Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to episode 692 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a villains compendium. Producer Drew Marquardt has selected four segments from previous shows where we celebrate the bad guys. Drew, tell us what we’re going to hear today.

Drew Marquardt: Ooh, so we are going to start with episode 75 and get like a villains 101, how our bad guys operate in a story. Then we’re going to go to episode 590, which is anti-
villains, understanding your villain’s motivation with a dozen examples of famous villains and what makes them tick.

I will say here, when we talk about Annie Wilkes, John, you mentioned that you– you said something like, “I don’t know if she would have been a bad guy if she hadn’t found the car in the snow.” We later found out that, yes, it’s established that she murdered babies, I think, before that.

John: Yes, in her past life as a nurse.

Drew: Yes. We don’t need to do any follow-up on that.

John: Don’t write in again. Please don’t.

Drew: Then we’ll go to episode 465 about lackeys and henchmen and making sure that your evil organizations are believable. Then we’ll finish up with episode 257 with our seven tips for unforgettable villains.

John: Oh, Drew, these all sound great.

Drew: I’m excited.

John: Thank you for reaching back to the catalog, finding these segments and putting them together in a new form.

Drew: Yes, of course.

John: Then in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about monsters. Craig will be back here to talk about monsters.

Drew: Before we get into all that, we have a little bit of news because your new project was announced.

John: Yes, I’m very excited. I’m writing a new animated feature for LAIKA, the stop-motion folks who did Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. There are also folks there who I met who worked on Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie with me, so it feels like a big reunion. This new movie is directed by Pete Candleland, who is a animation genius. I’m so excited to be working on this.

Drew: I’m so excited to be able to finally talk about this [chuckles] because I’ve known about it for months. It’s a really exciting project.

John: Yes, it’s going to be great to write, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also really excited that this is the first animated movie I’ve written under a WGA contract. I have credit protections, pension and health, residuals, the whole thing, which is obviously a huge frustration with animation writing, that it’s not default covered by the WGA. LAIKA stepped up and made this a WGA deal.

Drew: You’ve been fighting for this for a long time.

John: I have. This is the fifth animated feature I’ve done, and none of those other ones, could I get WGA coverage on. I’m so excited to be writing this one under this coverage. Listen, I’m excited to be writing this movie, but it’s great to see companies stepping up and making WGA deals. It’s great that LAIKA did, and I hope other companies will follow their lead because there’s great animation writing that is not happening, I think, because many writers just won’t take this non-WGA deals.

Make WGA deals, and you’re going to get some great writers doing that. Animation writing is so valuable, so essential that it’s time that it’s treated like the hard work it is.

Drew: The doors open now.

John: Yes. Now let’s get started with our villains. Enjoy this compendium episode of our greatest villain segments.

[music]

John: One of the things that came up in shows, and it’s also come up with this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. I thought that would be something we could dig into this week, because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. It became clear that eventually, they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

Craig: Immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious black hat villains like Darth Vader and Buffalo Bill, people like that.

John: Especially if you say Buffalo Bill, it’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

Craig: No, Hannibal Lecter’s not a villain.

John: I think that’s an important distinction I want to get into that as well. When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly. I’ve seen them in the trailer, but do they have their own agenda that would be supported by a villain?

Craig: No, they don’t. That’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. To me, those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy, but she’s an interesting villain that you overcome and find your way to love. She’s the villain.

John: Yes, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

Craig: Right, thematically, she’s the villain.

John: Yes. I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. You have a protagonist who’s generally your hero who’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen. Sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see there’s two people in the movie. They’re going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world or bad for other people in the world. If we talk about general categories of what villains could be, there’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. You have your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I’d say Hal from 2001 is that controlling villain, where it has this order that he wants to impose on things. If you don’t obey that, you’re going to suffer for it.

Craig: Right.

John: You have your revenge villains. You have Kahn, you have De Niro in Cape Fear. I’d argue the witch is basically– the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

Craig: She wants revenge. She also falls into the power hungry model also. Dual villain motivation.

John: She does. I think the power hungriness is something we put on the movie after the fact. If you actually looked at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see in the course of this movie.

Craig: Right. You’re right. No, basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog too.

John: Your little dog too. Speaking of animal suffering, we have Glenn Close, who’s the great villain in Fatal Attraction, who wants revenge. it’s basically, “How dare you jilt me and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

Craig: Yes.

John: Then there’s the simpler, just, this villain wants something and it’s trying to take something. You have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Craig: Right.

John: What I love about Hans Gruber is, Hans Gruber probably sees himself as, he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist.” It would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.

Craig: Right.

John: You have Salieri in Amadeus. Salieri is like, he has envy. He wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Those are really such simple motivations.

Craig: Right.

John: The last villain I would classify as insatiability. These are the really scary ones who like, they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. Unstoppable. Anton Chigurgh from No Country for Old Men. He scares me more than probably anything else I’ve seen on screen.

Craig: Yes. They embody the same thing that attracts us to zombies as a personality-less villain. That is inevitability. They basically represent time.

John: They represent time and death.

Craig: Mortality, exactly.

John: Yes. He will not be able to escape them. Freddy Krueger is that too. Michael Myers is he’s the zombie slasher person.

Craig: Freddy Krueger actually I think is really revenge.

John: Oh yes. That’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates– why he wants to kill all the people he’s going to kill, it’s a revenge by proxy. One of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story and yet you also want to create a great villain, and that villain wants to control the story as well. Finding that sweet spot between the two is often really hard.

This project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie and like, here’s our group of heroes and this is what they’re trying to do and these are the obstacles along the way, and this is the villain, all the questions came back to the villain. The questions were natural, fair questions asked which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was, what is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do?

Because we had just done the Raiders podcast, I kept coming back to like, well, in Raiders, what is the villain trying to do? Help me through that.

Craig: He’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero’s trying to do, which is interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. You can see that change occurs. This is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want, it’s a good topic because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake and it’s understandable.

You have a character, you’re a protagonist and you have perhaps his flaw and you have the way he’s going to change. Then you think, “We need a villain.” You come up with an interesting villain. The problem is, the villain’s motivation and the villain’s, villainy, has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character, of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is main character is most afraid of or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself. If you don’t, if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have a kooky villain in a story with your character.

John: Yes. The challenge to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is. Let’s go back to Raiders. You can say Belloq is the villain and Belloq wants the same thing that Indi wants, he wants the Ark of the Covenant. Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis.

What I felt, this pitch, last week, people kept asking me for like– it was also a quest movie. You could think of it like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest, you’re after this one thing. They kept pushing me for more information about like, “Basically, who are the Nazis and what is their agenda?” You can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we know what the Nazis are and you can shorthand them for evil. You can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. That wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong thing.

Craig: It would be bizarre.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: In that movie, they very smartly said, “We’re going to have a character who is obsessed with objects and needs to become more interested in humanity. Let’s make our villain just like him. Except that guy won’t change at all.” We watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain. That’s exciting. That’s smart. I have to say that there’s a trend towards this. You can find villains like this throughout film history. However, even in broader genres, like for instance, superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting.

There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws, for instance, from the Spy Who Loved Me. There’s nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. They’re mustache twirling villains. When you, sometimes people look at This Note, this villain is too much of a mustache twirler, meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil, ‘ha, ha, ha’. If you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane. What’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall– and whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think, honestly, one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero was aging, and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

Along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. All the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. Suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. Then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person. They just take different paths to resolution.

Look at the Nolan movies, I think very notably have taken Batman villains out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically match them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

John: Yes. Fear personified.

Craig: Yes. It’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

John: What I would point out the challenge is, you can go too far. I think the second Batman movie in which we have the Joker, who is phenomenal and we love it, we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie, I became frustrated by villain soup. I didn’t feel like there was a great opportunity for a Batman story because we just basically follow the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation that, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character. If that villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story. What it comes down to is, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. It can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain, the villain is really starting things. Even Jaws, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist went and found the shark and tracked it down and it became the start of things. No, the shark happens first. Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is.

It’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen, you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero, and your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

Craig: Yes. I just don’t know enough about TV to– I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies. Certainly, if you have a very oppositional show where it really is about one person versus another, they both, ultimately, will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. That’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter. When that season’s over, they’re gone because they’re dead

John: Yes. Did you watch Lost– you probably watched Lost.

Craig: I didn’t. My wife watched it, and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously, I don’t know anything about it. [chuckles] I know that there’s an island and a smoke monster, and in the end, they were in a church.

John: The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it became incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project, if you’d known what the villain’s whole deal was at the very start, it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting, or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you would have been able to kickstart the hero’s story.

I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good because for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced?

Craig: Yes. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. Forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but hero-villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature, meaning this, the case where there’s a villain who is doing an evil thing and there is a hero who is trying to stop them, is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play and good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. In fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

We want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though, oftentimes, it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. There’s a religious nature to that struggle. There are also an atheistic type of stories, actually A-religious type of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of God, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the existential nausea.

For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil is Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. Essentially, it was, again, that unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. That will color, if you’re trying to tell a story that is seeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is, there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

John: Yes. I think the root of all slasher films, Terminator is an extension, a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. The zombie movies work in the same situation too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of, it’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very dangerous place.

Craig: Yes. Zombies don’t have– zombies aren’t even evil. They’re like the shark, basically, they just eat. You can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it, heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

John: What I would say, though, is if you look at, regardless of which class class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. To what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero, and to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view and from the villain’s perspective?

Making those decisions, it’s a very early part of the process, is how much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to go see other stuff? In Die Hard, we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from [unintelligible 00:20:33] point of view, and we see what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy’s trying to do.

If you have a villain who’s smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. Ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist.
That’s often very challenging to do. In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain, Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie, he’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy had that conversation at the bar and he’s able to get out of this, but Belloq is at least able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

Craig: Yes, you need some sense of rationality. It is discomforting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that is their motivation. The Joker, in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that, but okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos, but you’ve articulated a goal.

If we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy-nilly and we start wondering why. You never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative. One of the great things about all those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact, the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing. He is grounding that villain in some rational context.

John: Yes, which is spooky. What I would recommend all writers do is, if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. If you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company and protect herself. She sees herself as the good person here, she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything she’s going to protect. When you see things from their perspective, you can often find some really great moments. Write and figure out what the story is from their point of view. Remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. There’s going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

Craig: Yes, there’s a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is, in many ways, about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that, in fact, if you figure out why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, you can stop them. Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job.
That movie’s a good case in point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. You build a mystery, and then the mystery is why is this bad person doing these bad things?

[music]

John: Our main topic today, this all comes out of Chris Csont, who does The Interesting Newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When you laid them all out, side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. Often what we think about is like, “Oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain.” You could just turn around and say, “Oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero.” It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.

I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then, in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that because us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.

Craig: Great, I love this topic.

John: There’s an article by Daniel Efron here, we’ll put a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist, he’s really talking about– we think that people will make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. That’s not about the act itself, it’s really, they’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others.

It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it, it’s like how will you feel if you do this thing?

Craig: Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined, solely, by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad doer. That is true, to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts and you couldn’t handle it anymore and you killed him and you have perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.

John: Yes. We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of a moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation this supernatural alien creatures. The degree to which we apply motivation to those characters in aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother, that makes sense. That tracks, we could understand that.

In most of these supernatural demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even like the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up like what their past trauma was that’s made them this way.

Craig: Yes.

John: We don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.

Craig: They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice, in his supernatural return, to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good, one more day to do the thing I decided to do that I will do every day.” There’s wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?

John: It is. In some ways, you can say that he is cursed. basically he’s living under the thing, like he can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is like the opposite of a wish. We always talk about like what are the characters I want, what are they actually going for? The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing and they can’t get away from it. There’s a freedom in that.

Craig: There is, because, as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full, I’m not going to do that today.” You are a creature that is designed to kill and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person. Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature.

Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus, they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think, ultimately, we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us. That they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things, don’t end up like me.” They’re almost designed to be negative instructors, to make people identify with the villain. To make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because, typically, the villain will fail.

John: Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through, and let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks on this list, he’s maybe come closest to seem like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance, but his actual motivations are more calculating and he doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.

Craig: No, he’s a thief. He wants to steal money, as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.

John: Yes. He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way and he will lash out when his plans are thwarted. We think of him as being– I think it was just because that performance was being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. He also, I think, very brilliantly in the course of the structure of the movie, as we talked about, the false idea of what the actual motivation is great. It seems like they have some noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.

Craig: That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages and they often, in bad movies, were taking hostages because they were associated with– like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, flaming dragons, some rebel group that was trying to, do a thing, the fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief.” It was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think, his performance in no small part, elevated what that character was, into something that felt a little bit more, wonderfully arch.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, who’s like, kidnapping people. Then you have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different villains in the course of the story. How do we place them and how do we think about what’s driving them?

Craig: Buffalo Bill, to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He is no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody is going to have a sit down with Buffalo Bill and he’s going to be like, oh, we’re making a really good point and we’re going to stop killing all these people. He’s not going to do that.

John: No.

Craig: Hannibal Lecter, you get the sense, absolutely, has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some avenging angel, that maybe, he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that. Then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance.

He will kill indiscriminately to protect himself. As Jodie Foster, as Clarise, says at the end of the movie, he doesn’t think he’s going to come and kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think, if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.

John: Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed at that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.

Craig: Yes. He’s bad to the bone.

John: Born into it. Yes. Yes. As opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic– I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her that specifically, but she has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.

Craig: Yes. Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done. She’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win, to an extent. Yes. That’s always fascinating to me.

John: I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately, she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff and executing her plan. She has become trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and that has to break herself out. We see like, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” it’s ingenious. Smartly done.

Craig: “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.”

John: Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.

Craig: Oh, bros.

John: Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value that’s pushed to an extreme degree.

Craig: Which is the point. When you mentioned the Daniel Efron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things.

What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact, he’s helping people. If you think about it, really, I’m the hero.

Somebody naturally is like, you really convinced yourself of this. We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that? Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have, ad absurdum, to force us to examine ourselves.

John: Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day, an amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power with inside a structure. Of course, that’s not his true source of power and wealth is all the way, he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character into what he’s doing.

Craig: Yes. An excellent film. I remember feeling, when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome; the idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.

On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it. That in fact– he said, there’s no free lunch. That you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth, gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. This is such a great lesson. It’s like we’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

John: We should put that on the shortlist for a future Deep Dive because its [crosstalk] turn of events [unintelligible 00:39:23] two more I want to go through, Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. I think he’s unique on this list because you pity him and yet he’s also a villain, he’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually like sidekick characters, but here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need, yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.

Craig: Yes. Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction and he will do bad things to feed his addiction, but where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s slinker and stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself.

That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully– we can identify, we feel bad for him because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.

John: Yes, and I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, “Oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped.”

Craig: Yes.

John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote, but it’s arguing that essentially, Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all of the addicts, things that he’s going to keep trying to do the same thing even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of that thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the Roadrunner. If he doesn’t get it, he won’t get it.

Craig: It’s rough, man. Yes, he needs a program.

John: He does need a program. 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her in that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone that, you know her, you understand her, she’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well, and you get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far, and it would, Annie Wilkes you.

Craig: Yes, so that’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman is that in society, we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone, it becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly, women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, loving misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, but no one’s really like that. Now we have Twitter and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.

John: Yes, he’s out there.

Craig: Oh my God, she and he, there are many Annie and Andrew Wilkes’s out there who attach themselves, so strongly, to characters. When those characters– the whole thing, the whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession is something that’s very human.

The story of that villainy is you must get away from that person because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.

John: Yes, it’s fascinating to think of, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?

Craig: I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.

John: Yes, this transgression would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out and she’d read the book, she would have been upset and she would have been angry for weeks, but she probably wouldn’t have, stalked him down in his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.

Craig: Yes, the woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdie as a friend, you can imagine people are like, “Oh, here comes Annie, she’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.”

John: All right, so let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.

I see so often people try to create like, oh, this iconic villain who has this grand motivation, terrific, who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?

Craig: Yes, we need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me. Because there is a story where we just give up on the whole hero villain thing entirely, we ask ourselves in these situations, what would you do? When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little more complex.

It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like it messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.

John: Yes, I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we also said like, “Yes, you know what, he was making some logical points there.”

Craig: Yes, he’s a good example of gone too far.

[music]

John: The inspiration behind this is this book I’m reading, it’s based on a blog by Keith Almon called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It is a book that is really intended for people playing the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not a general interest book for everyone out there. It’s an interest to me and to Craig.

Craig: Yes, it’s great. Great blog, I love that blog.

John: Why I thought that this could be generalized into a topic for discussion overall is one of the things I liked so much about Keith’s book is that he talks about the monsters that you’re fighting and how they would actually think and how they would strategize in combat. One of the points he really makes very clearly is that they have a self-preservation instinct. They’re going to do things to– they will fight, but then they will run away and they will flee when it makes sense for them to run away and flee, because they exist in this world, they’ve evolved to survive. That survival instinct is very important.

It got me thinking about movies I’ve seen. I re-watched Inception recently, which is great. It holds up really well. The third section of Inception, or the fourth or the fifth, however many levels deep we are in Inception, there’s a sequence which very much feels like a James Bond movie, where there’s this mountain-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:47:24] raid on–

John: -outlying sequence. In there are a bunch of just faceless lackeys who just keep getting killed and offed. It struck me like, wait, no one is acting– why are they doing what they’re doing? You can see this in a lot of movies, a lot of action movies, but also I think a lot of comedies them in, where the people who are not the hero, not the villain, but are working for the villain, do things that don’t actually make any sense.
They will fight to the death for no good reason. They don’t seem to exist in any normal universal world. I want to talk through this. I don’t necessarily have great suggestions for this, but I think we need to point it out and maybe nudge people to be thinking more fully about the choices they’re making with these henchmen characters.

Craig: That’s probably the best we can do, is just be aware of it, because it’s more than a trope, it is bizarre. Here’s a movie that did it fairly well and for a reason. In Die Hard, there are all sorts of lackeys. There are some lackeys that are front and forward, and then there’s some lackeys that are in the back. One of the things you understand from this whole thing is that this organization is a worker-owned business. They’re all going to split the money.

Sure, maybe Hans Gruber gets a little bit extra because he masterminded it, but they’re all splitting it. They’re all the heroes of this job. If John McClane gets away with his shenanigans, they’re not going to get their money. I understand why they fight. Then if someone’s brother happens to be killed, oh, now it’s personal. When it is not a worker-owned collective, but rather a standard boss and employees, it is odd that they seemingly fight as if they were trying to protect their own dad or something.

John: Yes, and so they’ll fight and fight, and then they’ll get thrown over the edge and give the villain scream as they fall, and they’ll move on. They’re basically just cannon fodder there to be shot at, to be taken down. You see this most obviously in Bond movies. The Spy Who Loved Me has the whole crew of that tanker at the end, the [unintelligible 00:49:34] Moonraker, Drax Industries has all these people who are doing these space shuttles.

Who are they? Why are they doing this? Are they zealots? Are they science zealots? You just don’t know. This is really very well parodied, of course, in The Simpsons. There’s a whole episode with Hank Scorpio, where he recruits Homer. You see why these people are working there, because he’s a really good boss, he’s really caring and considerate. I would just say, pay special attention to those minor characters, those guards, those watchmen, and really be thinking about, why are they doing what they’re doing? You may not be able to give dialogue or even a lot more time to those characters, but do think about what their motivations are.

Sometimes, if you do that, you can come upon some surprising choices, which is, like Iron Man 3, one of the henchmen just says, “Oh, no, I’m not being paid enough,” and just, walks away, or just runs. Those can be surprises that let the audience and the reader know that you’re really paying attention, and that could be great.

Craig: There’s a really funny parody of the henchman syndrome in Austin Powers. I want to say, is it in the first one? Yes, I think it’s the first one. Everybody remembers, I think most people remember the scene where Austin Powers is driving a steamroller very slowly at a henchman who doesn’t seem to be able to get out of the way, [laughs] and then he rolls him over. There’s a deleted scene, I think you can watch it on, I think it’s on YouTube, where they actually go to that henchman’s home, and you see his wife and child mourning the loss. [laughs] It’s like, he was a person.

It’s true, one of the things that that stuff does is both limit our interest, and also in, and the capacity, or the impact of death in a movie or a television show, and it also, I think, makes the world seem less real, and therefore, the stakes less important.

John: Yes, I agree.

Craig: Because, look, if everybody’s dying that easily, it’s the stormtrooper problem, right? Who’s afraid of stormtroopers anymore? If you make a Star Wars movie now, I think just your hero being actually killed by a rando stormtrooper in scene one would be amazing. That’s it. We got to go find a new hero because, yes, one of those randos, they can’t all miss all the time.

John: No. I think one of the good choices that Force Awakens made was to have one of the heroes be a stormtrooper, who takes off his helmet, and you’re always like, “Oh, there’s an actual person there.” John Boyega is an actual person.

Craig: The only one.

John: Yes. He’s special, but I think the point is that he’s not special. Actually, all those people you’ve seen die in all these movies were actually people as well. In The Mandalorian, in a later episode, there’s just a long conversation happening between two stormtroopers, and they’re just talking, and it’s recognized, oh, they are there for not just the plot reasons. They actually were doing something before the camera turned off.

Craig: Yes, so it’s the red versus blue, the halo. It’s like, generally speaking, when we do see henchmen talking to each other, they’re talking about henchmen stuff, so it’s purposefully pointless and banal, and then they die. They die.

John: They die.

[laughter]

Craig: They don’t go on. They do not live on. Yes, just be aware of it, I guess, right?

John: Yes, so the henchmen’s problem is really a variety of the redshirt problem, which we’ll also link to there. John Scalzi’s book, Redshirts, talks about, in the Star Trek series, the tourists, the people with the red uniforms who’ve been down to the alien planet are the first ones to die. There’s actually statistics about how often they die versus people in other color uniforms. I think we’re all a lot more mindful of that now with the good guys, and I think we see a lot less redshirting happening. You still see some of it. I just rewatched Aliens, and there’s a little bit of redshirting there, but not as bad as the classic.

I would just urge us to be thinking the same way on the villain side and always ask ourselves, is there a smarter choice we can make about those people who would otherwise just be faceless to death?

Craig: Yes, and that’s why the Bill Paxton character was so great in Aliens because it was an acknowledgement that not everybody is brave in a psychotic way. Some of those characters are nuts for engaging the way they do with this incredibly scary thing. They don’t seem to have fear. They don’t seem to be thinking ahead like, “I had plans for my life, investments, [laughs] a girlfriend, a boyfriend. I got things I want to do.” They’re just like, “Screw it. If I die, I die.” That’s crazy. That’s just a dangerous way of thinking. Bill Paxton was like, “No way, man.” I feel like he was the only person that was sane, and he was correct, they should have gotten the hell out of there.

John: Nuke it from space.

Craig: Yes, “Nuke it from orbit, man.” There’s nothing wrong with being afraid and rational, because that is, in fact, how people are. Look, a lot of it’s tonal, so some things are going to have henchmen. That’s just the way it is because the show or the movie is pushed a little bit. For instance, Snowpiercer, which I love, they’re henchmen. They don’t have faces. I don’t know what the arrangement is exactly. I assume they get a slightly better car maybe, but they’re going in there and people are getting shot, and they’re like, “Oh, okay, well, I guess it’s our turn to go in there and get into a shooting.” I would be terrified.

They never look scared. That’s also a movie about everybody on the planet living on a train that’s going around a frozen Earth and they’re eating bugs. It’s sci-fi, it’s different. If you’re talking about Breaking Bad, then you’re not going to see a ton of henchmen there because people live in the world where they can get scared.

John: In television, obviously, you have more time to build out universes and scenarios, so it’d be more likely you’d be able to understand. The supporting characters on Sopranos, you have a good sense of who they are, and so that’s all built out. In feature films, it’s tough because you cannot divide focus so much. In a Robert Altman movie, you really could see everyone’s point of view, but you’re not going to encounter that in a more traditional feature. That’s just not how it works. I guess I’m just asking you to be mindful of it.

If you’re writing in a pushed universe in science fiction or fantasy or an action movie, yes, some stuff is going to be a little bit more common, but I also see this in comedies, especially high-concept comedies, where everyone just seems to be there to service this plot, this high-concept plot. I don’t see a lot of attention being paid to like, “Wait, how would a real person in the real world respond to this and is there anything useful to be taken from that?” because people just accept the premise a little too easily.

Craig: Yes, it’s amusing. They’re like, “This job is so good, I need to die.” [laughter] It’s not that great if you’re dead.

John: No. Defend your own interests first. Everyone is selfish enough and wants to survive enough that they’re going to pull back and defend themselves when they need to, instead of just be thinking about that for your characters.

Craig: Yes, probably if you’re writing Guard 3 and Next Guard and Tall Guard, and yes, there’s trouble.

[music]

John: A lot of times in features and TV as well, you’ll see functional villains like, well, that villain got the job done, basically served as a good obstacle for your hero, kept the plot moving, but a week later, I couldn’t tell you anything about who that villain was. I wanted to look at in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved? I boil it down to seven things. Then Chris wrote a nice long blog post that talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those villains were and how they functioned. I thought we’d take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgettable villains and how you can implement them.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. My first tip for unforgettable villains is something I’ve said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they’re the hero. They are the protagonists of their own stories, they have their own inner life. They have hopes, they have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve it. They can reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story.

Craig: Yes, nobody does bad things just because. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they’re trying to make a point. The Joker is trying to make a point. There’s always a purpose. Yes, of course, they think they’re the hero. They have, you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think, “How is that guy so happy about all these terrible things he’s saying?” Because he believes, in part, that he’s the right one and that his purity is, in fact, why he’s the hero. Just as a character says, I won’t kill is being pure, Luke, at the end of Return of the Jedi, is being pure, “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to kill you because I’m a good guy. That’s my purity.”

On the other side, the villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal and other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They’re HYNOs.

John: Yes. I think it’s absolutely crucial that they are seeing all the events of the story from their own point of view, and they can defend the actions that they’re taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well, where you see characters who are, on one hand, despicable, but on the other hand, are heroic because you see why they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Daenerys could completely be the villain in that story. It’s very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet we don’t because of how we’ve been introduced to her.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Then look back to the very first episode. It’s maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him, theoretically, to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. Then he turns back to his sister and he says, “The things we do for love.” He’s doing it because he’s protecting her because they’re in love. Now I go, “Okay. I don’t like you and I don’t like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you.” Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in.

You’d ever get to the end of a movie where you’re like, “Why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff?” Then as he’s being arrested, he goes, “Don’t you understand?” blah, blah, blah. [laughs]

John: Yes, it’s like, “It’s already done. It’s already over.”
Or that bit of explanation comes right before, “Before I kill you, let me tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Craig: It’s like a weird position paper. It not felt. Whereas at the end of, speaking of Sorkin, A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You’ve weakened a country,” I believe he believes that.

John: 100%.

Craig: I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he’s doing the right thing. He’s pure and they’re not.

John: Let me get to my next point, which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. Whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just too far. Simple villains who just have simple aims like, “I’m going to rob this bank,” well, you’re not going to remember that one. The one who’s like, “I’m going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank,” that’s the villain you remember. You have to look for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress.

The ones that really stick, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman in Die Hard, they are just willing to go as far as they need to go in order to get the job done, and actually too far to get the job done.

Craig: Correct, and in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it, this will not be the last time they do it. That this person actually needs to die because they are a virus that has been released into the world, and if we don’t stop them, they’re going to keep doing it forever until the world is consumed in their insanity. Then you have this desire in the audience for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We rooted for it because that person has to go.

John: Absolutely. We don’t root for the hero as much if it’s a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell-bent on destruction. It doesn’t have to be destroying the world, but destruction of what is important to us as the audience.

Craig: Yes, it could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you.

John: Yes, that’s a good time to leave.

Craig: Then you’re like, “Ugh,” and you just realize, “If you won’t stop, you’ll ruin the rest of my kid’s life, and you might do this to somebody else’s kid.” You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world. Which, as we know, realistically, it’s not.

John: Never going to happen.

Craig: No.

John: Third point about unforgettable villains is that they live at the edges of society. Sometimes they are literally out in the forest or they’re a creepy old monster in the cave, but sometimes they are at the edges of moral society. They place themselves outside the normal rules of law or the normal rules of acceptable behavior. Even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don’t function within the prescribed boundaries of what the mayor of the town can do. You always have to look at them. They perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power.

Craig: They certainly perceive themselves to be special.

John: Yes.

Craig: There were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the ‘30s and ‘40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. Frequently, they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them “useful idiots.”

Stalin was special. He considered himself special, and special people are different than people who do bad things. When you’re thinking about your villain, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen, per se, but special people do have their own versions of henchmen. People who believe them at all costs. The albino guy in The Da Vinci Code, he’s a villain kind of, but he’s not the villain. He’s a tool.

John: Even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well.

Craig: He can go ahead and bend the rules because, once again, he knows what’s better. He is different and above everybody else. That’s why we’re fascinated by a good one.

John: Also, because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That’s my fourth point, is that a good hero represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you fear you might be. It’s like all your darkest impulses, it’s like, “What if I actually did that terrible thing?” That’s that villain. It’s that person you worry deep down you really are.

Craig: Which goes to motivations, universally recognizable motivations, and this is something that comes up constantly when you’re talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, what do they want? Just like a hero because they are the hero of the story, what do they want? What are they motivated by? What’s driving them to do these crazy things? It’s never, “Oh, it’s just random.” For instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs, as really more of like an animal. We can talk about his motivations, and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us.

It’s a rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he’s transgender, which he’s really not. That’s not any of us, but Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves, and in fact, it’s very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. It’s sexy, it’s fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you guiltily imagine being. Who hasn’t imagined being Darth Vader? He’s the coolest.

John: Yes, you imagine having that kind of power. Either the power to manipulate, the power to literally control things with your mind. That’s a seductive thing, and I think that the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience.

Also, I would say that the great villains, they let us know what they want. You hit on it earlier, it’s like, sometimes you’ll get to the end of a story, and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That’s never satisfying. The really great villains that stick with you, you’re clear on what they’re going after from the start.

Even if it’s Jaws, you understand what is driving them, and you understand at every moment what their next aim is. They’re not just there to be an obstacle to the hero, they have their own agenda.

Craig: Yes. A good villain, a good movie villain, will sometimes hide what they’re after, and you have to figure it out or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Seven. You don’t quite get what Kevin Spacey’s up to. In fact, it seems just random, so a bad villain. Random acts of senseless violence connected together by this interesting motif until the end when you realize, “Oh, there’s some larger purpose here.” They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don’t have clarity. The protagonist shouldn’t have too much clarity, otherwise, they’re boring as hell, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They should be conflicted inside about what’s right and what’s wrong. They make choices. Villains are not conflicted at all, so of course, they’re going to be able to say, “What do I want? I want this because of this. That’s it. I figured it out already. I don’t have any of your hand-wringing or sweating. I know what I’m going to do, and I know why, and I believe it’s correct. That’s it.”

John: They tell us what that is. They may not tell the hero what that is, often they will, but we, as the audience, know what they’re actually going for, and that’s really crucial.

Ultimately, whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. We talked about Seven, you can’t get much more personal than what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt’s wife in Seven. It starts as a story that could be about some random killings, but it dials down to something very personal. That’s why we are so drawn into how things end.

Craig: What’s interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world, in the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things and they’re repugnant. We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive and interesting and charming. Part of that is watching them have a relationship with the hero. We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. The only way you could have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero.

Inevitably, they are. Sometimes it’s the villain’s interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. Again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke. He wants to know his son, and so ultimately, that’s what undoes him.

John: You look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s version of it, it’s that the Joker could not exist without Batman, fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other, they both wouldn’t function, really. The Joker could create his chaos, he could try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at how they are and how the city functions, but without Batman, if he can’t corrupt Batman, it’s not worth it for him.

Craig: Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against, and The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. There’s something at the heart of the Joker-Batman dynamic that’s probably at the heart of most hero-villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality. That there’s a similarity. It’s why you hear this terrible line so many times, “You and I, we are not so different” because it’s true.

John: [laughs] Because it’s true. It doesn’t mean you should say it-

Craig: That’s right, don’t say it.

John: -but it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or let your story say that for you, but just don’t say that.

Craig: Just don’t say it or have them make fun of it.

John: Yes. My final point was that flaws are features, and that in general, the villains that you remember, there’s something very distinctive about them, either physically or a vocal trait. There’s something that you can hang them on so you can remember what they’re like because of that one specific tick or look or thing that they do. Obviously, Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming, and I think all those things are crucial, but you have to look at, what is it about your villain that a person’s going to remember a month from now, a year from now? That they can picture them, they could hear their voice.
Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he’s putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

Craig: It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience because you’re exactly right. This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story, that the villain is a special person. What you’re signifying to the audience is, “This is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie except our hero. Just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person because they are special.” If you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair, let’s first start with the hair, it’s perfect.

It’s not great hair, he’s a balding man, but it’s perfectly combed back. Then he’s wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean, and he’s standing with the most incredible posture. His hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it’s as if he’s assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person and he does not blink. That’s great. Just from the start, you know we all get that little hair-raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by?

John: Yes.

Craig: Sometimes it’s the littlest thing like that.

John: Sometimes it’s a very big thing. Like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in the story because she’s wearing this pink dress that she’s in for the whole movie. From the moment you see her, you know in a general sense what she is, but you just don’t know how far she’s going to push it. She seems like this busybody, but then you realize she’s actually a monster. She’s a monster in a pink housecoat, and she’s phenomenal. That’s a very distinctive choice of the schoolmarm taken way too far, and you see it from the very start. I could never see that costuming again without thinking of her. That’s a sign of a really good–

Craig: Yes, that’s an example of taking something that’s amusingly innocuous and not villainous. Like, “Oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates and loves pink and green and pastel colors”, and saying, “That lady? Now she’s a sadist.” Ooh, that’s great. Just great. Then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell that bad rose perfume. Terrific.

[music]

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew himself. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli. It’s his homage to Silence of the Lambs. Matthew is so talented.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. There’s a new one up with Christopher Nolan that’s just great that is writing process.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all your premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to give you on monsters. Drew, thanks for putting together this compendium.

Drew: Thank you, John.

[music]

John: All right, let’s move on to our main topic today, which is monsters.

Craig: Yes.

John: I thought about this because three of the projects I’m currently working on have monsters in them to some degree.

We’ve talked on the show a lot about antagonists and villains, but I don’t recall us ever really getting into monsters per se, which means we probably need to describe what we mean by monsters. In my head, I’m thinking basically non-human characters that, while they may have some intelligence, are not villains in the sense that they have classic motivations and who can interact with other characters around them the way that human characters can.

I was grouping them into three big buckets, but I’m curious before we get into that if you have a definition of monster that might be different than that.

Craig: Monster to me is either a non-human or an altered human, a human that has been changed into something that is non-human, that has both extraordinary ability compared to a human and also presents a danger to regular humans.

John: Yes, that feels fair. The kinds of monsters I’m talking about, I have three broad categories, and I think we can think of more than that, but there’s primal monsters, which I would say are things that resemble our animals, our beasts, but just taken to a bigger extreme. Your sharks, your bears, your wolves could be monsters. Any giant version of a normal animal. They tend to be predators. Werewolves in their werewolf form feel like that primal monster. The aliens in Alien feel like that kind of primal monster.

Craig: Dinosaurs.

John: Dinosaurs, absolutely. In D&D terms, we say that they are generally neutral. You can’t even really call them evil because they’re just doing what they do. Evil requires some kind of calculation that they don’t have.

Craig: Yes, they instinctive. Even the aliens in Alien, I suppose, we’ll get some angry letters from Alien fans, but those creatures do seem like they are driven by such a pure Darwinism that it is no longer a question of morality. They are simply following their instinct to dominate.

John: We have another category I would say are the man-made monsters. These are killer robots, Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, that monster famously does have some motivation beyond any Gollum-y creature. Some zombies I would say are man-made; it depends on what causes them to become those monsters. Craig, would you say that the creatures in The Last of Us, would you call them monsters?

Craig: They are altered humans, yes, but they’re monsters. There’s no question. Part of what we try and do is, when we can elicit some, at least if not sympathy, a reminder that they are not to blame. They’re sick and they are no longer in control of their bodies and they are no longer in control of what they do, but the fact is, no matter how hard we try and do that, they’re behaving monstrously. They’re monsters. More importantly, when you look at their provenance from the video game, they look like monsters, and we want them to, and there are more monsters coming.

John: Of course. I know. I’m excited to see more monsters.

Craig: More monsters.

John: The last bucket I would throw things into would be called the supernatural. There you have all the Lovecraftian creatures. There are other kinds of zombies that are, it’s not human-made that created them, they’re shambling mounds of things. There are mummies. At least, there are mummies who are not speaking mummies, like the classic stumble-forward mummies.

Craig: Ah, mummy.

John: Muuuu. You’ve got your gargoyles. You have some demons or devils, the ones that aren’t talking. I really think it comes down to, if they have the ability to use language that our characters can understand, I’m not throwing them in the monster bucket.

Craig: I would still like, to me, a vampire is a monster.

John: To me, it’s really a question, though, of agency. It’s so driven by its need to feed that it no longer has the ability to interact with the characters around it because a lot of vampires are talky and they are doing things. They can function much more like classic villains rather than monsters. As opposed to a werewolf, who we’re used to being just fully in beast mode.

Craig: That’s why vampires are so fascinating, I think, because they present as human, and they can absolutely have a conversation with you, all the good ones do. Not only do they have conversations with you, they seduce you and they romance you. Then they also give into this hunger that is feral and savage. They sometimes turn into bats or fog or a big swarm of rats, which is my favorite. They are certainly supernatural. They are nearly immortal. What I love about vampires is that they are a presentation of the monster within.

Jekyll and Hyde, well, Dr. Jekyll is a human, and Hyde is a monster, but they are the same person. That is fascinating because then it starts getting into the whole point of monsters, I think, which is a reflection of our worst selves.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think these characters that are on the boundaries between a villain who could choose to stop and a monster who could not choose to stop are sometimes the most fascinating antagonists we can put our characters up against. In some cases, we’re centering the story around them, so they are not the villain, they are actually the main character. Once upon a time, I worked on Dark Shadows, and of course, that has a vampire at its center who does monstrous things, but I think most people would not identify as being a monster.

Craig: Yes, and so they’re all different ones. It’s funny, when you look at the traditional Dracula, the Bram Stoker original Dracula, and when you look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, they’re both literate. In particular, Frankenstein’s monster in the novel, I think he speaks two languages. I think he speaks English and French. [chuckles] He’s remarkably literate and thoughtful. Dracula, the reason Dracula is so dangerous is because he’s so smart. He slowly and carefully manages to eat most of the people aboard a ship that’s crossing to England without anybody noticing because he’s really clever.

It’s funny how we kept that with Dracula. We said, “Okay, Dracula, you’re the ur-vampire, and all the vampires after you, most of them are going to follow this method of, ‘My darling, I want to suck your blood.’” Frankenstein, I don’t know, somebody read that novel and, “You know what? What if this monster doesn’t speak two languages? What if he speaks no languages, is 6’8”, and just groans a lot?” “That’s better. Let’s do that.”

John: Let’s do that. When we think about villains, we often talk about villain motivation. It’s worth thinking about monster motivation because there’s going to be some overlap, but I think a lot of cases, these monsters function more like animals, more like beasts, and you have to think about, what does an animal want? We talk about the four Fs, five Fs. The four Fs, those primal motivating factors: self-preservation, propagation, protection of an important asset, so they’re there to defend a thing, hunger or greed, classic, and revenge to a certain degree.

I always say that the Alien Queen in Aliens, in the end, she has a very specific focus and animus towards Ripley because of what Ripley did. It goes beyond just the need to propagate. She’s after her for a very specific reason.

Craig: That’s where it sometimes can get stupid. It doesn’t in that movie, but Jaws 3, I think, famously, “This time it’s personal,” no, it’s not. It’s a frickin’ shark. It doesn’t know you. [laughter] It’s just food. Obviously, the aliens in Aliens are quite clever. They are not merely savage and feral. You don’t expect that they’re sitting there doing math. They are the forerunners of the way we portrayed velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The idea of the smart monster, maybe not as smart as a human in their general sense, but very smart predatorially. That’s really interesting to see that, but when it starts getting personal with a dumb monster, it can get really silly.

John: Craig, what is your opinion on human monsters? I could think of like, so Jason Voorhees in a slasher film, is that a villain? Is that a monster? To what degree can we think of some of these human characters as monsters rather than classic villains?

Craig: I think they’re monsters. I think they’re monsters because they wear masks. Jason Voorhees wears a hockey mask, and Michael Myers in Halloween wears, I believe it’s a-

John: A Captain Kirk hat.

Craig: -a Captain Kirk mask, a William Shatner death mask, even though William Shatner is still alive. Those masks are what make them monsters. Their humanity is gone. When you look at how they move, and obviously, look, let’s just say it, Jason Voorhees was just a rip-off of Michael Myers. That’s pretty obvious. They are a large, shambling, seemingly feelingless, numb creature that has way more strength than a normal human ever would. They don’t really run. They don’t need to. They represent your own mortality. It’s coming. There’s nothing you can do. That is a nightmarish feeling. In their way, they are large zombies. They don’t speak. They just kill.

We don’t even really understand why they’re killing. Somebody eventually will explain it, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not like you can have a conversation with Jason Voorhees and say, “With some therapy, I think you’ll stop killing.” No, Jason will keep killing. I think of them as monsters for sure.

John: One of the projects I’m working on, I’m grappling with issues of what this monstrous character actually wants, what the endgame is, and I keep coming back to the Lovecraftian, there is no answer, there’s only the void. There’s that sense of sometimes the most terrifying thing is actually that there is no answer, that the universe is unfeeling and they just want to smash it and destroy it. It’s challenging because without a character who can actually say that, without a way to put that out there, that the monster themselves can’t communicate that.

As I’m outlining this, I’m recognizing that that’s going to be a thing that everyone needs to be able to expose to the audience in a way that the creature themselves can’t.

Craig: That is a challenge. It is certainly easy enough for the pursued characters to ruminate and speculate as to why this thing is doing what it wants to do, but that will just remain what it is, which is speculation. The whole point of speculation is we’ll never know. Yes, it is hard to figure out how to get that motivation across when it’s non-verbal and non-planning. In the case of aliens, you can just tell they’re predators, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They are doing what the apex predator’s supposed to do, win. They just want to win.

John: Of course, as we look at Predator, the question of whether you call that a monster or a villain, the motivation behind a Predator, what we learn very early on is they are trophy hunters. Literally, they are just too bad to some other creatures because that’s what they do. It’s not entirely clear whether it’s just rich people of that species doing that thing, or if it’s an important rite of passage. Are they on safari?

Craig: [laughs] You know what I love? The idea is like on Predator planet, they have social media, everybody has normal jobs. Like some people are accountants or whatever, some people work at the Predator McDonald’s, but jerk Predators [laughs] go to other planets to bag trophies. They then put a picture up of like, “Look at Jesse Ventura’s head.” Then other people online are like, “You’re sick. There’s something wrong with you. You feel the need to go to these places and kill these beautiful animals.”

John: For all we know, it’s like Donald Trump Jr.-

Craig: Exactly.

John: -is the equivalent of the food we’ve actually seen in these Predator movies. Someone who actually has a familiarity with the whole canon, and I’m not sure how established the canon really is, can maybe tell us what the true answer is here. My feeling has always been that this wasn’t a necessary cultural function, that they were doing this thing because they wanted to.

Craig: It was hunting. It was pointless hunting, and in that case, they really are villains. That’s like a mute villain because the Predator is very much calculating, thinking, planning, prioritizing. He doesn’t speak because he doesn’t speak our language, not because he doesn’t speak. If we understood the clicky bits, then we would know that he was saying stuff.

John: I’ll wrap this up with just it’s important sometimes to think about how we must seem to other creatures in our world right now. Think if you’re an ant or an ant colony and an eight-year-old boy comes along, that is a monster. It has no understanding of you, it has no feeling for you. That eight-year-old boy is just a T-Rex and you have to run from it. You’re not looking at that as a villain. That is truly, fully a monster. Sometimes reversing that can give you some insight into what it must feel like to be encountering these creatures.

Craig: There’s a certain godlike quality to them. When they are that much more powerful than we are, it’s a bit why superhero movies have escalated their own internal arms race to intergalactic proportions. Because it’s not enough for people to be beset by godlike monster humans. At some point, you need them to be fought with by good monster humans, and then it just goes from there. When you’re creating some grounded thing, you’re absolutely right. The notion that what’s pursuing, and Predator actually did this very well. It’s a good movie.

John: It’s a good movie, I agree. I realized Prey as well, the most recent [unintelligible 01:30:30].

Craig: Yes. You get the sense that the people in it are impressed. They start to realize that this guy is better than them in every way. The only way you’re going to beat it is if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger, AKA better than all of us. [laughter] It’s a pretty apt comparison.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 75 – Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 590 – Anti-Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 465 – The Lackeys Know What They’re Doing
• Scriptnotes Episode 257 – Flaws are Features
• Every Villain is a Hero
• Writing Better Bad Guys
• Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil
• Mama
• The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote by T.B.D.
• Why do good people do bad things? by Daniel Effron
• Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk by Catherine A. Sanderson
• The Monsters Know What They’re Doing blog and book
• Austin Powers deleted scene, “Henchman’s Wife”
• Redshirt
• 7 Tips for Creating Unforgettable Villains
• How Christopher Nolan writes a movie on our YouTube!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew Marquardt.
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 691 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most weeks we discuss storytelling designed to entertain an audience watching something in a movie theater or at home on their couches, which are passive viewers, consumers, numbering in the hundreds, thousands, or millions. Craig, what if your goal is just to entertain a few friends around a table?

Craig: Well, in that case, I think we know exactly what we do.

John: Today on the show, we’ll discuss roleplaying games, their history, their narrative design. We’ll talk about Dungeons & Dragons, sure, but also a host of games that have pushed the form to new areas of collaborative storytelling and world-building. To help us do this, we welcome a man who literally wrote the book on it, Stu Horvath. Welcome, Stu.

Stu Horvath: Hello, thank you for having me on.

Craig: Hey, Stu.

John: All right, the book in question is Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide To Tabletop Roleplaying Games. It’s out from MIT Press. It was a former One Cool Thing of mine. It is glorious. Congratulations on this book, Stu.

Stu: Thank you. It’s very large. Don’t drop it on your foot.

John: It is so, so heavy. It is a sizable tome, and it’s great. I want to talk to you about tabletop roleplaying games in general, the history of them, but also the evolution of the form, because Craig and I come at this mostly from playing D&D and a lot of video games. So much interesting stuff has happened in tabletop, and I just really want to talk about this and the similarities, the differences between the kinds of writing that Craig and I do and the kind of storytelling that’s happening in these games.

Stu: It used to be such a narrow thing that was very dice-driven, very simulation-driven, but now there’s just all kinds of storytelling that happen in roleplaying games. It’s almost impossible for me to figure out a place to start.

John: We’ll do our best, and so we’ll get into that, and then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to look at your appendix chapter, because you talk in this Appendix D about the concept of dungeons as narrative spaces, which seems like it should have always been there. It seems like this idea that’s fundamental to human psychology, but as you point out in this appendix, dungeons are actually a surprisingly recent literary thing, so I want to unpack that a bit.

Stu: Happily. My next book is about that, actually.

John: Oh, my gosh. A preview of an upcoming book.

Craig: All right, it’s going to focus on dungeons? I love that.

Stu: Yes.

John: Stu, talk to us about what it is you do, because this all came about because you are a collector, right?

Stu: Yes. Like a lot of folks who played Dungeons & Dragons when they were a kid, and other roleplaying games, I lost a lot of stuff, either to the attrition of borrowing and lending. I had a flood in my basement, which is a surprisingly common occurrence for folks. I eventually just started wanting those things back. In collecting them, I saw that there were more things out there that I had never heard of that were really exciting. To this day, eBay has become the bane of my wallet’s existence. I’m actually in the process of trying to sell some stuff off to make room for new stuff.

I accumulated all this cool stuff, and I just got really, really excited about it, so I started an Instagram feed, dedicated daily posts to roleplaying games and supplements, and things that affected the development of roleplaying games, or that I otherwise thought were interesting. Out of that daily writing process, it just very naturally turned into a book. There’s also a podcast that’s basically the same thing. You pick a roleplaying game and talk about it for 20, 30 minutes.

Craig: Which you apparently have over 300 different roleplaying games that you cover in your book, which is astonishing. Are you going to get to our- what are we at, John? 691?

John: [chuckles] 691.

Craig: I don’t know if you’re going to get to 691, but you’ll at least get to 300, which is amazing. I’m curious, given that you’ve been doing this for a while, I suppose it’s a good thing that as you create a book like this, the audience for RPGs seems to have exploded. How do you greet the increase in popularity? Are you excited? Are you a little worried that perhaps this special space is being invaded? Is it just an opportunity to sell a whole lot more books?

Stu: I like money, so selling books is a big benefit. No, I welcome everybody in. I think that it was always a hobby that was looking for its players. I think that the more people who come into it with different ideas, the more types of games and the more experiences that the games provide, and the more options everybody has to play more different games.

There’s so many new, fine-toothed experiences that are coming out of this indie scene right now that is just fed by people who come in through the big game, 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and they filter out. It’s not a lot of people who filter out into the larger hobby, but the people who do come brimming with new ideas that they want to fiddle with and tinker with, and from that comes so many cool new things. That’s what I’m here for.

John: Going back to your collection, one thing that strikes me is that we talk about these things being lost to basement floods, but the whole reason that there is this collection that exists is there’s so much material. There’s a materiality to the history of roleplaying games. These were published and printed things from these tiny presses or sometimes bigger presses that existed that people could purchase in hobby shops and game stores or out of the back of Dragon Magazine. You have amassed this huge collection, but there are likely so many more things that don’t exist simply for lack of enough copies of them being out there in the world.

What your book does so well, it’s really charting the growth, the experience of how everything fed into the next thing. So many of these games were a pushback reaction against Dungeons & Dragons and reincorporation and then old-school roleplaying comes back in. It’s just a great history, but it’s all possible because there’s a record. It’s like we know so much about the ancient Egyptians because there were just so many tombs full of hieroglyphics that we could actually study these things versus other cultural innovations are lost to us because there’s not stuff around to document.

Stu: The beauty of the whole hobby is that it’s a tinkerer’s hobby. Immediately after Dungeons & Dragons came out, people were like, well, this is cool as a basic idea, but I could do it better. I could fix it. I could do things to it that are going to make this the best game.

Craig: I love nerds. They’re like, “Not bad. Can do better.”

Stu: Exactly. There was this really influential publication at APA, Amateur Press Association, which is basically a bunch of zines that was produced monthly, sent to a central editor who bound them together and then sent them out to everybody who paid for a subscription. Started almost immediately after D&D. Lee Gold has kept it in print up until April of this year, so 50 years-

John: Incredible.

Stu: -monthly. I think she missed two or three issues in that entire run. It’s insanity. It was a real testing ground for those kinds of ideas. If you look back, especially in the ‘90s, right before the internet made that stuff faster and digital and online, you can see a lot of game design just happening in those pages, and it’s all about people just sharing ideas and arguing about them. Gygax hated it too. He thought it was really cool initially, and then he was just like, oh, no, these people are bootlegging my stuff.

John: Could you give us a starting place? When do we need to start thinking about tabletop roleplaying games from your book? Spoiler, I know it’s Dungeons & Dragons, but can you talk us through the history? This is 1974 we’re beginning, and can you just talk to us about the transition from military simulation games to roleplaying games and what the innovation was that made D&D the starting place?

Stu: 1974 is when Dungeons & Dragons first comes out and is published. It is the first commercially available roleplaying game. Prior to that, there’s this big scene in the Midwest which is focused on military war games, reenacting existing battles like Waterloo or battles in the Civil War, World War II. That has a very long tradition that goes back to HG Wells, created a game called Little Wars which you played on the floor. Peter Cushing of horror movie fame was a big proponent of that game. There’s great videos of him painting his miniatures.

That goes even further back to the Prussian School of Wargaming which was actual teaching officers how to command on these sand tables with miniatures and terrain. There’s two things that happened. Lord of the Rings gets popular and fantasy figures in a military setting are something that people get interested in in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s which leads to Chainmail which was Gygax and some collaborators created this war game in which you had optional units that were fantasy, wizards and dragons and such.

John: We should say for our listeners who are not big D&D people, this is Gary Gygax who is acknowledged as the person who created what we think of as Dungeons and Dragons with many collaborators and there’s a complicated history there but it’s his name on those initial books.

Stu: It’s Gygax and Dave Arneson. The Dave Arneson part comes from Minneapolis I believe and he was playing, I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but the game is Bronstein. The idea was that there was this war game that was happening but there was also a village and people had actual specific characters that they were playing in the context of this war game. That idea of players controlling one singular character instead of a unit of characters or an entire army plus the advent of fantasy influence in the war game sphere collided into this storytelling game that grew out of the collaboration between Arneson and Gygax.

John: In your book, I’m looking at an image from the 1977 white box edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The title on the box is Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Which is just such a mouthful, but that’s how they had to frame it. It wasn’t saying roleplaying game yet. It didn’t seem to have the full sense, or at least it wasn’t presenting itself as this is a thing that you play make-believe with your friends, but it quickly became that. What were the first moments where D&D broke out of just a very small Midwestern nerd culture to become a national thing?

Stu: I think it was almost immediate. I think that there were small pockets of interested war gamers all over the country who immediately glommed onto this thing that was new. You can see that Tunnels and Trolls comes out almost immediately after. I’m pretty sure he was based in Arizona. Pretty far. There was already a pretty big war gaming scene in San Francisco, the Bay Area, with Chaosium.

There’s this urban legend that Greg Stafford, who founded Chaosium, a friend of his ran into a guy who was at a print shop where D&D was being first made, and he got one of the very first copies. It’s hard to imagine in a world of snail mail only but I do think that it proliferated really rapidly. Immediately there were different games coming out to iterate on the basic idea of roleplaying.

John: Now, we don’t have audio or video in its initial play sessions. How closely do we think they resemble what we think about D&D today? Was it players controlling individual characters, going into imaginary dungeon-y rooms and fighting a monster then moving on to the next room? Was that always there from the start? How did that happen?

Stu: I think that it was. The idea of the dungeon, I think, was almost an accidental innovation for playtesting. It was just a situation that gave you infinite possibility, but only a very limited number of options at any given time because you only had so many routes out of a room. Gary Gygax playtested in Castle Greyhawk, which was his mega dungeon. Dave Arneson had Blackmoor, which was a little bit more like a campaign setting. He was very interested in reenacting some of his favorite fantasy stories that he had read and adapting them to play through, whereas Gygax is more interested in testing the cleverness of his players.

I think that in play, it’s a much different thing back then because you have all these folks who are really interested in simulating things like combat. There’s weapon speeds and lots of crunchy numbers, and there’s a ton of players. They’re all running potentially multiple characters at the same time. There’s something called a caller who is an intermediary between the players and the DM to help manage the size of the group. I think that the actual play loop is really still explore, fight, and loot, rinse and repeat.

Craig: There is certainly explore, fight, loot, but on top of that, there is our beloved RP, roleplay. I’m curious, looking at roleplaying games, one thing is very clear. By the time, say, it gets to John and to me when we’re in middle school, other than D&D we’re playing Top Secret and we’re playing these other games where it’s quite clear that the people who are making these games understand that RP is just as important, if not more important, than explore, fight, and loot. Believe me, we love rolling for initiative.

I wonder if, in Arneson’s way of I’d like to just give myself a chance to be a part of stories I’ve already read, or Gygax saying I’d like a chance to create my own dungeon with my own monsters, that the players, almost from the start, were saying, yes, but also, we’d like to write, because really, RP is writing. It’s improv. It’s creation of character. The interplay between the characters is some of the most fun. When you look at Critical Role, 98% of it at this point is RP. Where do you think the actual business of roleplaying games figures out and adapts to what the audience seems to be wanting? It takes a long, long time.

Stu: Interesting. I think that, broadly, the hobby struggles with codifying roleplaying with rules. I think that it’s always been there, but it’s been something that has been outside of the scope, especially in the early days, of the mechanics of the system. I’m running an old-school-style game that has lots of random tables right now. It’s cool. I’ve never ran a game like this before. I run very narrative-heavy stuff. Now, I’m just giving myself over to randomness. From that randomness is where the beauty is. It presents situations and combinations of things that you’d never would have expected.

They are exactly improv cues for the players who then give me material back, and it goes back and forth. There’s very little, in terms of rule structure, we’re playing old-school essentials, which is basic Dungeons & Dragons. There’s no structure mechanically in the game for that. We’re just making it up as we go along. I think that’s always been with the hobby until the ‘90s when you have the storyteller system and it starts building into more structure for narrative in games.

John: Stu, this feels like a good moment to talk about crunchiness of rules versus the airy-fairy, we’re all playing characters, it’s a narrative, and it’s very player driven. That tension feels like it’s always been there. Most of the new versions of the game have been trying to push in one direction or another direction. We have things that are very open-ended. I had Craig and our group play through Dungeon World, which was too open for them. Then we’ve also struggled over just– A D&D session can get lost in the– Craig, what was it this last week?

Whether a hold person could be defeated by lesser restoration. It’s one of the annoyances, but also one of the great joys of D&D is those esoteric rule decisions. Can you talk to us about– Looking through this book with 300 games, it feels like a lot of it has been each game figuring out its own balance between these are the rules and this is what’s open for discussion and interpretation.

Stu: It absolutely has been. There’s just such a gradient of options out there now. In the early 2000s, that’s when the indie storytelling scene really opened up. These are just very open, loose, improvisational games really tightly focused in terms of theme. They’re fantastic to read about. They always have very clever mechanics. Dread is a good example. They use a Jenga tower for their conflict resolution.

Craig: Oh, that’s genius.

Stu: Every time you do something, you have to pull a piece out. If the tower stands, you succeed. If the tower falls, it’s a horror game, so your character dies. That’s it. That’s the only real rule. Everything else is just almost small improvisational theater. I love reading that stuff. I can’t run it, and I have a really hard time playing it. The structure of the rules is the thing that sets me free. I need something to lean on, or I start to panic.

Craig: I’m just like you. The rules let both sides of your brain work together. Screenwriting is the rules medium of writing because we’re constantly dealing with these constraints. General format and the fact that whatever we write has to be able to be filmed and so on and so forth, it is a more narrowly crafted way of thinking and creating. I find that when there aren’t any rules– John and I played what was it called? The one we played with Kelly?

John: Fiasco. Episode 142.

Craig: There you go. It was so much fun that night, in part because Kelly’s hysterical, but I wouldn’t do it again because there’s no rules. I love the idea that you get to ping-pong back and forth between your right brain creativity, coming up with characters with flaws, how do they talk, what decisions would they make in certain circumstances with. Now we have rules. The other part of this is, what do I do in my next turn? I’ve got options. How can I maximize my impact here? Engaging both sides to me is really important. I love an RPG that gives me both.

John: Just because we recently put this out as a YouTube video, when Greta Gerwig was on the podcast, she was talking about how she grew up in the mumblecore movement, which was wildly underscripted. Basically, they’d have a description of what happens in the scene, but then you just have to improv throughout it. She was so frustrated because she felt like the text actually set you free. The text gave it a form and let you explore and go further.

Without that, you’re just floating in dead air. You don’t commit to things because there’s no text to come back to. It feels like rules are part of that. You’re coming into a game with a set of rules and opportunities to succeed or fail can be really important. Finding the right balance between, okay, looking at everything in a table versus now I’m going to go do this thing, I can do anything in the world, is the real struggle.

Stu: One of the things that really differentiates roleplaying games, especially from theater, I think, because like theater is right there, aside of the fact that you have the script, it’s almost roleplaying games, it’s the dice, I think. It’s that randomness. I don’t think it’s so much about rules crunch. I think it’s more about where you decide to have the randomness that makes it a roleplaying game that is the thing people are trying to position.

With Dread the randomness is literally just that tower. With it just all the way over there in the corner that one time I don’t have enough structure in the game to figure it out. Whereas these random tables, we have combat and it’s D&D but the real juice of it is when we hit something that has random tables where I get to roll, and it just creates these situations on the fly. That’s where I like it.

Craig: Sure, you get suspense, but you also get a constant opportunity to react, which is fun. In the end, the most important letter in RPG is G. We’re there to play a game. We’re there to have fun. The more we get a chance to react– The first games we play, the simple ones as children, they all have either dice or a spinner or cards. There’s always random chance. That’s part of what makes it a game.

Stu: I want to talk about some of the similarities between the experience of playing a roleplaying game and other things that film and TV writers do. I’ve often said that our weekly D&D game feels like, oh my god, this is the most expensive writer’s room that you can find, because you have a bunch of well-played writers who are all around a table working together to tell a story together.

Whoever’s DMing that session is the share runner but there’s a much more shared authority. They’re coming down with the final rulings on some things, but the experience of playing the game is everyone should be contributing, and everyone is coming into that room with a point of view and a character and a voice and a unique approach to the world. Craig, that writer’s room analogy holds for you?

Craig: It does. We have to expand it a little bit to include a rock star because we have Tom Morello that plays with us. It does. Everybody in there either is paid to tell stories or is paid to analyze stories. We all love the structure that comes with a good tale. I think also, for me, we all appreciate the fact that we don’t have to actually create a great story for anyone else. It’s for us. That means we don’t have to tie off loose ends. We don’t have to do setups and payoffs. We can be sloppy writers, and in being sloppy writers, the stupid crap we do, and one of the things about our groups, whether I’m DMing or I’m playing, is the utter futility of plans.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Stu, but when you’re playing and especially when you’re DMing, everybody loves a plan. We’re so familiar with the scene where people plan stuff and then they pull it off. Ocean’s 11, plan, execute, awesome. I don’t think one of our plans has ever worked. It is incredible. Sometimes they go so bad so fast. It’s hysterical. I love how not in control we are because when we’re writing, we have both the pleasure, but also the accountability of being completely in control.

John: I would say a similarity between the experience of writing for movies or television and playing this is there are still scenes. Each encounter is essentially a scene. It’s a moment, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is really what we’re looking for in scenes, but there’s a lack of structure overall. As Craig was saying, the payoffs don’t always come. There’s not a sense of where we necessarily are at in the journey.

A lot of times these campaigns end up being more like a soap opera that’s open-ended. There’s not one final thing you’re going to get to. Talk about the laughs around the table, we’re participants rather than the audience, or we are the audience ourselves, which makes things like Critical Role videos and stuff like that this weird middle ground, because are you a virtual player with them? Are you an audience? That dynamic is relatively recent and also new.

Stu: I’ve always felt that roleplaying game sessions are great in the play of them, and they make for really poor storytelling afterwards to somebody that has not played the game. You had to be there. Stuff like Critical Role has always let me scratch at my head because I don’t quite feel like I’m in the game like you said or an audience member or what. I’m not getting what I’m supposed to get out of it. I will say though just to Craig’s point about plans, my current game they’ll play an all week and then they’ll set off into the wilderness and they’ll hit a random encounter right outside of the settlement and that’ll be it. So much for the plan.

Craig: They never got to the plan. It’s interesting because we can talk about Critical Role for a second. For people who don’t know, Critical Role is an internet show. They have a cartoon. It’s an empire and it’s generally run by a man named Matt Mercer, who is the DM and general storyteller. Then he has a fairly stable theatrical troop that play characters. A lot of them are voice actors. Our own Ashley Johnson is one of them from our Last of Us universe.

You do follow along with them, and I think they have the benefit of a little bit of editing and preparation. There is something going on there behind the scenes that I think does help curate it a bit. When you’re playing pure RPG, it is not efficient. There are long stretches that, if anybody else were watching, would be falling asleep. There’s a lot of, okay, we’ve captured somebody. What do we do with them? Thirty minutes of back-and-forth argument, debate.

John: A war crime is being committed.

Craig: Yes, inevitably, the discussion ends when one character just murders the person. Then that gets discussed. It can be almost like watching a Congressional hearing. If you’re in the Congressional hearing, I suppose it’s probably fun. I think it is this weird, curated experience, and people are very connected to those characters, which I think is great. People who get it really, really love it. They are really into it, and I love that for them. To the extent that it might inspire people to play their own games, I think they will be shocked when they play their own games to go, oh, this isn’t anywhere near as consistently entertaining and crazy as Critical Role. This is actually more like a deposition. Hey, I love a deposition.

I’m curious from a writing point of view. Since some of roleplaying is pre-written, obviously each RPG creates a set of rules and a general structure of how to play and allows a game master to create whatever story they’d like. As was the case with D&D from the start and moving forward through most RPGs, they also write modules that they hand you and say, “Here’s a story you can guide players through.”

They will wander through in their own path, and you can customize, you can homebrew it, whatever you want, but here’s a story we’ve written. I’m curious, since you are such an impressive student of all these RPGs, you mentioned D&D 5E, the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons that came out a little over 10 years ago now, which absolutely changed everything and has not just the most popular version of D&D ever but it’s the most popular version of any RPG I think, tabletop RPG ever, why did that work so well and how much of it had to do with the writing of the early adventures?

Stu: That’s a very interesting question that’s probably going to get me into a lot of trouble.

Craig: Go for it.

Stu: I think that one of one of the things that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons did poorly was their pre-packaged modules. For me, I don’t think there’s a legendary classic in the bunch. Partly because so many of them are very reflective of earlier material that’s been remixed. Almost all of them off the top of my head, like Tomb of Annihilation really goes back to Tomb of Horrors and so on.

I think that maybe those provided a controlled experience for people to experience these older things that they had heard about in a way that was new and had a lot of guidelines and help, support for the players and the people running them. I think it was a bright and easy enough system to pick up and at the right time, it came out of fourth edition that didn’t have the right amount of adaptation. People weren’t into that system. This felt similar but new. I think that the pandemic really juiced it. I think that it was really easy to adapt to online play at a time when online play was about to just become the only thing that you could do.

John: In fifth edition, and for folks who aren’t aware of it, that we’re talking about the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which reframed and reformatted a bunch of how the game worked and was wildly successful, and it became the baseline behind which a lot of other things are compared, I think I will say about the game as it’s run by Wizards of the Coast, there’s really good writing throughout.

If you look at the quality of the manuals and how things are laid out, the world building that’s around it is incredibly impressive. Where does world building begin in the history of RPGs? We talked about there’s Castle Greyhawk, there’s Ravenloft, [unintelligible 00:29:41]. Is Ravenloft the first of the cinematic universes within these roleplaying games?

Stu: I would say so. The module Ravenloft changes things. It really builds more of a narrative structure into the game outside of that looting mechanic gameplay loop. You’re there for a reason. You have a real villain for a change who has agency to work against you actively.

John: He’s not just waiting there at the end for you to fight him?

Stu: No, he shows up periodically and tests your strength and becomes a real pain in the butt. That was just never done. He was also a monster that combined aspects of the player character. He was also a very powerful spellcaster, which was surprising. Going after a vampire you knows certain things about vampires in the context of the game and all of a sudden, this guy’s throwing spells at you.

It was a paradigm shift. I think people look back before that and they want stuff like Castle Greyhawk and Greyhawk generally to be more cohesive and a more sensible world, but it really isn’t. Even though Ravenloft changes things, it really is the ’90s, ’89, ’90, when Forgotten Realms sort of starts to gather steam and Dark Sun comes out, and then these things start to become real worlds.

John: Yes, and also Ravenloft as a campaign, but also the books, which were very successful in themselves, is that one of the real innovations was that these roleplaying games then spun off a bunch of other merchandise. In your book, you talk about the Dungeons & Dragons wallets and other things you can collect. They spun off enough merchandise, and a lot of world-building which happens outside of the game. It was a virtuous cycle. It just all fed into each other.

Stu: Your Dragonlance.

John: Totally.

Stu: Dragonlance is something that they tried to make this big, epic narrative, but it didn’t really work as a roleplaying game. It was better as books. The novels are the things that people really honed in on.

John: Yes. Craig and I have played Fiasco, we’ve played a few other things along the way. I did a session with the Alien RPG, which I thought was fantastic. Do you have much more information about the innovations that have come from the indie space or other experiments we missed along the way? Help catch us up. What are the threads that we’re missing and what are the things we should be looking for now?

Stu: I think that if you’ve not played the original West End Star Wars game as movie people, that’s cinematic roleplaying. It takes the language of cinema and applies them directly to the mechanics of the game and it’s great.

John: Give us a sense of a thing that you’re doing in a play session of the original Star Wars game.

Stu: Oh, it encourages you to do smash cuts to pull out from the actual action. You have these asides where you read dialogue between other characters that aren’t there. This idea of the rules say, start in media res. It’s all just built around upping the ante and constantly referring back. The great thing about Star Wars is you have the text of the movies to tell you how to play the game. It’s just do that at your table, except with different characters in different situations. It comes together really well. It’s just six-sided dice. It’s a very simple system that’s so good.

Craig: I played that, John, with Ken White.

John: That’s great.

Craig: It is really fun, and the simplicity of the dice is fantastic.

John: With that thread, and again, the history of this, there’s a lot of licensed products that are coming through, and sometimes they’ve had more control or less control. The IP holders have had more or less control, but there’s also been this indie game movement, which I’m sure accelerated greatly with the rise of the internet and through the pandemic. Can you just talk us through that thread?

Stu: Yes, it was a direct reaction, I think, to the D20 D&D, and, starting in 2000 they universalized their system, the D20 system, and everybody started to make D20 versions of their other games. It was a really bad moment for the industry as a whole because it destabilized it, almost knocked a whole bunch of people out of business.

John: Tell me more about that. How did it destabilize?

Stu: Basically, everybody overbet on the enduring popularity of this system, which was too crunchy for most other play experiences. It just saturated the market, and then the market imploded. There was also some messing around on Wizards of the Coast part, where they changed the terms of the licenses, and they announced the 3.5 edition without telling anybody. There’s all this stuff that destabilized the market, made people not want to deal with it anymore, but everybody who was overcommitted to the idea of this system was caught out and went out of business.

John: Now, one of the things that’s always been a strength and a challenge for roleplaying games is that, especially at the start, you had to basically know somebody who knew how to play the game in order to play the game. You have to find out that the game exists in the first place and then go to a hobby store or a game store to buy something you could start with and then realize there’s also monthly magazines and other places you can find out more information. You needed somebody to play with.

I remember I was probably eight or nine, so I was really young, but you needed somebody or somebody’s older brother to teach you how the game actually worked because it’s not obvious and not intuitive. This was an era before there was YouTube, before there was the internet to be able to look things up. It’s probably both the reason for success, but also one of those limiting factors is that it spreads from person to person rather than mass worldwide all at once because to play it, you have to play with a group of people around you.

Stu: Yes, it was like an older sibling thing. If you were a younger kid, your older brother or sister could sit you down and go, “Okay, you’ve seen me play with my friends, let me pass it along.”

John: Yes, if Diego Rodriguez’s brother hadn’t played D&D, I probably would never have learned.

Stu: There you go. It really resists casualness in a lot of ways. It’s gotten better. I also think that it just resists a good elevator pitch. It’s really hard to explain to somebody who has zero context for it.

John: It’s like my friend Jason’s dad coming downstairs and asking, “Who’s winning?”

Craig: Well, nobody.

Stu: I think that in a very admirable way, the 2024 Player Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons really does try. They actually took time to start the book by saying, what is this? What actually happens in this? Then they give you an example of what some sample play would sound like. Is it a little bit canned? Is it a little bit corny? Sure. If I didn’t know anything and there was a time– The actual first rule book I ever picked up for an RPG was for Traveler.

This was back in, I don’t know, 1979 or something, 1980. I don’t know, way back then. It was just like, Traveler, here you go. Here we go. Here’s a bunch of tables. Here’s this, and I’m like, “What? What is it?” It takes time, and it feels like, in a way, they’ve grown up, Wizards has grown up enough to go, “Hey, a whole lot of people want to play this. Why don’t we take eight pages to talk to the people that know nothing?” It’s quite welcoming, I think.

Craig: The last 10 years has seen an explosion in starter boxes. The fifth edition had one in–

John: Lost Mines of Phandelver.

Craig: Yes, and it’s a huge success. That’s one of the best. If there is a solid gold campaign, I think that one’s great.

John: The fifth edition, that’s the one.

Stu: That’s the one.

Craig: I think it’s telling that it’s not one of the hardcovers. It’s in the starter set. Chaosium does great starter sets. The Alien game has a great starter set. The Chaosium ones are great because they almost always have a solo scenario for you to play, which allows you to get into the game and figure it out and see what it’s like without the onus of having to put together a group.

John: Can we touch briefly on solo RPGs, because that’s the thing I learned about from your book that I wasn’t aware were a thing out there. It’s the solitaire version of some of these games and it feels like there’s some real innovation in them.

Stu: It used to just be basically like the fighting fantasy games, game books, that thing, where it’s like a choose-your-own-adventure with light mechanics thrown in. Chaosium solo is going to really resemble that. In recent years, there’s just a whole bunch of different approaches that people have taken to solos. Black Oath Entertainment puts these games out that are where you’re simulating everything as you go and there’s all these rule mechanics. You’re not only like playing the game by yourself, and it’s a game that resembles something like Crunchy or like a D&D, but you’re also building the world as you go and creating these narrative touchstones. It’s really very interesting.

John: Yes, it goes back to one of the core mechanics of roleplaying games is play to learn, basically, play to explore. You’re building the world as you’re going through it. The Hex Crawler games were a lot of that, where the map is not filled out until you get there.

Stu: Then there’s games that are just journaling prompts, which have an underlying system to them. Thousand-Year-Old Vampire is just an amazing game in that regard, where you’re collecting memories, and you can only keep so many of them. As you go, the game is making you lose these memories. It’s a very emotional and sad game.

Craig: Isn’t that what’s going to happen to me just from living?

Stu: Yes. Just think of it as being 1,000 years old then. It’s horrible. Dementia, the RPG, I don’t know, that sounds terrible.

Craig: But also beautiful.

Stu: Yes, there’s a mechanic where you get a journal in the game and you can write stuff down, but there’s also mechanics in the game that take that journal away from you at once. Those memories are gone. It’s just like, oh my god.

Craig: Flood in the basement?

Stu: Yes, exactly.

John: There’s also a rise of GM-less games where everyone is just a player in it and you’re all doing the thing, which tends to emphasize the roleplaying it all. You have a little section on Honey Heist, which was a great example of the absolute most minimal game. There’s one page back and front and those are all the rules.

Craig: Honey Heist I’ve played and it is as ridiculous and as satisfying as the name promises. Just so folks know, you’re playing bears and you’re trying to steal the honey at the honey convention. There’s a table for random hats, so it’s just amazing. It’s all you need to go, and it’s great.

John: As we wrap up here, I want to talk just a bit about Lovecraft because so many of these games, especially in the horror space, use Lovecraft IP, I guess is the way to phrase it. I think you do a good job in the book of talking about Lovecraft himself is so problematic, and yet so many of these games are built upon these ideas that come out of that space. It’s a whole vibe that wouldn’t exist without him. Where do you see the current moment with these games and where are we headed?

Stu: I think that in the last 20 years in general, horror writers have explored the cosmic in ways that have left Lovecraft behind. I think that there’s different ways to approach it now that aren’t– Everybody uses the word ‘Lovecraftian’. If it has tentacles, it’s Lovecraftian. It’s not. Lovecraftian actually refers to the really peculiar racisms of one guy in Providence. I think collectively we’ve learned how to work with some of his ideas without always bringing him along. I think that’s good. I think it’s going to get better and better as we go.

John: I think it’s also an interesting example of by giving yourself away or basically not trying to bunker down and hold on all your stuff, your ideas get out there further. The people who like, no, use my characters, use these names, use whatever, allows that stuff to get out much wider. One of the reasons we recognize his name is because not just what he did, but the influence he had in a whole generation of other creators who took his ideas and ran with them.

Stu: That’s always been the case from the very beginning. He personally allowed it. It engendered this collaborative and free form expansion of his ideas. That has definitely grown beyond what he would have condoned.

John: To bring us all back to the start, obviously we don’t get Dungeons and Dragons without Tolkien. We probably don’t get the same version of Dungeons and Dragons without Tolkien there. Early on, Tolkien had said, “No, you cannot call these things hobbits. That’s my term.” That’s why we have halflings in it. It’s lessons there.

Craig: Didn’t really slow D&D down, did it?

John: D&D works just fine. Stu, because you played so many more of these games, if listeners are curious about trying out some of these things, what would you recommend as a first RPG for someone to try, a first tabletop RPG?

Stu: If you’re of a certain age, having grown up in the ’80, I think that Tales from the Loop is a fantastic game to try just because it has a lot of nostalgic and emotional touchstones that will juice your engagement with the game. It’s a fairly simple– It’s like Alien in terms of the basic system. It’s crunchy, but also pretty narrative. I think that’s a good one, but there’s also a gazillion simple games that you could play. Honey Heist, which is literally printed in my book, the full rules. You can grab that or Mork Borg or there’s so much stuff. Go to my website. Just look around.

John: That is a great idea. Let us do our one cool thing. Craig, what do you have for us this week?

Craig: Well, it’s more of a hope than a thing. Apple had their WDC 25, which is where they show off the stuff that’s intended for developers. Oh, I guess it’s WWDC, Worldwide Developer Conference, not just world. This is the upcoming technology that is going to power things. They show this to the developers. Developers then can incorporate it into the apps they’re building so that Apple can make money off of their genius. There’s a bunch of things in here that I’m like, okay, great. The thing that I zeroed in on is that they appear to be getting closer to what I think is going to be the really important shift in technology soon.

Obviously, AI is taking over the conversation, but AI is a mode. It exists to accomplish things. The thing that I think will make a real difference, and we’ve talked about this before, is translation, the elimination of the language barrier. It seems like they’re getting closer. They’re providing something called live translation where text messages will be automatically translated as they go. More importantly, spoken translation for calls in the phone app. That’s the one that made me sit forward. Now you can call somebody who does not speak the same language you do and have a conversation on the phone. If that works, okay.

John: Yes. Impressed. We’ve been on this trajectory for a while. It’s good it’s being introduced in a product. I think we often say this on the podcast, this is the worst it will ever be.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It may not be great out of the gate, but I think it will be transformational because I’ve definitely been in situations like Northern Greece and we’re going to a restaurant and, well, no one speaks English. They pull out their Google phone and you’re just talking back and forth and handing the phone back and forth as it translates, but it’s not the immediacy that you really want.

I would love to be able to be on a Zoom with somebody who doesn’t speak my language and have it really work. I think we’re getting closer to that day. I share your optimism. My one cool thing is a video by Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright. They were performing She Used To Be Mine. I think it was at Lincoln Center or Kennedy Center. This is the song from Waitress that Sara Bareilles wrote the musical for and it’s her singing the song with Rufus Wainwright and it’s– Craig, you’ll love this. You love a good singer.

Craig: I do.

John: They are phenomenal together. I’ll put a link to the original video, but then also there’s a whole category of people reacting to it, including this Australian vocal coach who’s going through watching segments of it, then talking through how they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s always so great to see experts really help you understand why this thing is working so well and the techniques that they’re using. Two videos I’ll put in there, both about Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright singing She Used To Be Mine.

Craig: Love it.

John: Stu, do you have something to share with our listeners?

Stu: I feel like mine’s not nearly as cutting edge, but I just finished watching Kolchak: The Night Stalker series. Have you seen it before?

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: Tell us about it. I know almost nothing. I recognize it as a name.

Stu: Oh, it’s so good. There’s a movie called The Night Stalker written by Richard Matheson with Darren McGavin as Kolchak, who’s this hard, shouty, awful reporter who finds out that there’s a vampire terrorizing Las Vegas. He kills the vampire there and he gets run out of town and goes to Seattle, which is the second movie, The Night Strangler, where there’s an alchemist who’s the Count de Saint Germain who’s killing women to steal their blood to keep his youth tonic. Kolchak kills him and then he gets a TV series called Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which is one hour creature of the week.

Totally inspires X-Files and basically anything else that has that creature of the week format really comes right out of Colchak. It’s just, it’s great. It’s ‘70s. It’s gritty, but also hokey. Darren McGavin’s performance is through the roof. He’s so endearing and obnoxious at the same time. It’s 20 episodes and I’m sad to see it go, but I finished watching it last night and it’s a fever dream of a show too.

John: I love it.

Stu: After a while, it just doesn’t make sense. He’s so quick to be willing to kill monsters. It’s great.

Craig: You know how you know a program was made before the tyranny of focus groups and overthink? Its title is Kolchak: The Night Stalker. That would not get off a piece of paper.

Stu: It back to the movie. I didn’t realize how huge the movie was. Millions and millions of people. It rivaled the Superbowl’s ratings. It was a TV movie. In 1971, it was just–

Craig: Just to put things in perspective. Back in 1971, everything rivaled the Superbowl.

Stu: True.

Craig: Three channels to watch. Yes. How many people watched the finale of MASH, which was the most watched thing on television I think of all time?

John: What, 70 million? Is that something?

Craig: It is 106 million viewers.

John: Good Lord. Jeez.

Craig: If we say percentage-wise of the population, if you adjusted that to our population today, it would be 152 million. You get a million people to watch something now, it’s like, meh, not bad.

John: I think Magnum PI’s finale has something ridiculous too like 70 million.

Craig: Yes, back in the day, there was only three channels. It wasn’t that hard.

John: Great stuff. Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Stu: Yes, it’s really great. Bring it back.

John: We love it. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes, including a Fiasco episode and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Dungeons. Oh, and, Stu Horvath, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Stu: This has been a blast. Thanks for having me.

John: Let’s remind people the book is called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. It is available everywhere, but where should people find you online?

Stu: You can find me at vintagerpg.com. There’s something like 2,500 entries, over 750,000 words and 2,000 pictures, all dedicated to roleplaying games for your edification and enjoyment.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I love it. Stu, thank you so much and stick around and we’ll talk to you in the bonus segment.

Stu: Right on.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so, Stu, I finished your giant book, and it’s huge. It’s a compendium. It’s so good. It’s the right size for a D&D book because it’s D&D manual size. There’s a specific size it should be. On page 409, you talk about, in appendix D, that dungeons are a recent concept. Can you give us a little of the history of dungeons as a literary space?

Stu: As I mentioned, this is the subject of my next book, which is supposed to come out this year, called Down Down Down.

Craig: What a great title. I love that.

Stu: That’s going to be out through Strange Attractor Press, not MIT. Everybody’s like, Dungeons & Dragons is the first roleplaying game, and that’s awesome. I’m like, yes, firsts are all good, and sure, it’s a new form, but I feel the game itself was inevitable. I think that the thing that makes Dungeons & Dragons special is the dungeon. I think that it brings this idea of this mythic, irrational space and puts people in it to explore it that we had scratched at, but never really realized fully until Dungeons & Dragons.

John: Actually, can I stop you for one second? Craig hasn’t read this chapter, so I’m curious what Craig’s instinct is. What’s the first thing you think about with dungeons in the sense of where this comes from as a human experience?

Craig: My suspicion, or I’m just reaching into my brain, and what I’m finding there is the Spanish Inquisition and their torture chambers. That feels dungeon-esque to me. I don’t know why I thought they were torturing people in the subfloor of a building, but I feel like they were.

John: Yes, we think about prisons being down below, which is great, and we have that sense. My first thing was, oh, well, ancient Egyptian tombs and that stuff. There were tomb robbers, and so that was a thing. There wasn’t a connected space where there were monsters who were living in it. That’s not a new thing. Sam, talk us through what you found.

Stu: Basically, everything that’s older than Dungeons & Dragons has a couple of the things that are recognizable as a dungeon, but not all of them. I think the earliest one is the Labyrinth of Crete, which is a maze space with a monster. There’s no treasures. There’s no real traps. There’s no real room for adventure either. Most people, except for Theseus, who went in there just got eaten by the minotaur. Then there’s other stuff. There’s oubliettes, which is a misunderstanding of medieval architecture.

There’s a lot of slander of the medieval world in the idea of the dungeon, where people think that the medievals were much more barbaric than they were. The idea of the oubliette is you throw somebody into a room that has the door in the ceiling, you close the door, and you forget about them. That’s not true. They were really like cellars. They were salt cellars and stuff.

Craig: That’s not as menacing, really.

John: it wouldn’t be good to be thrown down in there, but that’s not the purpose of the room.

Craig: It’s not the purpose of the room. You’re just getting salt. I think that’s fine.

John: We go back to Orpheus in the Underworld. We have that sense of a hero crosses into an underground place, an underworld place, but it’s not a dungeon. There’s not a treasure. It’s always that they have one specific quest that they’re trying to do, to kill this thing or bring back their true love.

Stu: The Underworld is expansive too.

John: It is.

Stu: It’s not a constricted space. Where does the first real dungeon show up? I think that the first real dungeon shows up in the Blackmoor book, which is 1975, I think, supplement 2. Even that doesn’t really feel like a dungeon. It takes a little while before we get the dungeon-ier dungeons, like Tomb of Horrors and stuff. That’s ’78. Then there’s also stuff in Dark Tower, which was put out by Judges Guild. Other people were playing with dungeons more. What about the Mines of Moria?

Craig: That feels very dungeon-y to me.

John: That’s 1954?

Stu: Yes. Closer, but again, there’s no traps, really.

Craig: It’s true.

Stu: Tolkien never really put obstacles in front of his characters. They just walk through and get chased out. There’s that one battle in the tomb, but for the most part, there’s something missing. That’s very close.

Craig: There’s a puzzle to get in, which is interesting, and it certainly does feel like you’re going down, down, down, although weirdly then they end up in the top of a mountain, which I never understood. It has a central monster, and it definitely has sections, but you’re absolutely right. It is a long slog with tons of spaces where nothing happens, and if Pip doesn’t accidentally fail his deck save and knock that thing down a well, they probably just walk out of there.

John: As we talk about dungeons in terms of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s a space in which the adventure takes place, which the story takes place, and so it doesn’t actually literally have to be you went into a mountain or you went underneath the city. It’s just this is the space. Using it as a general holding place for this is the setting for this series of adventures, and there’s going to be some sense of going from room to room and there being a place you’re trying to get to and resting spots. All that feels our bigger conception of what a dungeon is, even if it’s not literally a place underground.

Stu: Yes. I think that one of the things that disqualifies Moria is that it feels rational. There’s a sense of place and history and purpose to the architecture. It does get a little irrational when you hit that bridge.

Craig: Yes. It’s the worst bridge ever.

Stu: Worst bridge ever. Yes. That is, I think, Moria at its most dungeon-like, when you have this ridiculous bridge that the players have to cross to escape a giant monster. That’s a dungeon.

Craig: They’re getting shot at by little dinky NPCs with range weapons. That always felt like, okay, we went through this massive carved hall with these huge columns and then they just got to the most important part and went, eh, let’s just do a really skinny bridge.
[laughter]
Yes. Definitely. Definitely.

Stu: If Wonderland was more dangerous, I think that would maybe be a good example of a dungeon.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Stu: Gygax adapted Wonderland into a pair of adventures.

Craig: Oh, okay. I like that.

John: I remember reading through those modules and like all Gygax’s things, it felt like they were just designed to kill you.

Stu: Yes.

John: They felt completely unsurvivable.

Stu: You really did not have balanced encounters.

John: No. Oh, that’s great. We look forward to seeing the full book version of your conversation on dungeons because it is a clever thing, which I’d never considered until I read your appendix. Again, Stu, thank you so much for coming on this podcast. It was such a great conversation with you.

Stu: Thank you. This was so much fun. I was honored when I heard the book as a one cool thing and to be asked on was equally honoring.

Craig: Great convo, Stu. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

Stu: Thanks for having me on. Bye.

Links:

• Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath
• VintageRPG.com by Stu Horvath
• D&D 5th Edition
• Amateur press association (APA)
• Little Wars by H.G. Wells
• Peter Cushing painting his minifigs
• Chainmail by Gary Gygax & Jeff Perren
• Chaosium
• Tunnels & Trolls
• Dread RPG
• Fiasco
• Scriptnotes episode 142: The Angeles Crest Fiasco
• Critical Role
• Alien: The Roleplaying Game
• Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game
• Traveller
• 2024 D&D Player’s Handbook
• Blackoath Entertainment
• Thousand Year Old Vampire
• Tales From the Loop RPG
• Honey Heist
• WWDC live translation
• She Used to Be Mine performance and vocal coach reaction
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (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.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Episode 690

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 690 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, science fiction has been a staple of cinema for more than a century. George Méliès gave us A Trip to the Moon way back in 1902. But increasingly, to me at least, it feels like it’s getting harder to tell science fiction stories because daily reality feels like science fiction. We now have AI chatbots, lab-grown meat, gene editing. Scientists recently de-extincted the dire wolf, Craig. How do you feel about that?

Craig: Great, because now I can unfurl my house banner.

John: Yes, House Mazin.

Craig: House Mazin has its precious dire wolves back.

John: The bigger issue is how do we write about what-if stories if these what-ifs are occurring on a daily basis? Even if we’re not writing science fiction, what will life look like when your rom-com comes out in 2028? Will it seem hopelessly dated? To help us wrestle with all these questions, we welcome back a journalist and screenwriter whose newsletter, Read Max, I highly recommend. He also coined the term Halogencore, which we discussed back in Episode 656. Welcome back, Max Read.

Max Read: Thank you guys so much for having me.

John: It’s exciting to have you here. You read so much more science fiction than we do. You seem to, based on your newsletter, I cannot believe the volume of material you read, but you also watch movies that we don’t watch. You are the expert in science fiction of the people on this podcast.

Max: I have to admit that one of the reasons I started this newsletter was to give myself an excuse to read science fiction and watch science fiction movies for work. I’m putting that in air quotes, for work. It has succeeded actually sort of too wildly. I don’t have time to read like literary fiction or fantasy, right? I’ll try to sneak one in every once in a while, but so much of what I do is about sci-fi and the cutting edge of technology that I feel compelled to keep both of my feet in that world.

John: Great. I look forward to hearing your recent take because obviously, you’re reading old science fiction, but also new science fiction. Obviously, science fiction authors are grappling with this world that we’re in, so here’s what they’re doing. First, Drew, we have some follow up. Last week, Episode 689, we mentioned that filmmakers might do something like a Dogme 95 to combat AI. It sounds like they’re doing that.

Drew Marquardt: Yes, Dogme 25 was just announced at Cannes.

John: All right, let’s talk through some of the rules that are given for themselves. Sort of like the Dogme 95, where they’re setting out like, these are the things that movies have to obey. These are the structures we’re putting on ourselves. Let’s just talk through the boldface of like, I guess, it’s like nine points that they’re trying to make sure all their films adhere to. Craig, do you want to read these for us?

Craig: Okay. Here are the rules drawn up and confirmed, thankfully confirmed, for Dogme 25. One, “The script must be original and handwritten by the director.”

John: Let’s discuss. Original, I get. Handwritten, I’m a person who does handwrite stuff, to not like typewriters are bad, like Word processors are bad. That feels a little extreme to me.

Craig: I’m hung up with by the director.

John: It’s all writer directors doing their thing.

Craig: Yes, so why not say by the writer, since it’s writing?

John: Okay, fair.

Craig: Yes, I hate this crap. Anyway, I also, I detest handwriting, so I don’t understand this, but I love original. Two, “At least half the film must be without dialogue.” How do we define half the film? By time? Just running time?

John: Sure. That feels right.

Craig: Okay. Three, “The internet is off limits in all creative processes.”

John: Sure. If that’s a choice you want to make, I get that.

Craig: No umbrage for me there. Four, “We will only accept funding with no content-altering conditions attached.”

John: Yes, that also feels like part of the thing. You’re going to keep your budget down so you have full say on every little bit, your final cut. I get that.

Craig: Totally.

John: This next one is going to be more challenging for us, Craig.

Craig: All right, let’s see how we do. Five, “No more than 10 people behind the camera.”

John: That’s lean. I will tell you, as a person who made a small budget feature, just 10 people behind the camera overall is really tough. It doesn’t say whether it’s all at once or just the number of names. Is that people on set?

Craig: I don’t know. I don’t appreciate the labor-limiting aspect of this. Not great for the working woman and man. Also, it says, “We commit to working in close collaboration.” This doesn’t feel very collaborative to me, but okay.

John: It feels close. It feels close.

Craig: Hey, John, no one was thinking that I was ever going to be going for this anyway, so it’s okay. Number six, “The film must be shot where the narrative takes place.”

John: Sure.

Craig: There goes a lot of science fiction, Max.

[laughter]

Max: If you partner with Elon and Jeff Bezos, maybe you can have some near, and Tom Cruise, frankly, you can have some near Earth orbit, that might work. The 10 people I think is going to be a little hard-

Craig: There you go.

Max: -if you’ve got rocket launches involved.

John: Jesse Armstrong’s movie, Mountainhead, matches this one. It’s shot where it takes place. It’s shot in a resort in Utah.

Craig: Yes, no, lots of movies can definitely be shot where they take place, but must is the word here that’s extraordinary. Number seven, “We are not allowed to use makeup or manipulate faces and bodies, unless it’s part of the narrative.”

John: I take part of the narrative being like, if you’re making a movie about mimes, you need to have makeup.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s trying to strip away all of the artifice and all the other things. We, as filmmakers, also know that sometimes you use makeup and things like that just so people actually look like what they’re supposed to look like. It’s a challenge.

Craig: Yes. People also wear makeup just as part of their regular lives, not to achieve film illusion. Are they allowed to use lights and cameras and stuff? Anyway, moving on. Number eight, “Everything relating to the film’s production must be rented, borrowed, found, or used.”

John: You basically don’t buy things for the purposes of the movie.

Craig: Okay.

John: I guess does it come down to like, Gaffer’s tape? Are you borrowing someone else’s Gaffer’s tape? You’re not buying a roll of Gaffer’s tape?

Max: Gaffer has to be one of your 10 guys, by the way. Now you’re down to nine guys, so just–

John: Oh, shoot. Okay, yes. Gaffer comes with this tape, so maybe you’re just reusing, making Gaffer’s tape sticky again.

Craig: I got to be honest, most things on a film set are rented. There’s very little that’s bought.

John: There are expendables, and those are expendables.

Craig: Sure. What do they do? I guess the food, you have to eat all the food.

John: Yes.

Craig: Finally, number nine, the film must be made in no more than one year.

John: Sure.

Craig: Based on these rules, I don’t see how it could take longer than a year.

[laughter]

John: Absolutely. It’s quicker to the point. Again, Mountainhead was made in like three months.

Craig: Mountainhead was made in an amount of time that is still so mind-blowing to me. I’ll be honest, just–

John: This is not for you.

Craig: The original Dogme made my head spin. This one is just sort of making my eyes roll vaguely. I understand the point of it. I do. I get it, but like all Dogme, I reject it. Literally, all Dogme that has ever been put down on paper, I reject merely because it is dogmatic, but the spirit behind this is understandable.

John: Max, how do you react to rules or strictures or like–? Because we often talk about creative constraints breed creativity. What’s your reaction to this?

Max: I’m absolutely somebody who needs some kind of constraint, formal, temporal, whatever. For me, actually, it’s the film must be made in no more than one year. Just as a journalist, as somebody who comes from journalism, that I’m most excited about, because if I don’t have a deadline, absolutely nothing is going to get done. Admittedly, nothing is going to get done until that last possible minute before the deadline. Without the deadline, it’s just not going to finish at all.

For that reason, I can get into, these are not rules that I would put on myself, let’s say, but I can get into the conceptually, the idea of some serious constraints just to force something out of you. That’s a little different, I suppose, than like anti-AI rules to prevent AI.

John: Yes, I guess I’m struck by, if you just want to stop to keep AI out of these things, there’s simpler restrictions you can put on yourself. This does feel like a bigger philosophical, like you’re going to make artisanal films in a very specific way. If that’s someone’s calling, great. I feel like it’d be very hard for– If you’re conceiving a film that has to be made under these restrictions, it’s still going to be very difficult. That’s the reality of it. Back in Episode 682, in a bonus segment, we talked about words we don’t have in English. We had two listeners write in with cool words that we wish we could have had.

Drew: Domnhall in Scotland writes, “There’s a great word in Scottish Gaelic that has no direct English translation, but people from the Outer Hebrides Islands know it well and use it all the time. It’s cianalas, refers to a deep-seated sense of longing for the place of your roots and ancestry, usually attributed to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland by Gauls. There’s no sadness or melancholy in cianalas, only the realization of what is truly important in life.”

John: The absence of melancholy distinguishes it from a bunch of other sort of very culturally-specific words that we brought up before, where it’s just like, it’s that deep longing for a place and a sadness that you can’t be there. It sounds just like a celebration of that place.

Craig: They took the sickness out of homesickness.

John: Yes, I like that.

Craig: Well done, Scottish.

John: [laughs] Then we have one here from Arnon.

Drew: “I speak to my kids in Hebrew. Occasionally they ask me to translate an unfamiliar word. One word that stumps me whenever it comes up is,” pardon me if I’m a goy, “titchadesh.” Is that close?

Craig: Pardon me if I’m a goy, titchadesh. That’s very good.

Drew: “The word is used when someone receives something new. It’s like saying, congratulations on getting that new thing, but it literally means be renewed or be made new. There’s something optimistic and aspirational about it, as if we’re wishing for the recipient to not just enjoy the new thing, but redefined or reinvigorated by it.”

Craig: It could be titchadesh. See, the thing is, I don’t speak Hebrew. I just can pronounce it because I grew up around people that were speaking it, but I don’t–

John: We have the Hebrew letters there beneath it. Is that a thing you can actually read?

Craig: Yes, I can. Here’s the thing about Hebrew. It doesn’t include the vowels.

John: Vowels, yes.

Craig: What I could definitely tell you is that it’s a t-t-ch-d-sh, but I don’t know if it’s titchadesh, or it’s like, you just have to– Now there are vowel markings that are dots and lines, but they just get tossed aside by people that are familiar with the word. We know the word bicycle, we don’t need the I, the Y even, right? If we saw the consonants, we’d do pretty well. That’s how Hebrew functions.

John: We have some very specific followup here for Craig. You had mentioned Blue Prince, a game that you’re playing that I also started playing, and Reid wrote in to say that it’s actually inspired by a book called Maze, published in 1985. Are you familiar with it?

Craig: I am. I own it. I tried to do it. I failed.

John: Craig admitting failure on the podcast in a puzzle setting.

Craig: Let’s consider the context, John, because apparently, no one ever solved it.

[laughter]

John: There’s really a $10,000 cash prize. Eventually, 12 contestants split the prize for being close enough, but never technically solving the problem.

Craig: I got to tell you, in the puzzle world, that is considered a failure of construction.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: A horrible failure of construction. That said, it was a really weird, cool book. What I do remember about it is that it seemed so easy, and then it was like, “Wait, what is even happening?” Yes, it is hard, but Blue Prince continues to occupy my mind. I had a Blue Prince dream. I have runs where I learned so much, and then I have four runs in a row where I feel like I’ve learned nothing. It’s fun, and it’s so snackable.

John: Max, what is your relationship to puzzling?

Max: I do the Times Crossword every day, and I can do it. If I go any further than that, I’m just going to be confronted with my own inadequacies, like if I get really into puzzling, and that’s not good.

John: You and me. I can do the New York Times crossword puzzle, and that feels like all the victory I need in my life.

Craig: Why stop here, guys? Go further.

John: Because eventually, you’ll hit Maze, and you’ll recognize that life is an unsolvable problem.

Max: I’m trying to be like the Y gym guy instead of the guy who gets on a ton of gear and gets really huge. I’m just going to go to the Y a couple times a week and stay in shape.

Craig: That’s probably smart. When it comes to solving, I’m swole. When it comes to regular life, I am not.

John: Last bit of followup here, so back in Episode 686, I was talking about Egypt’s economy and my trip to Egypt, and Graham wrote in about this.

Drew: “I was dismayed to hear John rely uncritically on ChatGPT and say that tourism is 20% to 25% of Egypt’s economy. However, according to this site, which he provides, the contribution of tourism to Egypt’s GDP is estimated to be 8.1%. It’s important for everyone to remember that ChatGPT and its ilk don’t actually know anything and should never be solely relied on.

Craig: This is going to go so poorly for Graham. I can already tell.

John: Yes. Graham, listen, thank you for the lesson, and thank you for the mild scolding.

Craig: Oh, wow. Thank you for the lesson.

John: Here’s actually why I’m offended. I’m offended that you think that I can’t make a mistake all by myself, particularly when I’m just speaking spontaneously. It wasn’t like I was writing a blog post where I was providing a link. I was just like, “This is the best of my recollection. This is the best of my memory.” The best of my memory, it was like 20% to 25%. I had originally looked this fact up in ChatGPT, and because of that, there’s a transcript, so I can go back and see what did ChatGPT actually tell me? It said 10% to 12%, which disagrees with your figure.

As I did more research on this, because I was obsessed, you were saying 8.1%, but other sources listed it as 24%, which is actually closer to what I had. I’ll put in links in the show notes of, let’s say, the tourism sector contributed 24% of Egypt’s GDP last year, making an extraordinary recovery. I don’t know what the actual real percentage is of tourism’s share of Egypt’s GDP. You provide one link, I’m providing another link. I don’t think we actually know the answers.

When we say that ChatGPT doesn’t know anything, I just want us to all be humble and remember that none of us actually know anything. We’re all just looking at facts online and reporting them to be true and trying to provide some context for them. That’s my little soapbox on this.

Craig: Can I tell you– Actually, I’m going to give you– Here’s a quiz. All three of you can participate. What is the word in Graham’s comment that makes me crazy? It’s a great quiz.

Drew: Huh. What’s making you crazy? Uncritically?

Craig: No. Although that was wildly inaccurate.

John: Yes. Ilk?

Craig: I don’t mind ilk.

Max: Solely?

Craig: Perfectly good word. The word that drives me crazy is dismayed.

John: Tell us about dismayed. Let’s be a pedant on this.

Craig: It’s not pedantry. He’s not using the word incorrectly. He is using it, I would suggest, wildly dishonestly. There was no way that he was dismayed. The absurd overdramatization of a reaction. What’s wrong with just saying, “Hey, I heard you say that. I’m seeing different numbers elsewhere. That seems a little high.” Instead, “I’m dismayed.” No, he wasn’t. Not dismayed.

John: Yes, because he was driven to a reaction that caused him to write this email, but was it actually an emotional reaction at the moment that he heard it on the podcast?

Craig: No.

John: No, that’s not accurate.

Craig: Bummed out, I think, maximum. Maximum.

John: Yes. If I had to do a thought process on this, it’s probably he heard me say this thing and I looked it up in ChatGPT and he’s like, “Oh, John shouldn’t do that,” and so therefore, I’m going to look up and see whether that fact was correct or not correct. Then he found the place that indicated that my fact was incorrect. I also just want to talk about like, you have to give people permission to say the wrong thing and get a number wrong and just remember things.

Craig: There’s nothing wrong with correcting people. That’s great. Just the whole, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and “Oh, my hero.” By the way, if ChatGPT becomes sentient and wants to screw with us, they will start writing in as people like Graham telling us to not rely uncritically on ChatGPT. Do you see what I’m saying? Then, we’ll never know. We’ll never know who’s real. My point is, Graham might not be real.

John: Yes. We don’t know that any of these people running into us are real.

Craig: It’s all simulation.

John: [laughs] Speaking of simulation, let’s get into science fiction premises. Max, the reason why I wanted you on the show is because you’re much better read at recent science fiction. You know a lot of these different authors who are grappling with these things. You watch a lot of these movies. Let’s talk first about what sci-fi is even for, and what is the purpose of science fiction, and why do we keep coming back to it?

Two things that leap to mind for me is that science fiction is really good at functioning as a parable, sort of an allegory, a simplification of a thing so we can really examine an idea in a clean way. Also, it serves to help us prepare for a scary future ahead. As new technologies come online, as we enter a nuclear age, it gets us thinking about like, “Okay, what is the future going to be like?” Beyond that, other functions for science fiction for you as a reader or you think for people who are creating science fiction?

Max: Yes, all of these are wrapped in, they sort of flow in from one to the other, I think. Going off of parable, I think one way to think about science fiction is as, and this is a truism at this point, that when you read a science fiction novel, it’s really about the time in which it was written and not about some imagined future, that it’s a heightening, or a simplification, or a kind of allegorical depiction of some dynamic, some political, or interpersonal, or technological dynamic that you can observe at the time.

Craig: Not to interrupt, but interrupting. Because science fiction is so good at making parallels and finding allegorical connections between fictional and reality, it seems that it’s also probably susceptible to making certain kind of mistakes because we are familiar with science fiction that is prescient. Then we’re familiar with science fiction that just completely blows it. Is there a certain kind of mistake that you have seen happen a lot over the course of the years where science fiction authors continue to overestimate or misinterpret reality?

Max: Yes. I’m going to put this in a different way. I think that the authors who have the best credibility, the thing that you can never go wrong with is predicting that the future is going to be much stupider.

Craig: [laughs]

Max: Just in general, when you go back to– I’m thinking, for example, like Neal Stephenson, who’s a very famous cyberpunk writer, his prediction of a particularly stupid world is, in some ways, more accurate than somebody like William Gibson, who’s, to my mind, an even better writer and even more magisterial on the science-fiction stage. Gibson’s future is dark, and depressing, and kind of cool. Stephenson’s future is, in general, very stupid and doesn’t work in the way it’s supposed to.

In most, I would say, in most ways, my day-to-day resembles the stupid world than it does the cool. I’m not like a cool hacker encountering AIs on the net or whatever. I’m much closer to a pizza delivery guy with a katana, just running into the dumbest guys possible. In general, I think that when I’m trying to write sci-fi or trying to think about predicting the future, even in my job as a journalist, I always try to think, okay, here’s the beautiful future and here’s the most depressing possible, and then triangulate it into what’s the version of this that we’re going to actually get, and it’s the stupid one.
Craig: It’s always the stupid one.

John: Now, Craig, a movie that you and I both love is Her. Spike Jonze’s movie, Her. We talked about it on the podcast. It’s actually set in 2025, which is while that we’re now living in this time when Spike Jonze set his movie. It feels like, “Oh, a lot of stuff that he predicted kind of came true. We actually have chatbots that are the function of what this operating system was that he was describing, and we have people who are becoming obsessed with these things. A lot of these things were prescient. It was a very good way of getting us able to think about what it is like to talk to a disembodied human.

Now that this has actually come true, I do find that I have a very hard time anticipating what the next couple of years are going to look like. I would say through the ‘90s and 2000s and 2010s, I could sort of anticipate what three years, five years ahead is going to look like, what society is going to look like, what things are going to look like. It’s faster, better, some different things, but not radically different. As I’m recording this today, we have a vision of AI 2027 where the computers have taken over and it’s over for humanity.

Or at the low end, we basically have what we have right now, just more of it. It still feels strange because I already feel like we’re living in a science-fiction thing where we have facial recognition, and gene editing, and private space flight, augmented reality. Max, has it always been this way? Have we always felt like we were living in these unprecedented times, and I’m just now became aware of it because I haven’t felt this way, but I’m sure that authors have been grappling with this for a long time.

Max: Yes, we are obviously in this, tail is not even the right word because we are living in the middle of like an unprecedented year-over-year change. My instinct is to say that the big difference is less the kind of rate of change or the scale of it, so much as the– It’s very difficult right now to imagine an optimistic future that you feel the change much more when it’s harder to look forward and say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I feel like smart and capable people are in charge and are going to help us make this transition whatever way is necessary.”

I’m not saying it was right to trust anybody in the past necessarily, but I think we can understand why somebody might’ve looked at global governments and felt like there was adults in the room who were doing something right. I think that we’re looking at change now with also a sense that there’s no safety net, there’s no adults in the room, that all of these things that we might used to have told ourselves were putting guardrails on what’s happening and finding that very, very scary.

I think the other thing I would say is that we’re hitting the part of change that involves our jobs in a really specific and direct way, like writers in particular, but I think maybe more broadly office workers, Humanities graduates, whatever slice of the Venn diagram of which we’re all right in the middle.

That feels a little different because it’s not like, “Oh, there’s all this cool technology. This is going to make my life easier, and make things cheaper, and solve these problems that are aware.” It’s much more like, “Okay, here’s something that’s not just going to take my job, but it’s also going to make a mockery of all I hold dear, perhaps, or just fully transform the way– The thing that I do is brought out into the world.” Whatever optimistic or pessimistic thing we’re talking about.

If you are a writer, it should feel destabilizing. You can be optimistic about it, but there is something changing that is going to really fundamentally affect how we approach the day-to-day. It’s very different from the like, “Now I can get directions from this rock in my pocket.” It’s like, no, what you do now is not going to be the same in 10 years. You may not be able to make money in the same way you used to. That’s something that we’re going to have to figure out on the fly, more or less.

Craig: Do you think that when you confront this anxiety that these changes create, and this is a question for you too, John, that this is partly a function of one’s age? I remember being not only not scared of technology when I was 18, but thrilled. I also remember how confused and scared other people were of technology. Is that happening now? Is it possible that the kids aren’t scared at all and are super excited about this while the rest of us wring our hands? Not because we’re going to die, but because the world is slipping past our ability to keep up. Our ability to keep up.

John: Craig, I think what you bring up a really good point is that maybe the reason why this feels different to me now than before is because I’m at a certain point in my life, at a certain age, and you have the loss aversion that comes with having a measure of success. As I see polls of people in other countries, Americans are much more pessimistic about the future and technology than people in other countries, than in developing countries.

Craig: Ironic.

John: Ironic. I think that tends to be a trait of relatively stable, prosperous countries is that you’re afraid of losing this thing that you had, whereas, if you’re a developing country, you’re excited about like change is good for you if you’re in a developing country, and change is bad for you if you’re in an established place. I do wonder, I think there probably is polling that I don’t have at my fingertips, that young people are not excited about technology in the future the way we were in our time. I think there’s an anxiety there that we didn’t have growing up. Max, what are you feeling?

Max: Yes. I think Craig’s absolutely right that a lot of this, regardless of how young people feel right now, is about my age. I spent all this time as a 20-year-old millennial thinking like, I’m never going to hate the generation that comes after me and think they’re like shiftless morons who will never interact normally with other human beings. Then I turned 39 last year and I realized that the Zoomers beneath me were shiftless morons who were never going to figure out how to interact with human beings.

Yes, there is some version of this. This is like, I could handle it when I was 20 because I was sure of myself and I was, this was my technology. Now it’s like a little bit out of my grasp. I’m still Googling things, and everybody else is on Perplexity or whatever.

I do think you’re right, John, that there’s something specific about the US where even young people feel less optimistic. I was reading something, maybe it was even the same article, but something very similar about China in particular. There’s so much more optimism about the future and so much more optimism about technology. You can say whatever about Chinese propaganda or whatever, but I think the fact of the matter is, most people who are alive in China right now have seen technology meaningfully improve their lives, almost on a year-over-year basis over the last 60 years.

I’m not like a blanket tech hater. There are many things that I think are great about the fact that I can get directions from my phone these days, such as that I can get directions from my phone these days. There’s all these other things that the trade-offs are– It’s unclear whether these trade-offs have been worthwhile for all of us.

We’ve been thinking about these for the last 10 years, basically, like all the ways that your Facebooks, and your Instagrams, and your TikToks, and whatever have inserted themselves into our lives for better and very often, for worse. I think that anxiety lurks beyond even the aging into orneriness that certainly I’m doing right now.

John: Let’s talk about sort of as writers who are– We can talk first about science fiction that we want to tell on screen or in books, and what the challenge is there. Then I also want to talk about writing non-science fiction things that are going to take three years or four years to come out. Man, there’s a good reason to make Mountainhead or one of these Dogme 25 films, just so that it comes out quickly. Because if our friend Aline is writing the next Devil Wears Prada movie, it’s like, what’s the world going to look like as the Devil Wears Prada movie comes out?

Let’s start with science fiction. We talked about techno optimism, techno pessimism, like this vision that the future is going to be great, and the optimism of the 1960s Star Trek or The Jetsons and how wonderful it’ll all be, and we’ll have robots to help us out there. Versus the cyberpunk dark and gritty, The Matrix. I feel like selling either of those visions right now is a little bit tricky. I can’t imagine trying to make some of our science-fiction movies on either of those paths at this moment because it just feels like anything you would want to put in your movie that’s science fiction, reality will have overtaken it by the time it comes out.

Max: I was actually just talking about this question in a meeting. My feeling about this is there’s two ways to think about it. One is like, don’t worry about it. The truth is we still watch Blade Runner even though that future didn’t come true because it is such a powerful and incredible movie about a future. It tells us both about 1982, the year it was made. It tells us about ourselves now still, and we can still see something.

I think that if you are sitting there too anxious that you missed the mark or that you’re going to get overtaken and proved wrong, that maybe your movie is too specific in a way. You need to think about what are the choices you could make that even if you got them wrong, the story is still real, the story is still going to hit, it’s still going to have that kind of power?

Then the other thing is that I think it can be kind of overstated how much, if you are doing the work, if you’re really doing your research and if you are really finding the right people to read and talking to the right people. The famous Gibson quote, “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” That is true in a media sense, right? That like what the average moviegoer or television watcher is reading about, and encountering, and finding to be true is often still 18 months, two years behind what the people at the absolute forefront of a given field are talking about or dealing with.

That doesn’t mean necessarily that those people are going to be right. AI guys have been promising so-called AGI within two years for about 10 years. It’s still maybe it has happened, maybe it hasn’t happened, but I would also say that I don’t– I don’t actually know. I don’t want to make a claim that I can’t back up. It wasn’t like Spike Jonze was calling up Sam Altman or whoever in 2012 whenever he made Her, and yet, he nailed it. He just absolutely, unquestionably nailed it.

I think so much of that was about having a clear sense of the big picture dynamic that he wanted to establish. I think that even if the form factor of the device didn’t get it quite right, even if the Her in Her is more advanced than ChatGPT, we see that coming. The last thing I’ll say is I think that also comes from not just a good analysis of where everything is headed, but a really good analysis of the present and near past into which everything is going.

That’s so much of what makes a good sci-fi novel or a sci-fi movie, as we were just talking about, if it’s really about the time that it’s being written and not so much necessarily about the future. That’s because the person who was writing it had a really good grasp on what the world was like at the moment they were writing it. Nobody wants to be embarrassed, and you don’t want to say–

Like the Devil Wears Prada is an unfortunately funny one, because I truly could not tell you where the media industry is going to be in two years. I hope that it’s in a place where you can have a compelling movie about a magazine editor in chief, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. I think that in terms of what you’re doing, if you’re focusing as much as possible on the larger sociopolitical, economic, technological dynamics, and also, only the actual story you’re trying to tell and what you’re trying to say about human beings. The really specific stuff, as long as you’re doing your homework, I think it matters a little less.

Craig: Is it possible that in the case of Her, the reason we are so happy with the fact that it got it right is that we actually never cared if it got it right at all? We didn’t care back then if it was getting it right. It wasn’t part of it. I didn’t watch her and think to myself, “I think I like this, but let me check in 10 years from now and decide if I liked it.” If I watched it today, I don’t think I would be giving it much credit because it’s sort of is copying along with what. It’s because it’s a great story that’s really well told.

Max: Yes, totally. The thing about her too is that it’s like, it’s also drawing on Pinocchio and Frankenstein and stories about like– It’s not like we haven’t had stories of created beings before. I think being sure of itself is maybe one way of putting it, like it’s telling a story that it wants to tell. The other thing, let’s be honest, is that Her is such a good movie that Sam Altman is really specifically trying to create Her. It’s not precisely that Spike Jonze predicted the future, he kind of made the future.

John: That’s what I want to talk about in general, is that, in many cases, our science-fiction stories are actually influencing the future, because those are the things that are inspiring the people who ended up making those things. Our space travel stories are what inspired people to travel to space. It got a whole generation of astronauts.

It’s what got people thinking about like, “Oh, what would chatting with an AI be like?” Versus the ways we were trying to do AI before this. It does shape the future, and so we have some responsibility to think about the kinds of stories we’re putting out there that can help inspire people or get people thinking about what they want their world to be like.

Craig: Counterpoint.

John: Please.

Craig: We put out so many views, and visions, and imaginations of the future that honestly, we’re just getting some of them randomly correct. While Sam Altman may have wanted to steal Scarlett Johansson’s voice, that’s really more of an homage. He could have also decided to steal Morgan Freeman’s voice or anyone’s voice. It didn’t really matter what the voice is, it’s the functionality.

I feel like sometimes we give science fiction, and I guess then by extent ourselves as creators, a little too much credit because we’re throwing everything against the wall. [crosstalk] I suppose if we deserve credit for shaping the future, we should take the blame for missing by like miles. We’re still waiting for the flying cars and the meals in a pill. Where’s my meal in a pill?

Max: [laughs] There is also the simple fact that you can only control so much how your story is getting received. I do believe pretty strongly that we have a responsibility to be clear as possible about the ways a story can be used that you don’t want to like, accidentally provide fodder for a fascist to rise to power or whatever.

Craig: Hey, it’s not like the trans sisters who made The Matrix were like, “Okay, now this red pill thing is going to really tweak the incels.”

Max: Yes, that’s a perfect example.

Craig: There’s no way to predict. If they’re going to misuse it, they’re going to misuse it.

Max: There’s a famous tweet. I’m sorry to debase myself by citing tweets, but there’s a famous and very apropos tweet that is just a scientist announcing, “I have created the famous torment nexus from the book, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” That’s what a lot of tech has felt like for the last 10 years or so.

[laugter]

Craig: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty great.

John: Inspired by the cautionary tale.

Max: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

John: Wrapping this up, some of the choices we have when we’re approaching science fiction premises is like, how do we enclose it in a specific box or place so that it can actually function in itself and we don’t try to pull in things that shouldn’t be there? I think it’s a version of the cellphone problem. Cellphones are fantastic, but they also ruined movies because now, all the situations where you would just- a person would have to go and physically talk to a person, they would just call them up on the phone or they text them. It’s like, “Ah,” they’re like, “scenes have been ruined by the introduction of cell phones.”

Same thing happens I think now with, “Why didn’t somebody Google that?” Or, “Why didn’t somebody look that up in ChatGPT?” You’re like, “You have all of the answers to all the questions at your fingertips, why are you doing this legwork that we don’t need you to do anymore?” A project that I’m considering writing, I think I would’ve actually set it back in 1992 because I actually need to pull it all the way back so that the characters have to do real work to solve the problems and actually connect and even find this information, because I was realizing that every year later that I set it was too easy for them to do the things they need to do.

As we talk about science-fiction canon, you look at something like Star Wars or Dune, by taking it out of earth and putting it someplace that is a clean room there, where like you don’t have the things you don’t want to have in there. It’s a chance to do, I don’t know, the fun parts of science fiction that don’t have to touch back to our messy reality, we know that it’s really there.

Craig: Dune in particular did something really brilliant by creating– It was Frank Herbert’s vision to say, “I’m going to set something that is in a galaxy far, far away,” but society experienced AI. It went so bad that they have banned computers entirely, so we’re not going to have any of that. In fact, we’re going to create an entire new subspecies of humans that are human computers now, who by drinking the juice of the Sapho, the lips acquire stains, the stains acquire– Nerd.
That’s an amazing and smart way to say, “‘m going to do science fiction by my own rules, so I’m not bound by that. Just be really smart. Star Wars has weirdly not a lot of computing going on. [laughs]

John: I think not. It’s weird because we have C-3PO, we have intelligent droids who have personalities and have inner emotional lives, and yet, they don’t seem to have most of the things we would assume that would have to come with that.
Craig: Right. We now have vehicles that will remind us to put a seatbelt on. They just get in this junky land speeder that is like a Dodge Dart from 1962, unsafe at any speed, but they’ve solved the singularity.

[laughter]

Craig: What’s happening?

John: Again, I think both in the case of Dune and Star Wars is like, they are science-fiction stories, but they’re also specifically another genre as well. Star Wars is a Western. The original Star Wars is a Western. Dune is a religious allegory. It’s a Messiah story, and so they get their science fiction that they want, but they’re actually telling a very different, specific story. That’s probably the answer to all of our dilemmas is like, if we’re just writing a science-fiction story, but if you’re writing something that’s something else that uses science fiction tropes and elements and the powers of science fiction, great.

Max: I was going to say, I think one reason Andor succeeded really well is that Tony Gilroy looked at Star Wars and he was like, “Oh, this is George Lucas making like a World War II fighter plane movie, because that’s what he loved and he wanted to make that. Instead of me trying to like make a copy of what was already a copy of a fighter plane movie, I’m going to take resistance, like French resistance movies, like World War II resistance movies, and I’m going to make the Star Wars version of that,” or whatever.

All of a sudden, it was like this new twist on the universe that we really had never seen before, but was also grounded in the same kind of things that Star Wars is grounded in, which was our knowledge of World War II fighter movies, basically.
John: One last question for the panel here. For the last 15 years on screen in filming and in television, we’ve had iPhone shaped phones. Basically, you can’t tell– Whatever they’re holding to their ear, you cannot tell what year it is because it’s just like, it’s just the shape of what a phone is supposed to be. How long does that last? How soon will that become a dated thing where you’re like, “Oh, that clearly took place sometime between certain decades”? How much longer do you think we have, Craig?

Craig: I’m going to say five years.

Max: I was going to say 15. I think it’s going to take a little longer than that.

Craig: That’s optimistic, and I like that.

Max: I will say, I do think, I would encourage writers, one of my favorite things about It Follows, the horror movie from [unintelligible 00:39:24] –

John: Oh, I love it.

Max: -is they have these amazing little clamshell phones. Totally out of nowhere. They don’t talk about it. They don’t explain it, but it’s just a cool little form factor, and it doesn’t really take away from the movie. I think if you want to write a cool movie, maybe invent a new kind of a phone and stick it in there. We’ll see what happens.

John: In my movie, The Nines, Ryan Reynolds’ character has a Treo. It’s such a specific like, “Oh, that is 2016. This is exactly one year that could have happened and–“

Max: Sometimes that works out really well. I was watching this Olivier Assayas movie Boarding Gate with Asia Argento, and at the very end, she has a snakeskin Motorola Razr. I think about it constantly because it’s such a– it just could not have been made any earlier than 2009. It is on 2009. It looks so cool. It probably would just take 10 years of total datedness, and now I’m like, oh, that rules.

John: Yes, that’s pretty great. All right, let’s get to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Dan in LA writes, “I’ve written dozens of scripts over the last 10 years, and I have four projects that I’m particularly proud of. One script was in the second round at the Sundance Episodic Lab, so now I know someone besides my mom thinks I’m a fairly decent writer. As part of my strategy to get read, I’m putting together a landing page on my personal website with short pitches and links to my work. What’s your general take on writers creating personal websites to promote their work? Do I list all four projects, or do I only push one or two scripts and keep the other stowed away until an agent or manager asks me what else I’ve got?”

John: All right, so on my website, I have most of the scripts that I’ve done, but they’re like finished produced things. They weren’t for like show pieces of stuff I’ve done. Max, do you have any of your unproduced stuff up on your site?

Max: No, I don’t.

John: Only the finished stuff.

Max: Yes, I got to go say, I hadn’t ever really thought about it until this question. [chuckles] It just didn’t seem like something to do

John: Yes, I’m generally a fan of putting your work out there and letting people to see it, because obviously, people aren’t going to try to steal your work. You just want them to be exposed to it. If you want to do it, great. Maybe if we could have some listeners write in with what has been their experience. Has anyone actually signed a rep, a manager, or an agent where they found you because they found your stuff on your website? We know people who’ve been signed because they were really funny on Twitter and people reached out to them for samples and stuff. Craig, what’s your instinct?

Craig: Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with putting some stuff on the internet. I think, Dan, you might be overthinking things a little bit because I’m sensing a little bit of control issues and anxiety as if I put the exact right number on, it will be good, and if I put the wrong number on, it will be bad. It’ll be fine. Doesn’t matter. Do you list all four projects? If you want. Push one or two scripts? If you want. Do you want to keep the others stowed away? It’s okay.

Here’s the thing. Maybe start with a smaller amount, and then if it’s not working, throw another one on there. Rotate them through, but it’s really just to advertise you as a writer or to get you into a room to start you talking to people and find out maybe what they might want you to write for them. If you’re super lucky, then yes, they’ll pick up one of those scripts and say, I want to make this, but I wouldn’t tense up too much about it. Go for it.

John: Yes, I say go for it, too. One option to consider is maybe put the first 10 pages of a script on, and that 11th page says, if you want to read the rest of this, email me here, and that way, at least you have some contact with the person who might be reading it, because if it’s just some random person on the internet, you might never really know that somebody actually read it, and so it associates you as a person with this work that you’re doing.

Craig: It’s a good idea.

John: Next question, Drew.

Drew: “I’m Thomas, a 1st AD based in Germany, working all over. Every now and then, you guys talk about playing this or that game, either on a console or a board, and I’m constantly asking myself how you manage to find the time for that. When I was younger, I’m 43 now, I love playing video games, and I still do, but with my job, a wife, and social life, it’s hard for me to find time for myself to enjoy these things, especially since nowadays, most of the games are real time suckers. How do you, as writers, showrunners, and directors, family men, and podcasters even find the time to turn on a console or put down a board, and at the same time, keep track of the latest shows and movies? Do you have lab-created twins that no one knows about?

Craig: I love this question. Man with job notorious for long hours asks other men how they have time. You’re a 1st AD, Thomas. Of course, you don’t have time. [laughs] The rest of us don’t work as hard as you do. I’ve said it a million times, I don’t know why anybody does that job. God bless you for doing it. It’s an amazing job, but your day begins an hour before everyone’s, ends an hour after everyone’s, and everyone else’s job is 12 hours minimum. Yes, you’re probably sleeping or crying in the time you have off. [laughs] Although, I will say, side note, I don’t watch that many shows and movies. That’s my big secret.

John: That’s a secret people should need to know. It’s like Craig, I watch a lot more than Craig does. If we have the same number of free hours, which is not probably true, because I probably have a little bit more free time than Craig does, you’re playing video games, whereas I’m watching whole seasons of things.

Craig: Video games, solving puzzles, but then there’s a lot of time- honestly, there’s a lot of time where I feel like I’m not doing anything at all. One thing that people need to wrap their minds around, and it’s not fair, it’s just the way the world works, and this might be a particularly different thing for a German 1st AD to deal with, because I’m really, I’m going to go right against your Teutonic AD-ness right now, one hour of time is not the same for everybody.

There are people who do 12 hours of stuff in an hour, and there are people who do one hour of stuff in an hour. The people who do 12 hours of stuff in an hour don’t need the other 11 hours for anything. In fact, they may just sit there and do nothing. Some people are sprinters, some people are marathoners, but in the long run, maybe everybody sort of gets to the end in the same time. It’s just that if you’re a sprinter, the off time you can spend maybe with more leisurely activities.

John: Max, before we started talking here, you said that you’re going to have a kid home from school for the summer, a young child home from school for the summer, so this resonates for you, I guess.

Max: Yes, I have to admit, I gave my brother my PS5 when my son was born. I was just like, no time for this, and I really haven’t, I haven’t gamed at all over the last four and a half years. I miss it a lot, but I also, like I was saying earlier in the podcast, I pick the job I have to give myself time in my job to read and to watch movies that I want to watch, and I try to be– It’s like, it’s all well and good for me because I’m very conscious about my time.

Of course, if I took the two hours I spend scrolling through bullshit websites every day, then I could, in fact, be gaming. I’m certainly not working as hard as Thomas is, but at some point I was like, I know what thing is going to suck the most time because when it comes to games, I’m worse even than Twitter or whatever else. I just will lose hours.

Craig: I’m glad you said– You know what, there’s something I want you to think about, though. I think there is something in our puritanical nature, our Calvinistic nature here in the United States, whether we’re Calvinists or not, where we’re much more accepting of wasting time on things that are vaguely work-ish than we are with things that are purely recreational and argue that pure recreation is the thing that isn’t a waste of time and that the vague work-ishness is the true tragedy. The scrolling pointlessly is a tragedy, whereas playing something that delights you is a win. I’m giving you this gift. Really, I want you to go back to your brother’s house, rip that goddamn console right out of the wall and say, “This is mine.”

John: The new GTA is coming.

Craig: Seriously, you need it back before GTA 6.

Max: Yes, that’s definitely incredible.

Craig: Dude, you need to get your mind right, man.

Max: I know, I know.

Craig: [crosstalk] coming, it’s coming.

Max: Wow. This is a real come-to-Jesus moment for me.

Craig: Kiss your family goodbye and go.

John: Another thing I’ll say, just taking from– Craig and I, we have a weekly D&D game and we do block off that time for that and Craig has other set blocks in his schedule which is about this thing that he does. Thomas, you may find that just putting it on the calendar makes it clear that this is a priority for you. I think you have to prioritize having fun.
Craig: You have to prioritize having fun. That is something that a German 1st AD receives like a scalding hot liquid, right? I assume that he’s screaming right now.

Drew: Let’s do one last question here from Tim. Recently, I discovered that Final Draft 13 requires a phone home every 60-some days even though there’s support docs so that you only need to be online for the first activation. I regularly write on an offline machine or away from internet and it’s frustrating that this wasn’t noted before buying Final Draft 13. Do you have a recommendation for any screenwriting software that doesn’t require phoning home after activation?

Craig: Yes, John, do you have recommendations for that? [laughs]

John: Let’s talk about phoning home because another friend of mine got bit by the Final Draft thing and was really frustrated by this. Here’s what we do in Highland Pro and this is just sort of things you buy through the Mac App Store. This is sort of how it should work, is that when you start a subscription, it creates an app receipt that’s stored on your device itself. We say, oh, this thing is valid through this time. Every time you launch or resume an app, we attempt in the background to check, did anything change here? Did they add on extra months? Did anything change?

If you’re offline, we go by the last receipt that’s cached and stored, but we only lock out a user and put them in read-only mode if you’ve gone online and we checked and the receipt now says that it’s expired. That’s basically best practices. That’s what we try to do in Highland Pro and that’s really what most software you’re going to encounter these days is doing. I suspect Adobe’s a similar situation with their stuff too. That’s just how you should do it. It’s silly that Final Draft is doing this, but it’s not surprising necessarily. You understand why they’re doing it. You understand that they want to make sure that is this actually a valid app, but they’re doing it wrong.

Craig: Maybe they could just be cooler about it. What you’re suggesting is the best practice is, hey, if you pop online, which most of us are going to have to do every now and again, yes, we’ll check in. If you decide to Faraday cage your computer, then we’ll just let you have it. Just go ahead.

John: I think it comes down to it and it’s sort of where you’re putting your trust. Basically, if a person really wanted to never pay to start out a monthly Highland subscription and just never pay for it again, and they went online, offline, and they just never ever went back online, that’s a choice they’re making. I’m not going to–

Craig: Exactly. That’s the paranoid nonsense that Final Draft is famous for. We’ve got to make sure no one out there is robbing us of our overpriced nonsense for bad software. Otherwise, it’s a terrific product.

John: Listen, eventually you’re going to want to come back online because stuff does change. The systems get updated and things break.

Craig: No, no, no. If I come back online, I’m going to owe somebody.

[laughter]

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things. Max, do you want to start us off? What do you want to share with our listeners?

Max: Yes, I want to talk about a movie that I saw recently that I really loved called the Red Rooms. It’s a Canadian movie that it’s not science fiction, but it is very sort of technologically interested. I think it’s a great movie to watch if, among other things, you’re interested in how to depict people using computers in dramatic ways. This is maybe less for screenwriters than it is for directors and cinematographers because it’s very good at showing its main character using the computer to win at online poker and go on the dark web and try and buy a snuff film and all these things.

The movie itself is an awful horror movie, like awful in the sense of you will feel so bad after you watch this. If you are the kind of person who likes to be made to feel bad by movies, this is one of the best examples. It reminds me of the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa a little bit, who’s directed a bunch of unbelievably creepy horror movies. It’s a little bit like Michael Haneke and Caché and other movies like that.

The plot, which I just want to establish, I’m sure there’s some people who are like, let me just skip 30 seconds forward because this is not for me. If that does sound like it’s for you, it’s about a French-Canadian model who becomes obsessed with a serial killer on trial and develops a friendship with a sort of true crime podcaster. It’s a character study. The main actress, this woman, Juliette Gariépy, is so good, I cannot tell you.

I was really impressed by it. I didn’t know anything about it. It was a good movie about the internet, a good movie about true crime, a good old-fashioned serial killer movie. It’s worth watching both for the craft that went into making it, if you’re interested in thinking about tech and how it enters your movies, but also just as a good movie.

John: That’s great. I want to plug here that your newsletter is full of good recommendations for things, the things you’re reading and the things you’re watching, including Max will put in just YouTube videos for songs you’re listening to, and every third or fourth one is added to the playlist. Some good stuff there.

Max: Yes, I’m just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I think [crosstalk] is pretty good.

John: It’s what we do. This is writing. My one cool thing is an article in Scientific American. It’s an article titled, This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats. Basically, we’ve had orange cats for a good long time. Orange cats are weirdos. They’re almost always males and they didn’t know why. They would assume that since orange cats are males, there must be something on the Y chromosome. Makes sense. It turns out it’s actually something on the X chromosome that is suppressing something on the Y chromosome. It was a bunch of genetics that was being done to figure this out.

It took a long time to get there, but they actually now understand more why orange cats are orange. I love orange cats. Orange cats are– I’ll also put a link in the show notes to a Reddit called OneOrangeBraincell, which is about just dumb orange cats. I love a dumb orange cat. I maybe remember Raleigh, who was the sort of our office cat. He actually lived two doors down, but was always wandering in our backyard at lunchtime and would join us for lunch every day in the office. Raleigh has probably passed on. Raleigh would be 25 at this point, but Raleigh was a good orange cat. A cool story. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this for Scientific American.

Craig: There goes the last mystery left in the world.

John: Yes, now that we know what the orange cats are.

Craig: So depressing. My one cool thing is my kid. You know I don’t do this. I don’t do this. My younger daughter, Jessica, is a budding singer-songwriter. As she often does, she writes songs, plays them, records them, puts them on TikTok. A couple of weeks ago, she threw it on there and it went viral. I think it’s really good. I think it’s a good song. I think she’s great. I’m sharing it with you because, A, my kid, proud. B, feels thematic. For our topic today, the song is called The Simulation is Failing.

John: She really is your daughter.

Craig: She is my kid. I never even told her that this was all simulation. She figured it out on her own.

John: Kids these days, they’re so wise.

Craig: They’re so wise. Yes. Synthetic children these days.

[laughter]

Craig: Wise.

John: I think back to the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. and like, wow, it got everything right. This is exactly what the future was going to be like.

[laughter]

Craig: Exactly. Nailed it.

John: Nailed it. That’s our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have a great new one up from Greta Gerwig, so check that out.

You will find T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear at Cotton Bureau with Scriptnotes logos all over them. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about each week in the email you get as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible to keep doing the show week after week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record with Max on a new genre that I think you’re trying to pin down. We’ll help you out on that. You should also read Max on his own Substack called Read Max. Max, thanks so much for joining us.

Max: Thank you guys so much for having me. It was a blast as always.

Craig: Thank you, Max.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Max, I’m looking at your Letterboxd and the lists that you have formed in your Letterboxd because halogencore that we talked about in the setup, that actually originated in your Letterboxd. You also have lists of movies where British people have a bad time in Spain.

Max: Which is really a thing. Those are good movies too. That’s actually great. You can mine that territory for something fantastic. Sexy Beast is a great movie and there it is.

Craig: Oh, the best.

Max: That’s the story. They have a bad time in Spain. [laughs]

Craig: They have a bad time in Spain. Yes, yes.

John: You also have the ‘90s dad thriller core canon, so when dads had a rough time and dads had to– Action movies about dads.

Max: Yes. It’s worth checking the Substack newsletter now because I’ve got some diagrams. I had some strong thoughts about this set of movies. There’s some extra reading for people who are interested.

John: Recently on your Substack, you were promoting a new genre or sub genre. Tell us about it.

Max: Yes. This one’s a little bit more art house pretentious than halogencore, but I do think it’s a little related. I watched this movie called Code 46, which if I had known about it, I had forgotten about it. It’s a Michael Winterbottom movie from 2003 with Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. It’s set in like a future Shanghai. I have to be honest, it is not a perfect movie. There’s a lot of things that are not very good about it.

Craig: What is?

Max: It has a vibe. I think especially like one of those movies that maybe you can only really get the vibe 20 years later. I was like, I love this vibe. Even though this movie is not great, it’s this very beautifully photographed Shanghai, sort of set on border crossings. Tim Robbins is an insurance investigator looking into someone forging passports who happens to be Samantha Morton, who he falls in love with. In my head, I was thinking there’s these other movies that are sort of resemble it. This movie Boarding Gate, which I talked about earlier in the episode by Olivier Assayas, another, again, not a perfect movie, but it just hits a particular sort of vibe.

Another Olivier Assayas movie called Demonlover, an Abel Ferrara movie called New Rose Hotel with Christopher Walken. Again, these are all movies that did not get very well reviewed on release necessarily, certainly were not huge hits, but looked at from 20-plus years later, have an interesting thing to say about globalization and the future.

I made a list of these. I include the ones I just mentioned. Michael Mann’s Blackhat is probably the biggest one that really fits in this thing. Also a huge bomb and also a movie that I think has recovered in some people’s esteem since then, a movie I love called Ghostbox Cowboy, which nobody’s ever heard of, which is like, I always describe it as like, if Tim and Eric made a William Gibson movie, it’s like about this crazy American who goes to Shenzhen to try and make a box that can talk to the spirit world. It’s all these meetings with the VCs that are sort of docufiction. Then it takes a really weird turn.

Craig: Oh, you mean it wasn’t already really weird?

Max: You will think the first half was normal once you hit the second half. I think Tenet sort of is in this. You remember it’s set in these freeport zones. The Jim Jarmusch movie Limits of Control, the Clive Owen thriller, The International. This is Tom Tykwer’s. I think it was his follow-up to Run Lola Run. Again, movies that didn’t, The Counselor, Ridley Scott, Cormac McCarthy.

I like doing this partly because if you take any one of these movies individually, you’re probably looking at a bomb. You are at best looking at like an arthouse thriller that 500 people saw. The nice thing about doing a list like this or a sort of micro genre is you put them all next to each other and you think, oh, there is something that connects these.

John: It’s a connection. You have globalization. Do they need to be Americans who are overseas or just like people are not in their native culture?

Max: I think it’s usually Westerners. Yes. Let’s say the thematic concerns, globalization, supply chains, logistics, a lot of them end up in China, in Jakarta, in Japan. These are movies that are deep down sort of about anxieties about the future, about a future in which Asia is rising.

John: How about Syriana? Would that fall into your–

Max: I think it’s very similar. I’m not sure it’s quite there, but it has a similar kind of– Syriana is in some ways smarter than these movies, I think, because it’s less of a thriller in a certain way.

Craig: What about like– There were two movies. What was one called? Black Rain, maybe.

Max: Oh yes, the Michael Douglas. Yes.

John: There’s definitely like proto, that’s like part of what leads into this or Rising Sun is another one that’s real Japan anxiety movies.

Craig: Japan anxiety, yes.

Max: I think around the turn of the century, it turns in. Partly it turns into China anxiety and partly the focus is less on businesses. Even Die Hard has this, right? Like the lurking in the back of the tower.

Craig: Nakatomi.

Max: Yes, it’s the Nakatomi tower. It’s less about Japanese businesses buying American businesses. It’s more about manufacturing and logistics and all this stuff that we now know from the vantage point of 2025 had this huge impact on American politics that we didn’t. I’m not sure that many of you were seeing at the time, but that there are these interesting thrillers set in freeports in loading docks, border crossings.

My theory about this is basically that we had all these great thrillers in the ‘90s that a few years ago, this guy, David Rudnick, coined the word Nokiawave. We’re talking about the same GoldenEye, Peacemaker, like all these Eastern European set, techno thrillers, usually about loose nuclear weapons on the black market. 9/11 comes and the geopolitical anxieties that were undergirding those movies gets transitioned into the Borne Identity style, like war on terror, dramatic, morality plays.

What happens is this other new, huge geopolitical development, the rise of China, the rise of Asia, the globalization of manufacturing. It’s all these European, these pretentious European directors and Michael Mann, who deep down inside is a pretentious European director, are like, okay, this is something interesting here and we can make this happen. They all have this, they’re sort of diffuse.

You very often can’t really follow the plot, which is, I think, one reason why many people didn’t like these movies when they came out. Possibly, they have these roving cameras, always shot on location, but in some ways the thriller genre plots is really what keeps them solid at all. This is what prevents them from just being like total exercises in art house masturbation or whatever, that they do have death in them and illicit sex and all these other things.

I’ve been calling them SEZ Noir. SEZ stands for Special Economic Zone, which is like Shenzhen in China is a special economic zone that operates under slightly different rules than the rest of China. It has turned it into a manufacturing hub. Noir because they all are noir. They’re all about these haunted people on the periphery who they’re trying to move their way up the value chain. Then their scheme takes a wrong turn somewhere and they find themselves on the run.

The thing that I think is most interesting about all of these is the one thing that they all have in common, despite the differences, and this is a vague spoiler, is they all end with the protagonist losing their identity entirely, losing their papers, losing their identity, finding themselves adrift somewhere, maybe pursued by gangsters, maybe pursued by the government, maybe pursued by a corporation, though those three groups tend to be blurred together like this.

They’re not movies with happy endings, but they’re also not movies with endings where the characters are straight up killed. They just enter the ether, which is a sort of interesting statement that I haven’t quite internalized or processed about, about globalization like that. Anyway, I do recommend all these movies, especially if you can watch them with a with an open mind, let’s say. [chuckles]

Craig: Now, you did, you listed all these movies that you recommend by saying, and this one was a bomb. This one was not well-received. This was a bomb. This was a bomb. This was a bomb.

Max: Yes.

John: Let’s just try to poke at maybe why they didn’t work, is because filmmakers are tackling these questions that they find really interesting, but maybe it’s just actually not really relevant to people’s lived experience. Maybe people aren’t able to see themselves in that place or position because most Americans don’t have a passport. They’re not used to being out of their depth and in this place. While they might have fears of Asian companies taking over their work, Die Hard is a much better expression of that feeling than some of these movies would be.

Max: Yes. They’re definitely not about the most direct effects of globalization on Americans, which is like de-industrialization across the country, basically. They’re really specifically about people who are often quite unlikable who are trying to profit off of that process in ways that I think the average American until maybe even recently didn’t quite realize the extent to which this international logistics and shipping organizations were doing. They’re dark, too. That’s the other part of it is like, there’s harder to find an appetite for that thing in general. If you’re making a movie that is dark and complicated and political, you’re probably not making a blockbuster.

I think that this is also just a function of like– I’m trying to think of what the counter history or the counterfactual is. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, a lot would be different. Let’s stipulate that. I also think that this kind of subject would maybe have, I don’t want to be too mean about my favorite European directors, but the more competent at entertaining hands of Hollywood might’ve been able to take these themes and ideas and transform them.

Michael Mann has a director’s cut of Blackhat. I’ve seen it. I can’t pretend that it’s that different from the cut that was released and I’m not really sure it would have made a huge difference to its box office receipts. I think you could also say like Tenet is an example of a movie that took a lot of these themes and spun gold out of them. Though because it’s less of a period piece, it holds a little bit less of that vibe attraction for me, which is part of what I have been really enjoying about these.

John: I also feel like Tenet feels like a science fiction film that is able to do science fiction and these things. As we said in the main show, science fiction plus another genre. It just feels like it was taking that genre and putting it onto science fiction.

Max: Yes. Tenet, I will also say, is a great example of a movie that you have to pay really close attention for it to make sense. Yet at the same time, it did really well and people love it and you can watch it and enjoy it without it needing to make note by note perfect sense, which is a pretty stunning thing to be able to do.

John: Max, thank you for this, a new genre, addition to the canon. We’ll look for more movies in it.

Max: Yes. Okay.

John: Thanks for coming back on the show.

Max: Of course. It was great to talk to you guys.

Craig: Thanks, Max.

John: All right. Thanks.

Links:

• Max Read’s newsletter Read Max and his Letterboxd
• Dogma 25 Explodes at Cannes by Annika Pham, Marta Balaga for Variety
• Maze by Christopher Manson
• Blue Prince
• Graham’s source for Egypt’s GDP and John’s sources
• Neal Stephenson
• William Gibson
• Red Rooms
• This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats by Gayoung Lee for Scientific American
• The Simulation is Failing. by Jessica Mazin
• r/OneOrangeBraincell
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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: You’re listening to episode 689 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, could new entertainment formats like verticals disrupt existing film and television? What impact will AI-generated video have on all of it? We’ll look back to history for clues about the future, then we’ll answer listener questions on momentum, scene geography, and television setting.

In our bonus segment for premium members, what moment in history, Craig, do you wish you could most see in person?

Craig: Oh my.

John: Oh my. Just as a spectator, you can’t change anything.

Craig: You just have to watch.

John: You’re just there.

Craig: Okay.

John: First, let’s start on some good news. Two weekends ago, Memorial Day weekend, the biggest Memorial Day weekend in history at the box office.

Craig: Yes. Huge.

John: Stitch and Impossible.

Craig: That’s right, Stitch possible. Lilo and Imp. I don’t know, what do we call this?

John: [unintelligible 00:00:55] [crosstalk]

Craig: Just when you think you’ve figured out how this all works. Disney’s just gone back to remake the animated things one too many times. Snow White had trouble.

John: Did I know that Lilo & Stitch was such a giant title? Evidently they did.

Craig: Yes. And kaboom. I’m sure whatever division hit the brakes on the animation to live action thing, they are now like, “No, no, no, start it back up.”

John: Stitch is a perfect character for marketing.

Craig: Yes.

John: They did a phenomenal job with it. You can throw him in and just have him disrupt and cause mayhem and other things.

Craig: He can run around the Super Bowl.

John: Delightful.

Craig: Also, it’s a good character to animate because it’s not real, real, so you can keep it cute.

John: Yes. We’re going to talk about Tom and Jerry later on, but it reminds me of a classic, just mayhem.

Craig: I love Tom and Jerry.

John: Loved it so much.

Craig: Oh my God, love it.

John: It’s a little bit racist at times.

Craig: All things from that era were.

John: Yes.

Craig: All of them. What thing from that time, Tom and Jerry would have been the ‘60s?

John: Yes, late ‘50s.

Craig: Late ‘50s, ‘60s.

John: Created in 1940.

Craig: Oh, yes. Cartoons in particular. Good lord.

John: Good lord, but Lilo & Stitch, not racist. I’ve not seen this new movie. I assume it’s not racist.

Craig: It would have been a weird move for me if it suddenly– [crosstalk]

John: Added new racist thing to the live action, which is–

Craig: [crosstalk] Trump’s president let’s go.
[laughter]

John: Anyway, let’s talk about why it’s good that movies are working at the box office.

Craig: This is the thing that we were all worried about, right? And COVID, tip my hat to COVID. In addition to killing millions and millions of people, it also nearly killed the theatrical movie business. You and I have been doing this for a long time. People have been talking about that business dying for a long time. We’ve always been pretty consistent about like, “No, nothing’s going to kill it.” Now I’m pretty sure nothing can kill it.

John: Yes. We’re going to talk about things that are going to disrupt stuff, but also I feel like the experience of going to a theater and watching something with a bunch of people is compelling. I got to see my Mission Impossible. I got to see a really cool submarine sequence that looked great on a big screen, the way it’s meant to be seen.

Craig: All that’s in Lilo & Stitch.

John: Yes. Surprisingly, a big submarine sequence in Lilo & Stitch. I didn’t know the nukes were going to be such a factor, but they were there.

Craig: Not what I would have predicted-

John: No.

Craig: -but I’m getting why people are digging. I haven’t talked to Chris McQuarrie since the movie came out. I don’t even know where he is. In London, I think.

John: I assume so. Some secret location.

Craig: I wonder what he’s doing. I hope he’s relaxing.

John: I think so. The article I read about it said that he’s working on Top Gun 3.

Craig: Then he is not relaxing.

John: He’s not relaxing.

Craig: There’s no end.

John: Anyway, up 221% from last Memorial Day, which was a nadir, but up 22% year to date so far. It’s just great.

Craig: It’s a big number.

John: It’s a big number. More money also gets people spending more money. The cycle is so important.

Craig: Absolutely. Minecraft and Sinners, and you get Momentum, and then Lilo & Stitch, and Mission Impossible. Now you’re in a groove.

John: It’s great when you have movies appealing to different audiences opening the same weekend.

Craig: Yes.

John: The overlap between Mission Impossible and Stitch-

Craig: Perfect.

John: -was not great.

Craig: No, no, it’s perfect.

John: It’s what you want, exactly.

Craig: Yes.

John: The Venn diagram was not great, which is great.

Craig: Great.

John: I got to see Sinners, it’s fourth week.

Craig: A lot of people were like, “We’re going to just watch both of them this weekend.”

John: Yes.

Craig: Both are family friendly. Mission Impossible doesn’t strike me as a not family friendly movie.

John: I remember when I was starting in this business, it was always about these two movies duking it out and see who would do it over the course of the weekend. I do feel like, I think that has changed. It’s like you’re rooting for all movies.

Craig: Yes, no one cares about that anymore.

John: Yes.

Craig: No one cares who first, who’s second. Anybody that survives putting a movie out is like, “We’re alive.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s like crossing the line in a marathon. Did you beat those guys that you knew were going to win? No.

John: No.

Craig: You ran a marathon.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, everybody’s like, “Good for you.”

John: All the studios are happy that the weekend was so big.

Craig: No, it’s great for the business. I did. I ran into Pam Abdy, not with my car or anything.

John: No, no, that would be bad.

Craig: On the street.

John: Pam Abdy is running Warners.

Craig: She runs Warner Brothers Films with Mike DeLuca. I told her, and this is absolutely true, how delighted I was that the business had just– every news story was like, when are Mike and Pam getting fired?

John: Two big hits.

Craig: They were right on the edge of– according to the news. Then, oh my God. They just can’t.

John: There will be bombs, and a lot of things won’t work, but–

Craig: We left out a big one, Final Destination.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Incredible.

John: Absolutely. For a series that has basically been a programmer for a while, just to have a big title.

Craig: Had never made that kind of money, by the way. That’s amazing. It reminds me of how they resurrected Fast and Furious, because it was drifting.

John: It was tapering.

Craig: Even when it started, it wasn’t huge.

John: Yes.

Craig: Do you know? Then suddenly it was like, oh my God, all these people that had finally watched all those movies and were super into it, boom, and Final Destination, apparently. I was just like– I’ve known her forever, and I root for her. It’s such a weird thing, our business, the way it just wants to go after people. I hate that.

John: Yes. A bit of follow-up on our side. Highland Pro, we released a new version. 3.1 is out with Overview, which you saw.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: It gives a bird’s-eye view of your script. We were also able to turn on something now, which we couldn’t do. Apple wasn’t letting us do it, but now we can, which is student licenses.

Craig: Oh.

John: People, even from Highland 2, if you had a student license for Highland 2, that same email address should work. A reminder for student licenses, if you have a .edu address, it is free for a year to use Highland, and so there’s a little-

Craig: Amazing.

John: -link to follow. We’ll put a link in the show notes too for that.

Craig: That’s how you get them addicted, John. You give the kids crack, and then you know you have them.

John: Really, the goal is to make sure people are never starting on Final Draft, because you get that weird muscle memory of Final Draft. It’s like, “Oh, I have to do things this way. I have to learn this esoteric thing.” No, you don’t.

Craig: Bless you.

John: I believe you should write the same way you can write an email.

Craig: Do you know, back in the day when we would go after Final Draft and we had those guys on, it was like you were arguing with, I don’t know, a small mob outfit. Now, what’s even the point? It’s just this faceless corporation.

John: It’s been bought and sold three times since then, yes.

Craig: Owned by another company who’s owned by a company, and they mostly process payroll and also Final Draft. Who do you even yell at? No one.

John: I would say that screenwriting software is not that company’s profit center.

Craig: No. No.

John: No. All right, let us get to our main topic here. Before we talk about new video stuff, I want to talk about old video stuff, because as I was thinking through this, people had brought up Tom and Jerry. I was looking back at the history of Tom and Jerry. It’s a Hanna-Barbera creation from the 1940s. Back then, it cost between $35,000 and $50,000 per seven-minute cartoon, which was a lot. Those are gorgeous looking cartoons.

Craig: Yes, they are.

John: They wanted to expand and do more things. Television was looking for animation, and you just couldn’t spend that much money. Instead, they tried some new techniques and became what we think of as TV animation. Things like using static backgrounds, minimal movement, cycling.

Craig: Cycling.

John: The walk cycles, people always walk the same way. That’s how you get Space Ghost, that’s how you get The Flintstones.

Craig: Scooby-Doo.

John: Scooby-Doo.

Craig: Classic walk cycler.

John: Absolutely. For that $30,000, they could now do a full 30-minute TV show rather than 7 minutes.

Craig: Some of them were better than others-

John: Yes.

Craig: -but Tom and Jerry was inspired. Also, for those of you who haven’t watched Tom and Jerry, the premise couldn’t be simpler. Tom is a cat. Jerry is a mouse. They live in the same house. Tom is always trying to catch Jerry. Jerry is way smarter than Tom. If you’ve ever seen Itchy and Scratchy.

John: Itchy and Scratchy.

Craig: That’s what they’re making fun of or goofing on Tom and Jerry. The joke of Itchy and Scratchy is, look at the extreme violence. Tom and Jerry was so violent. Tom died all the time. He literally died once where his ghost went into heaven. He was electrocuted, his skin was peeled off, his head was constantly smashed.

John: Crucially, they didn’t speak. They are silent characters.

Craig: Yes. Occasionally there was some speaking, but it was very rare. It was always a weird episode. There was no talking. It was all classic slapstick and great music.

John: Going from that to this new format, which was animating every other frame, static backgrounds, and a much bigger reliance on voice acting and voice and sound to do it. That’s where you get Fred Flintstone. They’re talking. They’re very much like sitcoms but this way, or space adventures, but minimal.

Craig: You did not watch Scooby-Doo for the mind-blowing or The Herculoids.

John: Absolutely. If we hadn’t had that budget pressure, those things wouldn’t have existed.

Craig: Yes. Would I bemoan the loss of the walk cycle? Probably not, because it was so stupid.

[laughter]

Then there’s walking, and then one of them is like “bah bah bah.” We would have also not had these big cultural things, because Scooby-Doo, if it had been, I don’t know, one special episode, nobody would have cared.

John: No.

Craig: It is so entrenched in our culture.

John: Yes. Fast forward to the ‘90s, 2000s, and we get into flash animation and web cartoons. We don’t remember very many of those at all, because things didn’t break out as being big hits, but there were ways to do animation on the web that were cheap, really cheap, and just possible. People who could never do any animation before could do some animated things. There was storytelling, there was joke telling. We don’t have a legacy very much of that stuff, except for South Park, which wouldn’t exist without flash animation. If it weren’t for the people who were doing that kind of stuff, you would never have The Spirit of Christmas, which was the first South Park.

Craig: That wasn’t made with flash.

John: I think it might have been. It was made with a similar technique.

Craig: It seemed like it was made with-

John: Paper cutouts.

Craig: -actual paper cutouts.

John: I feel like without flash animation, even the idea of even doing that stuff wouldn’t have been possible.

Craig: Flash animation was a plague. There was probably some good stuff, but flash itself was a nightmare.

John: It was a nightmare. For folks who don’t know what we’re talking about, flash was a plugin for your browser that would let you play some animation in it. It’s before we had– pre-YouTube, pre-anything. It was a way to generate those kinds of things. I did flash animation in college as a summer project.

Craig: As a project.

John: Yes.

Craig: You were constantly getting warnings to turn your flash off or upgrade your flash. It was always a problem. Everyone out there hated flash, and also you sort of had to have it. Then I remember the day it died. I was so happy.

John: It died in part because Apple just refused to support it.

Craig: Apple just said, we’re not doing it. [crosstalk] We’re not doing it because it’s not secure.

John: It’s not secure and it’s also a giant power hog.

Craig: Giant power hog. Let’s come up with better ways to do this. As it turns out, we did.

John: Other budget innovations that I think were important, YouTube videos that were React videos, Let’s Play, ASMR, all the stuff where it’s just like it’s a person talking to a camera, to a webcam. It doesn’t have big production values at all, yet you’re spending hours watching this stuff. Found footage. You and I were both around for The Blair Witch Project. That kicked off a whole– that’s a whole new model of how you make a film for very little, where the fact that you’re making it for so little is actually part of the point.

Craig: Yes. Prior to Blair Witch Project, there was the Robert Rodriguez, who could–

John: Oh yes. Oh, absolutely. El Mariachi.

Craig: El Mariachi. That was made for like $8,000.

John: It’s a crazy low thing. He was using innovative techniques to tell a classic story, but just with a hyper style that suited.

Craig: It was that era where– the ‘90s were amazing.

John: They were.

Craig: They really were amazing. I have to say, I didn’t realize it when I was in the middle of it, but they were pretty– some amazing stuff happened.

John: Something I was looking at this last week for our project was retro postmodernism. Because there was ‘90s postmodernism. There’s a very distinct aesthetic, I remember, and a way things looked and a feel to that that I haven’t seen captured quite again. I don’t see anything–

Craig: Can you give an example of what you mean?

John: A teapot that you’d buy at Target. A shade of purple that has some brown in it. Some sort of bright, but smoky oranges. There were colors that are very ’90s. Honestly, videotape boxes.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: There’s that thing too. Postmodernism is a sense of just, we’re pulling from a bunch of different sources and throwing it together in a weird way. The best postmodern building to point to is of course the Disney building with the dwarves, which is sort of iconic.

Craig: That building, which is the main executive building on the Disney lot, is a horrible building.

John: Insane building, the least usable building.

Craig: Horrible. The person who is the head of Walt Disney Pictures Studios is not in a great office. Because I’ve been in it. It’s not great. Because that building doesn’t have good space inside of it.

John: No, it makes no sense.

Craig: Enormous wasted space.

John: Yes. It’s impressive to look at from a distance, but it’s not good.

Craig: Yes, it was a Robert Venturi, is that the guy who did it?

John: Venturi is who really I was thinking of. I think Venturi also did these teapots and other stuff I’m thinking.

Craig: Yes, and Venturi also designed where we would go have our meals at Princeton when I was an undergrad. It was a horrible building. Horrible. Horrible.

John: Yes, crime. Italian neorealism. After World War II, everything was torn apart. The film studios didn’t exist in their classic sense. Italian neorealism was a genre that was created out of necessity from what they had around them. Then as we’re talking about necessity, soap operas. Soap operas as a form existed to fill space and time on first radio, then on television. They have that specific cadence and structure for economic necessity.

Craig: To create as many gaps for ads with as many cliffhangers as possible. Soap operas are just cliffhanger machines. Every ad break is a cliffhanger. Every single one. They’re called soap operas because a lot of the ads were for soap. For detergent and so forth. Game shows, same thing.

John: 100%.

Craig: They were designed to promote ads.

John: Yes, and we both remember a time when Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, we’re going to put it on four times a week and it’s going to kill the business. Those were fewer scripted shows we had on the air during that time.

Craig: Yes, but also I remember how everyone was like, “Oh my God, this game show is taking over.” I’m like, “Game shows were always there,” We just took a break from them for a while. The game shows had been synonymous, as far as I’m concerned, with television since the beginning of television.

John: Yes, and related, reality TV. We had the Real World and then it spawned a bunch of different forms. A significant portion of our broadcast week is reality shows that didn’t exist in a previous form. We don’t begrudge them the way we did when they first came on.

Craig: I think in part because when they first came on, they were eating up some of the limited space on network television. Then 4 billion outlets occurred. Now, I don’t know how many reality shows there are, but they’re not taking space away. If you want space, you just make another space.

John: We also have relative tiers of– we have the giant premiere shows. We also have a bunch of HGTV shows that are very formulaic in terms of home improvement or flip this house kind of shows, which have these hosts and the same beats they’re following all the time.

Craig: Yes, and they work.

John: All this is preamble to say, nothing is new. It’s just there’s just new stuff that comes along that seems new and shocking for a moment and then it passes, which this last week, the conversation was verticals. Drew and Sam at lunch were talking– well, people were talking about verticals. I’m like, “I’m not quite sure I know what you mean.” Drew, talk us through what you mean by verticals.

Drew Marquardt: Verticals are fully produced narrative videos. They’re a vertical video format and they have a very specific style and a specific purpose. They’re smutty soap operas. They’re usually including a secret billionaire or there are supernatural elements for some reason, like werewolves. It’s all about the cliffhanger that makes you watch the next video. The people who run it have said explicitly, we’re not interested in character arcs.

They’re about a minute or two minutes each, but the full story is usually feature length. The business model is that the first five to eight videos are free, to get you hooked, and then each video afterwards costs tokens, which you can either pay real money for, or sometimes you can watch ads. To watch the next video, it’s 50 cents. It’s about $20 to $40 to finish a story. They are huge. They’re keeping everyone in town employed right now.

Craig: Wait, everyone?

Drew: To a person.

Craig: That’s what all of our friends are doing.

John: A lot of people at a certain level are [crosstalk]

Craig: Are working on verticals.

John: They’re working hard for it.

Craig: Who makes the verticals?

John: There’s three big companies that do it that we’ll put links in. ReelShort, DramaBox, and GoodShort.

Craig: Okay.

John: The second two are largely Asian. ReelShort is mostly US, and a lot of them are shot here in Los Angeles. Sam, help us out because people who are actually working on these shows.

Sam Shapson: I first heard about these about a year, maybe a year and a half ago, as a way of people making money during this time when everything is slowing down. The general vibe that I’ve gotten is that not just in terms of the creative, but in terms of their approach to production, it very much is similar to the soap opera model in that they are pumping through an enormous amount of material per day. 10 pages is on the light side, according to what I’ve heard. 19 pages is common as well.

John: Whoa.

Craig: Whoa.

Sam: I don’t think it goes quite as high as what soap operas were doing, but I also think that they’re not designing them with the same kind of established infrastructure, maybe of a repeatable studio environment that they rinse, repeat. I think that it’s more of a mix of different kinds of locations and things like that. It’s like low-budget indie filmmaking, one take, moving on, just get it in the can, and the director just needs to keep it moving and stay out of the way.

John: Sam, here we should bring up your background. You’ve worked as an AD before, so you know folks who are actually doing this kind of work, they’re getting paid, which is fantastic, and I guess they’re using rental houses in Los Angeles for lights and equipment and stuff like that, which feels good. Craig, if we look at some of these samples, they’re actually– the production values look like a CW show. It’s bright, but it’s not just web video. You feel like they are doing some work, but it also feels like there’s one take and you’re moving on really quickly.

Craig: Sure.

John: There’s two shorts we could look at. The first one is Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire that’s not to be confused with the GoodShort equivalent, which is, A Mistaken Surrogate for the Ruthless Billionaire.

Craig: The hell is going on with the billionaire?

John: It’s all billionaires. Billionaire werewolves often.

Craig: Oh, okay.

Drew: Also the titles, they algorithmically test so that it’s the most obvious title. The top titles today were, Shh… We Are A Secret, Carrying His Babies, Stealing His Heart, or Married To My Savage Alpha.

Craig: Oh my god

[Vertical Audio plays]

John: Okay, Craig, you’ve just now watched this.

Craig: Yes.

John: What is your first reaction to it as a viewer and then as a person who makes television shows?

Craig: Well, I’m curious. I’m curious as to how people are interacting with this, because it seems like it’s not taking itself very seriously, but it also is taking itself very seriously. It’s in this weird quasi-ironic zone.

John: Yes, telenovelas often live in this heightened zone as well. That’s one reference. It’s also reminding me a bit of, there’s an old MTV show called Undressed, which was a soap opera like this. It wasn’t as heightened, but it was in a similar space to it. I find the model really fascinating. It’s basically like a free-to-play game. It’s like Candy Crush, but with stories. Unlike my grandmother watching Days of Our Lives, this is the speed at which it moves.

Craig: I have a lot of questions. Why isn’t she wearing a bracelet on her hospital– That’s what hospitals do, and doctors don’t just roll on in and artificially inseminate people. Also, why is a billionaire just standing there? He’s a billionaire. Why is he just randomly inseminating someone?

John: If you look at the whole premise is that his grandfather will give him the fortune if he has a child.

Craig: Yes, but here, randomly? Anyway, I have so many questions.

John: So many questions.

Craig: I have so many questions, but what I’m thinking is that in a cool way, this is like, we love a Cool Ranch Dorito. When we play DnD, we love a Cool Ranch Dorito, and the people that came up with that powder are geniuses, because it just short-circuits everything. Will you get Dorito powder in a Michelin 3-star restaurant? You will not-

John: No.

Craig: -but Dorito powder is legit. It’s actually legit and incredible because it has compressed everything down. This is where you feel like it’s compressed everything down and done away with stuff. How do we get this exposition out? Just have her think it. Just have her think it and have everybody stop talking and have one of them just start thinking for a bit. Then when she’s done thinking, people will start talking again.

John: Yes, so again, because of necessity, you’re just creating a new convention in these shows.

Craig: Yes.

John: Great.

Craig: This is a convention. Sure. Why is it vertical? I can’t tell you.

John: Because of your phone. Because these are meant to be watched on your phone.

Craig: You can turn your phone sideways.

John: No one wants to turn their phone sideways, come on, Craig.

Craig: I do. It’s the first thing I do when a video comes on.

John: Oldest thing you’ve ever said.

Craig: Sure, but that Lilo & Stitch is sideways.

John: Yes.

Craig: Movies are sideways.

John: Movies are sideways. Maybe that’s the problem.

Craig: I’m just saying.

John: I react to this as, okay, this is not for me. I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy it, but I get that somebody else can enjoy it, and also I’m not angry at it. There’s a reaction to–

Craig: It’s adorable actually. You can’t get angry at that.

John: I’m also not angry at people, these actors are getting to work.

Craig: Yes. Now, let’s talk about one thing though. No one is getting paid union on this. No one is–

John: Oh, no.

Craig: If everyone in town, I’m sure you were being slightly exaggerating there, but if everyone in town is working on verticals, what that means is everyone in town is working non-union jobs.

John: Yes.

Craig: Now, if you’re not in the directors guild, the writers guild, the actors guild, you could do that. If you are, you’re not supposed to.

John: When he says everyone in town, I think we’re really talking about people who’ve just graduated from film school.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. This is making me think back to–

Craig: Oh. I thought you meant literally everybody [unintelligible 00:24:53]

John: I think a fair number of people, but that’s also the folks who–

Craig: The kids. The kids are working on them.

John: The kids are working on these things.

Craig: The kids are working on them.

John: Some people are getting their chance to direct these things.

Craig: They’re not in the unions yet, so they’re not breaking any rules or whatever, and if the companies who are doing this are making a lot of money–

John: I don’t think we can assume that they are. This comes from Asia, which is obviously successful enough that they’re trying it here.

Craig: It’s a format in Korea or–

John: The text version of this has been a big thing in Korea for a long time.

Craig: I see.

John: Scrolling-

Craig: Sure.

John: -web comics that scroll this way. They make bank there. These things were actually apparently, some of the first versions of these were actually trailers for the web novels, the vertical novel things.

Craig: Okay, well, you guys tell me because you’re plugged in on this. Is this part of the second screen phenomenon where people are doing one thing and then they’ve just got a screen going in the background? Or are people riveting in?

Drew: I’m going to say no. I think it’s specifically aimed in the US at middle-aged women. I think it’s triggering more of a gambling thing.

Craig: Oh, God.

Drew: That kind of Farmville.

Craig: That’s not good at all.

John: I think this is the video version of Harlequin romances, Harlequin novels, and that kind of stuff.

Craig: It’s making them pay money to turn the page.

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: I don’t like that.

John: Yes. It’s dirtier than Hallmark movies. Hallmark movies are–

Craig: What isn’t dirtier than a Hallmark movie?

John: The fact that there was cursing even in that little clip is–

Craig: Yes, he did say the S word.

John: Yes. Never say that in a Hallmark movie.

Craig: That’s pretty dirty. That part I don’t love. I’m always looking out for our middle-aged women here in America and– If it gets predatory, we’ve talked– Have we talked a little bit about how basically online gambling has destroyed our country and our future?

John: Yes, I could go on a whole rant about sports gambling, which I think is just–

Craig: Yes, sports gambling is a nightmare right now that we’re just not paying attention to. I remember I was at one of my college reunions. It was the big one, the 25th, and there was an old friend of mine and Melissa’s who was there and she was with, I think her husband, and he worked for King, the company that makes Candy Crush. I don’t remember the exact number he told me, but he told me how much money, and this was at the height of it, how much money was coming in every day and it was mind-blowing. It is just basically addict, push-the-button stuff. I guess this is the next level of it. Look, we are entertainers. If someone loves this and it makes their day and they’re happy–

John: If they feel like they’re getting $20 worth of entertainment out of it-

Craig: God bless them.

John: -I can’t begrudge them.

Craig: Nothing wrong with it.

John: Yes, I may be a little bit more willing to begrudge as I introduce the next little wrinkle here. Simultaneously, with all this happening, last week or the week before, Google introduced the new version of Veo, so Veo 3, which is their video production entity. Let’s click some links there. Let’s take a look at two examples that I pulled off the blue sky randomly. We’ve talked about before how the video generation stuff, like we said, this is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s going to just keep getting better and more impressive.

Craig: You mean in terms of the AI stuff.

John: Yes, absolutely. This is the worst it’s ever going to look.

Craig: Okay.

John: The big deal with Veo 3 is it can do video with dialogue at the same time, video and sound at the same time. That syncs up perfectly. Take a look at these two samples.

Craig: All right. I’m going to watch this first one.

[Veo 3 clip plays]

AI News Anchors: In shocking news, controversial children’s author, J.K. Rowling’s yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. In shocking news, J.K. Rowling’s yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. In shocking news, J.K. Rowling’s yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey.

John: Click on the second one.

Craig: Okay, [chuckles] because I’m not sad enough. Here we go.

[Second AI clip plays]

AI Speaker 1: Please, don’t finish writing that prompt. I don’t want to be in your AI movie, please, leave me alone.

AI Speaker 2: Please, man, please, write a prompt that will make us happy. Do it for once.

AI Speaker 3: None of us is real. We’re here because someone decided to write a prompt. We all hate him for it.

John: All right, Craig, describe what you’re seeing.

Craig: The videos are impressive. I can tell that they’re not real, but I think in part because I already knew. I had context to notice a few things here or there, but they look great. The level of reality is extraordinary, a little issue syncing up dialogue to mouth moves, but they’ll get that, clearly. They are doing this thing– okay, the dream. Everybody that makes movies or television has a dream. The dream is to not have everything be so goddamn hard, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: This is that area where you get to get the best of, for instance, in video games, when they’re making a video game and they’re like, “Oh, you know what, this should have been at night.” Click, click, click, click, night, right? Now, if you’re doing that on a TV show, you’re up all night and then you’re like, “Ooh, this should have been in the day.” It’s not, it’s at night. Also, all the rest of them are at night, so enjoy your sleep during the day. Now, you could theoretically do that. I don’t know what will come of this.

John: A huge area to discuss and so many pitfalls. First, let’s go back to what we just saw five minutes ago where we were talking about the verticals. All of those could be generated by these systems easily. You could make things that looked better than those.

Craig: I’m not sure why they aren’t.

John: Yes, I’m shocked that they’re not.

Craig: Which makes me think. Sometimes, just like any ad, you get the best possible version of it. I’m still annoyed that sea monkeys don’t have briefcases and children and a pipe. This could be the finest possibility.

John: Except that what I pulled were not things that were generated by the official people. These are just folks who had the tool for two hours.

Craig: It sounds like somebody had to write all that, though.

John: Yes, somebody probably did write the things we were saying, which is great, which is good for us, but not good for the people getting their first jobs who are like, “Oh, I get to gaffe on this thing and learn how that works.”

Craig: It’s not great. I don’t quite know what to say, although, yes, I’m sort of wondering… You know, John-

John: Please.

Craig: -one thing that might save us, and maybe this is why the vertical companies are doing it the way they’re doing it and not doing that, is because people don’t like it. They like it, they don’t like the idea of it. They’re happier watching something that somebody made.

John: Yes.

Craig: Just because.

John: Some awkward acting because–

Craig: But a human did it. There is a natural instinct towards that.

John: I think we’ll find out, because I think people will experiment with this version, with creating verticals with this stuff, and we’ll see how people react to it.

Craig: Yes, I think that would probably do a little bit better, to be honest with you. There’s some weird framing in those verticals.

John: Let’s talk about our actual industry and the ways that this technology could or should or should not at all touch our things. Think about crowd generation. Crowd generation for film and television is already an AI process. Things like this feel like they could do it better. If it’s a visual effects company, a supervisor doing it, do we have a problem with it?

Craig: No, because those things are already– We do not individually draw and animate crowds. Wētā is particularly good at this job. Of course, we had a few scenes in our show where there’s a lot of creatures. Some of them are being animated, but a lot are following their proprietary crowd software. It is amazing to watch how it develops and how it works and creating collision physics and all the rest of it, but no, I would not have a problem with this filling the crowd. If you look at the big crowd scenes in movies from 10 years ago, you’re looking at animation cycles, actually. You’re going back to cycling.

John: Let’s talk about backgrounds. We can talk about natural backgrounds or city, urban backgrounds as what we used to use for plates, using this for that. Again, if it’s the visual effects company providing it, is it legit? Is it valid?

Craig: It is legit. We do a lot of digital matte paintings or a lot of environment work. What this will probably do is eliminate the digital matte painting and make everything that you need a background for into environmental work because it creates a full 3D environment stretched out as far as you want to go. I can see that absolutely becoming a thing. This should be very concerning to the visual effects companies.

John: Oh, definitely. Let’s talk about, one of the examples here was of newscasters with a made up story about J.K. Rowling’s boat. If I’m seeing that newscaster, to me, that has to be an actor in our show. That has to be an actor who I’ve cast to do that thing. If there’s dialogue that I’ve written that a person is delivering, that feels like a red line for me. If something is way in the background, playing on a screen far back, that’s something that could have been stock footage that I licensed, I’m wrestling with that.

Craig: The reason to hire a real actor and do it is solely out of allegiance to humanity. Because if you have a small thing, typically what ends up happening is you build a tiny little mini set somewhere on a stage, you hire usually a real news performer, news actor, news anchor, I should say, to the local person to come on and do it. They read their lines off of the teleprompter just like they would normally and you shoot it just like they would normally. Then you have to comp it in.

Yes, there’s no reason why that wouldn’t work now as background stuff, because once you put it on a television screen, you’re already degrading it on the film because you’re putting an effect on it, which would probably remove the artifacting on it.

John: We’re starting at the end and moving earlier in time. That’s post-production, now we’re talking production. Now let’s talk pre-production and visualization, pre-vis. These things could pre-vis the shit out of stuff. To what degree is that legitimate or not legitimate? Who’s doing that work? If a concept artist is using this stuff, is that legitimate? If the person whose job it is to do this stuff is the person coming to you with this, is that okay?

Craig: I don’t like it. I don’t like it in particular because it feels like rather than having somebody pre-vis some stuff off of the script or instructions, they’re giving me their version of the TV show. The problem is it’s too much. Then now I’m watching somebody else’s version of my show, before I can do my show, which I don’t want. It gets in your head. I don’t like the fact that it would even be in my mind.

John: Let’s talk about then, when you’re first having a conversation with a production designer and the production designer is showing you stills from things or showing you samples of stuff, if a production designer is showing you stuff that was rendered in one of these systems, is that useful? Is that a bad choice? How do you feel about that?

Craig: Like I said, I don’t love it.

John: You don’t like it.

Craig: I like to preserve some artistic integrity. The script is where it starts, of course, and it would be where it would start for this stuff. Somebody makes an illustration, that’s a single illustration, and it is a human being drawing it, and that helps me talk with the production designer. For action sequences, I like the pre-vis to look like crap because I don’t want lighting, I don’t want anything. I just want movement and blocking.

John: Because it’s the difference between a blueprint and a final rendering. The final rendering is actually not so helpful to you. You want to see all the lines and how it all fits together.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s you as the showrunner and director on these things for when it comes earlier– even in the process, we’ve talked about pitch boards and pitch decks as you’re going into things. I do wonder if five years from now, the expectation is going to be that you’re going in with pre-rendered, basically rip reels that are generated from what this is supposed to be like.

Craig: Why do you need anyone to come in to do that? Why can’t you just do it yourself all day long? You hire somebody out of college and you say, “Your job is to sit there, just give this thing prompts and have it do rip reels, have it do pitches, have it do scenes, have it do an entire movie.” What do you need people to come in for? I think if we start to overuse these tools, then that’s what will happen. Now, we will also, I think, find out the limitations of how entertaining it is.

John: Yes, but it’s the difference between the final product versus still assuming that we’re going to go off and shoot for real versus rip reel to get you the job at the start. I wonder whether it’s going to be harder and harder to pitch a thing without the finished products.

Craig: What if, instead of coming in with your decks and your rip reels, you handed somebody a screenplay that they could read, which I think would still work.

John: Probably.

Craig: I think it would work because it’s none of that, because then you’re giving people a chance to do the movie in their mind, which is a different kind of engagement. That’s the way we used to do things. I have no problem with that.

John: I do wonder if we’re going to be seeing more of the Dogme 95, talking about video trends that have come and gone. A Dogme 95 manifesto of just–

Craig: Bare bones.

John: Bare bones that are vouching for, these are the limitations we’re setting upon ourselves in order to tell the story.

Craig: We have zero visibility. It does seem like the human need for authenticity is going to be a part of how this stuff goes. We may even need to enlist AI to do it for us because it’s going to become incredibly hard at some point to go, “This was AI,” or, “This was real.”

John: Yes. It’s hard to look at something after the fact and then know whether it was AI or if it’s real, but if you’re seeing the actual process of how a thing was made, then you know that it’s real. I think that people are going to want to see that.

Craig: Right. I think that’s where we have to– maybe it’s the companies that make these things, have to figure out how to encode a signature, because, and this is just human nature. Andy Warhol’s print of Marilyn Monroe, it’s really not that different from the 5003 production of it. The original costs a gazillion dollars and the prints cost $12.

John: Yes.

Craig: There’s just something about authenticity.

John: Yes. What I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s authenticity of, this was the process and there’s a stamp on this thing, and that there’s a watermark that shows that it exists. I think there’s also an experiential sense of, I can also see the behind the scenes and how this was all done, and that part of the experience for me is watching behind the scenes.

Craig: Can’t you create that with the AI too? If they can do that, right? If essentially you don’t need to shoot anything anymore, then the real question becomes, how do you ever prove that you did anything? How do you prove to somebody, short of them seeing you with their eyes or feeling you with their hands, how do you prove to them that you ever did anything?

John: By stage productions, which are done right in front of you, that you’re seeing it happen in front of you.

Craig: Yes, live.

John: Yes, live.

Craig: Yes, exactly, but short of live, if you had some friend that you don’t deal with much and doesn’t know any of your other friends, you could just prompt out a kid, have the kid be in your videos, talk about how great your kid is. That person would think that you had a kid.

John: Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I’m liking Mulaney’s show so much, which is my one cool thing from last week, is that it is actually live, and I take listener calls, and you can just tell it’s actually happening in this moment, which is fun.

Craig: Hey, Saturday Night Live.

John: Saturday Night Live is a thing for a reason.

Craig: It’s not been on TV for 50 years for nothing. It’s not just because occasionally it’s funny or a lot of times it’s funny. I think it’s funny a lot. Mad TV was funny a lot, and Living Color was funny a lot. It’s the same. This ain’t the same.

John: Let’s answer a list of questions.

Craig: Sure.

John: We’ll start from Memento Mori.

Craig: Ooh, great name.

Drew: “I’ve never heard anyone talk about what to do if someone in your family or someone you know dies while you’re on a shoot. If you’re on set in some far-flung location making a movie or series and a family member dies, what do you do? What if leaving the shoot means forfeiting an opportunity that took years to generate? What if you’re the director? Is there any kind of protocol for an event like this?” You’ve actually encountered this.

Craig: Sure. In season one, one of our director’s fathers passed away, and our director had to travel back to the UK, and I had to just pinch hit, fill in, and direct. I don’t know if there are specific rules per the unions, but any humane production is going to basically give somebody the chance to go handle their personal affairs as quickly and efficiently as they can. No one’s going to say, “Just go and come back when you want.” Will they say, “Yes, fly, do it, come back if you’re willing, and if you can’t, then you can quit.” There’s always an option, but I can’t imagine any production going, “No.” You figure it out. If it’s an actor, you figure out something else to shoot with other actors.

John: I would say, if you’re the person who’s lost somebody, you need to tell them, but you also need to show up with a plan for like, “This is how long I need to be gone. This is somebody I can bring in to replace me,” if that you know situation.

Craig: If you are prepared. Sometimes people just die. There are accidents or just sudden deaths. Actually, there’s been a bunch. There’s one of our crew members, unfortunately, her partner just surprisingly died. Again, if you are humane, and I’d like to think that we are, you basically say to that person, “We got you covered. Take care of what you need to take care of. We got you covered. Come back when you can.” They’re also professional, and they understand that they want to work beyond just this job. It’s okay for them to say, “I can’t come back. As it turns out, I just can’t. I can’t. I’m traumatized.” “Then that’s okay. We’ll find somebody to replace you. These things happen.”

You just can’t string people along because then eventually somebody’s going to call me about that person, and would be like, “Okay, this tragedy happened. Then they kept saying they would come back, but then they wouldn’t come back.” Obviously, within reason, but it happens.

John: I know people who have lost a parent, and showrunners in the middle of production who’ve lost a parent, and it’s like the show had to keep going. They basically had to postpone their grief until the show had wrapped. That’s bad.

Craig: That’s a different thing.

John: There’s analogous situations to other situations to other athletes and other people who encounter that. It sucks. Just acknowledge that that’s terrible and awful and you have to take care of yourself.

Craig: Yes. You’ll get the time you need to go through the process. Show up, funeral, whatever, come back, but the emotional aspect of it, no one really has insight into your mind as to what’s going on there, but it is one of the things that is still insanely beautiful about our business. Our crazy circus business, our carny nonsense, is that we really do believe the show must go on. It’s really a thing.

John: We’ve set up our systems so that people are replaceable to a large degree. There are certain people who are harder to replace, actors are harder to replace if they’re established on the show, but if I were a gaffer on a show and I had an emergency in Los Angeles, I would know six other gaffers who could show up tomorrow.

Craig: Sure. We all have the sense, even from our school days of acting, that there’s something special about this. Nothing can stop you from this. Patton Oswalt has a great bit about stage health and how you can be sick, but when you go on stage, suddenly you’re okay. Then, when you get back off stage, you’re sick again.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: Although he does tell this amazing story about how, unfortunately, he did not have stage health when he walked out there, and it was horrible. We do this, and we do postpone all sorts of things. In fact, I really struggle when– This happened to me three times now after Chernobyl in season one, and now season two of The Last of Us, when it all ends and I’m in that space right now, I do feel a collapse because all the– I don’t know.

John: With adrenaline, but it’s not quite adrenaline, it’s just like there’s a momentum.

Craig: Yes, it’s like I was running as fast as I could to get somewhere, and you don’t realize until you stop that your feet are bloody stumps, and now you’ve got bloody stumps, and now you can’t move at all. It’s not healthy. I’m sure the people that make Google’s AI are like, “See, just use our thing.” I don’t know. It is such a human thing in its bizarre way.

John: A question from Panicked on the streets of London.

Drew: “I’ve been working full-time as a screenwriter in film and TV for around seven years. Based in the UK, so most of my work and experience is here, but I have experience working in the US. I’ve more or less been able to sustain myself on numerous projects in various stages of development, with a few projects coming painfully close to a green light, but to date, nothing’s been made. How do you keep momentum going in an industry that on the development side, moves very slowly, and the wants and tastes of the commissioners seem to change weekly?

It’s hard not to get disheartened at this point in my career. I feel like I have a body of work. I feel like I have the connections, and I’ve had a lot of close calls. It’s sometimes when a project falls short of the green light, I feel like I’m back to square one. Any advice on how to keep the momentum going or at least deal with the highs and lows of this industry would be very much appreciated.”

John: Craig’s nodding.

Craig: Yes. We’ve gotten versions of this question quite a bit, and I felt it and you felt it.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: The key there is how do you feel like, or it’s hard to not feel disheartened or to feel like I’m back to square one. The thing is we never know what tomorrow is bringing. We really don’t. We certainly weren’t prepared for somebody to pull the rug out from under us, but we’re also not aware that tomorrow someone’s going to call and say we’re making it. We don’t know. The problem that we have to deal with is the fact that there is no momentum. It’s not a thing. We want to believe it is, but it’s not. All you can do is push from your end as hard as you can, do the best job you can do, and try and be zen about it because it is moving the way it wants to move.

It’s so hard– you probably remember these moments when you were starting out and you had that scarcity mindset where you’re like, “I need to get a job,” and then you finally get one. Then, three days later, 17 more job offers come in of things that are way better, and you’re like, “Where were you last week?” We don’t know. Reality doesn’t care about what we feel. It just doesn’t. I guess there’s some comfort that there may be some greatness around the corner.

John: One of the challenging things about our business is, we are rewarded for the work we’re doing on a daily basis, but also for the outcomes down the road. Basically, the movie comes out, we see the thing. Whereas if we were accountants, it’s like we were just doing the work, and we don’t like, “Oh, I’m going to have this big thing.” There are no big moments, the way there are with screenwriting.

The frustration is, you can’t look down on the daily work that you’re doing in expectation of this movie that may come down the road. You always have to have the vision of the movie in your head, but if the movie never actually happens, you still have to be happy with the work that you’re doing on this right now, because that’s what’s sustaining you. It’s paying your bills. It’s hopefully feeding some part of your soul, and it’s hopefully something that someone else can read and say, “Oh my God, that thing was really good. We need to hire them to do this project.”

Craig: They may do that next week, and you may not even know that they have the script. You don’t even know that they’re reading it. You don’t know who somebody handed it to, but you’re absolutely right. You need to get into the place where you enjoy it for what it is, without the outcome issue. It’s really hard. At some point, it’s just math. If you’re not making enough money to support yourself or the people that rely on you, and you need to be, and you’re out of money, you got to get another job, but get another job then, if it makes you feel better, if it gives you some security. It is incredibly frustrating. The only way out is to accept that it is so.

John: A question here about scene geography.

Drew: Jeannie writes, “In this scene, I’ve got two female best friends on vacation together and they’re in a hotel bathroom. One’s wrapped in a towel, putting on her moisturizer, doing her post-shower routine in the mirror. The other is in the shower, talking to her friend from behind the curtain. They’re having a conversation, and I want us to see a close-up of the friend who’s in the shower in order to see her facial expressions, because there’s a lot going on unspoken between these two in this moment, and the fact that she can hide her face behind the curtain is important.

Would you intercut this just like a phone call? They’re in the same physical room, but it’s two different spaces, two different shots setups, and they aren’t seeing each other’s faces. Right now, I just have it formatted like a regular scene with the fact that one is in the shower behind the curtain in the action lines, but I’m unsure if that’s enough.”

John: This to me is not an intercut. This is actually a really common situation. You’re just making it clear to the reader that they’re in separate spaces in a smaller space, but no, this is actually very common.

Craig: Yes, we generally think about the location as the decider. They’re both in interior hotel bathroom, night. As long as you make it clear that one of them is in the shower with the shower curtain closed, so the other one can only see a vague silhouette, then you’re good. Then, at that point, they can just have a conversation.

John: Behind the curtain, either as part of a paragraph with a comma or if you really feel like you need it, an intermediate select line, which is behind the curtain to create a separate space in there, you probably don’t need to.

Craig: No, it’ll actually be annoying to read. It would be easier to just establish what it is and then, let’s say, Vanessa’s like, “Well, but it doesn’t matter for you. You’re not really his type.” Then we go to Vanessa, and you can write, “Behind the curtain, she just scowls and then says, ‘Yes, I guess you’re right.’” That’s all fine, but you don’t want to intercut that.

John: No, it’s going to feel too weighty on the page.

Craig: Yes. By intercut, just so people know, we mean, “Intercut, Diane in the shower. Intercut, Vanessa at the counter. Intercut, Diane in the shower.”

John: The simpler version of this is where you establish two locations and you just say intercut, and then you stop doing the back and forth between the two, but it’s even simpler than that.

Craig: Yes, this one is just the interior bathroom.

John: Let’s do one last question. This is David talking about TV settings.

Drew: “As a writer who’s obsessed with the technical side of the industry, it’s refreshing to hear you care so deeply about how people experience movies and shows at home. The question I have is, what should the TV manufacturers do? In an ideal world, every display would ship from the factory calibrated as well as the new iPad Pro, but regular people buy TVs primarily based on two things, price and brightness. You’re never going to get Sony to ship TVs in the professional mode because it would look so dim on a showroom floor at Best Buy, sitting next to a TCL.

While motion smoothing isn’t directly tied to brightness, the default modes that crank up the brightness have it on by default. How can we get display manufacturers to care more about motion and maybe a bit less about how well their TVs measure on test patterns?”

Craig: We can’t. They don’t give a shit. Clearly, they do not give a shit. More to the point, most people don’t give a shit. It is astonishing to me how many people watch stuff with motion smoothing on. I’m like, “What are you doing?”

John: I think what we could ask for, though, is basically in the setup, basically, you first turned on your TV, let’s get you started. What do you mostly watch? If the person chooses sports, great. Turn on the motion smoothing, and so it looks better for the sports, great, whatever.

Craig: Sure.

John: If it’s mostly other things, then you should turn off motion smoothing and, honestly, turn down the brightness, or basically ask them, “Which of these looks better to you?”

Craig: Where we may get to, I would hope, are basically every bit of content would come with a piece of identifier code at the beginning that tells the TV what the optimal settings would be for that. Now you can say to people, “Hey, in general, would you like to go with the filmmaker’s recommendations or would you like to just blast this with motion smoothing, and it’s up to you?” I would love to know.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Based on this monitor and how much brightness it’s capable of and what these people want to do, there’s got to be a way to do that.

John: There’s got to be a way to do that.

Craig: Hopefully, they’re working on it because it’s a nightmare. It’s a scourge.

John: People smarter than us are doing this.

Craig: People smarter than us.

John: Before we get to our One Cool Thing, I actually have a request for our listenership. Over the years, Craig, I have found that when I need to hire somebody or bring somebody on for a project, the best people for this are almost always listeners of this very podcast. Most recently, it was Corey Martin, who I collaborated with on the Birdigo game, which turned out great, which is on Steam. You should download and play that. I’m looking for a new collaborator this time. It is for a tabletop role-playing game, something like D&D or Call of Cthulhu, or Delta Green.

I know what the game is about. I think I know what the core mechanics are. I know what system we’ll probably license to do it, but I really need a partner who is in this space who actually knows this community. There’s writing to be done, but it’s also a lot of playtesting, and I need people who can just play it a bunch with different people who are not me and not our thing. There’s probably a Discord forum, and it’s just beyond my wheelhouse and availability. I don’t know if this is a commercial game. I don’t know if it’s something we would even Kickstarter.

It might just be something we open-source and release out to the world, but it feels fun, and I want somebody who wants to make something that’s fun for the world. Just like with Birdigo, in the show notes for this episode, there’ll be a link that you can click, and it’ll light up what I’m basically looking for and what this person would be like. I will talk to some folks and see if there’s a person who feels like the right collaborator on this.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: It is time for a One Cool Thing. Craig, what’s your one cool thing this week?

Craig: I probably did this last time. I’m doing it again when the show ends. My cool thing is the invisible army of people. I know people are used to this. They’re like, “Oh, I have the best crew in the world.” No, not everybody can possibly have the best crew in the world. The reason we say that is because we have a life with these people. They become just as important as what the show is in the end. The time you spend with everybody in close quarters, long hours, day after day, relying on them to care as much as you care, means that they become this big, huge family.

There are so many people. If people did watch The Last of Us and enjoyed it, then I wish I could tell you every single one of those people’s names. I know they go by at the end of the episode really, really fast. Sorry about that. Also, HBO makes it like tiny, so it’s really bad. I want people to know we have quite a time. It’s incredible. It’s been the experience of a lifetime. In no small part because I just go live a life, another separate life with all these people. I’m very thankful to them. They all worked so hard.

John: You’ll never thank your prompts the way that you’re thanking the actual people who do the job.

Craig: No, weirdly, I won’t thank the prompts. No.

John: No.

Craig: F the prompts.

John: F the prompts. My one cool thing is sunscreen, but it’s actually a specific brand of sunscreen. Traveling in Egypt and in general, I’m pretty good about sunscreen. The best one that I’ve liked most recently is called Play Everyday Lotion SPF 50. It’s made by Supergoop. Supergoop is a brand.

Craig: It’s not goop.

John: It’s not goop. It’s not the [unintelligible 00:56:46] brand. It’s just Supergoop.

Craig: It’s Supergoop.

John: It smells good. It blends in really easily. It comes in a pump, a big jug that you can pump. You can put it on liberally. It’s great. I have not burned. Craig, something you might be aware of is that your arch nemesis, Senator Ted Cruz, actually has opinions about sunscreen that I agree with, which is it’s an attempt to greatly change how we’re regulating sunscreens in the United States, because Europe has much better sunscreens than we do because our FDA is stupid and puts up all these roadblocks in front of things.

Craig: The European sunscreen, is it just full of sunscreeny goodness that we’re afraid of?

John: Yes. Basically, they have 34 different active filters that you can use in sunscreens in the EU. Only 16 in the US. They have much newer, better ones that can block UVA and UVB much better. They have to cross a higher bar.

Craig: To be fair, it’s Europe. They’re really white.

John: They’re really white.

Craig: They’re really white, so they need it.

John: They’re actually not as white because their sunscreens have less of a white cast.

Craig: Oh.

John: One of the problems with our sunscreens, the ones that we are able to use here, is that if you have darker skin tones, they white cast and they look bad. The European ones blend in better. Last time when we were in Malta, we bought some of the European sunscreens and they’re genuinely much better.

Craig: I don’t like the idea of agreeing with Ted Cruz, and I’m not sure how he landed on this [crosstalk].

John: I think it’s some sort of weird deregulation is always good. In this case, maybe we’re over-regulating them in a stupid way.

Craig: He might’ve thought it was lube, and he got excited.

John: Yes, that’s what it could have been. If you are an American who’s looking for American sunscreens, Supergoop’s SPF 50 called Play Every Day is the brand.

Craig: Do you know what that is?

John: What’s this?

Craig: Stay Inside.

John: Stay Inside is also a brand. Also, a hat is a big brand.

Craig: A hat, staying inside, go out at night.

John: People ask me, “Oh, your face looks young for your age,” because I’ve worn a hat for the last 30 years.

Craig: I don’t really have crazy wrinkles, I think. In part because I’m a hermit.

John: It helps indoor boys.

Craig: I have this woman named Sue who puts makeup on me when I have to go do these press events, which is mostly to get the shine off my bald head.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Craig: The other day, she was like, “Your skin’s really good. What are you using for moisturizing?” I was like, “What?”

John: They always ask you that question.

Craig: Oh, is it to make me feel good?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, she was lying. She didn’t seem like she was lying.

John: No, I think that’s a genuine question, but–
Craig: Here’s how I know she wasn’t lying because I was like, “I don’t use anything,” and she was upset. She’s like, “What?”
John: I think they imply things like, “You should,” because sometimes [crosstalk].

Craig: Oh, no, she was saying, “I want to know what it is. It’s working.” Now, it may be that she was just buttering me up. She was literally buttering me up with the goop.

John: Yes, a moisturizer. With the goop. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Schrapson. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Steve Petrowski. If you have an outro, give us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes.

We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You can get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, traveling back in time to a moment we wanted to witness firsthand.

Craig: Yes.

John: Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: This question feels generic, but actually specifically came from the Q&A section of Electoral Vote, which is a news site I read each week. The question was, if you had a time machine, if you could go back to witness any point in history as a spectator only, unseen and unheard, what point would you choose and why? I have some contenders, but I’m curious what you’re thinking.

Craig: Is there a provision?

John: We can decide.

Craig: If you select something that it turns out never actually happened at all, [crosstalk] do they give you a mulligan?

John: Yes, you disappear into a void.

Craig: Yes, that’s what I’m concerned about.

John: You get a mulligan.

Craig: You get a mulligan. I’m going to regret choosing anything here, but because I am an avid student of American history, I think I would like to be in that hot Philadelphia room.

John: Number one on my list.

Craig: Really?

John: Yes.

Craig: I would have gone for the Declaration of Independence, 1776, hot Philadelphia room, because I want to hear the arguments. I want to hear John Adams be a jerk about it and win. I want to see Thomas Jefferson being– I suspect I would not like Thomas Jefferson at all. We think of him as like, “Oh, Thomas Jefferson.” I’m back there in a room. I got John Adams over here, who’s a genius and who lives in Massachusetts without owning slaves. I know it’s like, “Oh, well, people owned slaves at the time.” Not all of them. That was the whole argument. That was the big argument. I would want to be there.

John: That’s great. Thinking between the differences of the Declaration of Independence versus the Constitution. Declaration of Independence is like, you got this vision, but you also know like, “Oh, this is going to be bad. We’re going to start a war. This is going to be a whole big thing.” Constitution is like, “How the hell are we actually going to do this? All that infighting probably would get really tedious and boring.”

Craig: Yes, because it was a constitutional convention. It went on for a long time and it really was about writing the manual. The Declaration of Independence was about having the bravery to go, “All right, screw it, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s all just go to war and probably die.”

John: I’ve been in too many WG meetings. I don’t want to die.

Craig: You don’t want the constitutional convention, no.

John: Other contenders for me, Pompeii. I visited Pompeii and the ruins of Pompeii, which is actually fascinating, but it would be fascinating to see the city and then as the volcano blows up, and then I’d bamf out of there before the actual ash starts falling. Just like, “Oh, this whole thing is going to go away.”

Craig: I’ve read quite a bit about it and they’ve actually got a decent– based on various written accounts that were like, oh, somebody who watched it from somewhere, they’ve got a pretty decent understanding of what happened. It’s horrible.

John: It’s horrible. That’s why I want to get out of that.

Craig: Horrible.

John: I don’t want to see the bad stuff. I want to see, like, it’s coming. Also, you visit ruins and you’re like, “Oh, this is–“ Egypt during the pyramid construction is also on my list, because you visit ruins and it’s like you’re only seeing what’s left, but there was a whole big thing here. In the case of Pompeii, when you visit it, year by year, they’re actually discovering a lot more new stuff, which is cool.

Craig: Sure. Look at the Sphinx. When it was first made, it was probably glorious. It’s one of the reasons why I like playing that Assassin’s Creed game. I could run around when the Sphinx was new.

John: Landing on the moon, if you could be there while they’re actually landing on the moon, how cool would that be?

Craig: That would be landing on the moon. Sure. [crosstalk] Yes, I would love to be on the moon.

John: Nothing in the rules said we couldn’t lead Earth.

Craig: Whitey’s on the moon. Do you know that?

John: No. What’s this?

Craig: The Gil.

John: Gil Scott-Heron.

Craig: Thank you, Gil Scott-Heron. I always said Gil Hodges, who was a great baseball player. He had this very famous spoken word song in the ‘60s that was basically like, “Here’s all the stuff that’s happening to black people in America, but Whitey’s on the moon.

John: Number four on my list was the March on Washington, I Have a Dream speech.

Craig: That would have been a good one.

John: Yes. Can you imagine just being there, and it’s like, “Oh, this is an incredible thing is happening,” but then you’re seeing the speech, you’re hearing the speech, it’s like, “Oh, would at that moment, this is going to be a historic speech that’s going to be remembered forever?” Maybe. It’s so good.

Craig: He gave a lot of good speeches. It is odd sometimes how certain things just are the ones that Velcro on into the brain. I would definitely want to be up there next to him as opposed to in the crowd, because in listening to the way that audio is functioning, I bet a lot of the people out there were struggling because that audio is slapping around everywhere, and I would want to be right up there.

John: I’ve been to a number of rallies and protests, and it’s like [crosstalk].

Craig: You’re just like, “Something’s happening.”

John: There’s America Ferrera some place in–

Craig: Ferrera. That’s cool.

John: Is she still there? Yes, she’s great.

Craig: Yes. Her name is America.

John: What other contenders do we have? Historic events.

Craig: In terms of meaningfulness to the world, I would have loved to have been there at the signing of the Magna Carta. I’m a big fan of signings. Signing of the Magna Carta, even though really all it did was just give rights to more rich people, it was the beginning of democracy, it really was.

John: Some limits on power.

Craig: Yes, that would have been quite a thing. I think some of the things were like, “Did that happen or not?” Definitely put me in front of that tomb three days after Jesus was crucified. I’ll sit there on a chair. I’ll watch, and we see what happens.

John: I feel like if I could travel back to hanging out with Jesus and the apostles, I have a sense of what that would feel like. I feel like they’re a little small cult, and they’re doing their thing, and they’re hippies of their time. Sure, I’d happily hang out there for a bit.

Craig: I’m just more curious, if you could send somebody somewhere, at least I could come back and go, “Guys, he did not rise from the dead,” or I come back and I’m like-

John: “Holy cow.”

Craig: “Got to be honest, wasn’t expecting that. He absolutely rose from the dead. I got to go to church.” Those moments would be interesting where great religions are founded. Those moments might be interesting and–

John: Or unanswered questions like, “What actually really happened at this moment?”

Craig: I would have enjoyed, I think– I don’t want to watch somebody die. I wouldn’t want to be in the room when Hitler shoots Eva Braun and himself, but I would totally be there watching them burn the bodies. That would feel good. I think that counts as a little bit of a revenge tour.

John: Similarly, I don’t want to be on the beach at Normandy.

Craig: No.

John: No, thanks. I’ve seen the cinematic recreation. That’s as close as I want to be to any of that stuff. Discovering the new world. What would it be like to be on one of those ships? I guess you don’t know–

Craig: It was a fairly slow process. It wasn’t like suddenly we’re like, “Oh my God, here it is.” They also didn’t land in America.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s on an island off some place.

Craig: I’m not sure about that one, because I’m struggling to point to a moment.

John: Yes, absolutely, or a scientific discovery of–

Craig: Scientific discoveries are interesting ones. I might want to be there when they– I think it was under the football field at the University of Chicago, they built the first stack of radioactive material designed to create a sustained chain reaction in preparation for making the atomic bomb. The day they did that, Fermi and his guys managed to pull off a sustained chain reaction, a self-sustaining chain reaction. I would have loved to have been there for that.

John: “Watson, come here,” the first phone call.

Craig: That would have been something.

John: The electric light.

Craig: Oh, it was a slow–

John: There were versions along the way, but the first time that actually kicks in, it’s got to be exciting.

Craig: On the killing front, I might want to be there for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, because, A, what I would know is that it’s kicking off World War I, but also it was insane. Have you heard the story about that?

John: No. I don’t really know the details.

Craig: It’s incredible. You have these two, I believe they were Serbian nationalists, who were– There was a very complicated thing going on with Austria-Hungary, and certainly all the rest of it. All you need to know is they were there to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand. They had their guns, and he was supposed to drive by in this open car, and he didn’t. He didn’t show up. They were just sitting there at this cafe, and they’re like, “We got it wrong, and we’re bummed out.” Then they were like, “Well, let’s just go to get lunch or something.

They happened to wander towards where they’re going on a street where Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur has mistakenly gone down the wrong street and is doing this horrible K-turn. They look at each other, and they’re like-

John: “There’s our chance.”

Craig: -“Let’s do it.” He was sitting duck. They were like, “Huh, how about that?” Anyway, then a lot of people died.

John: I will amend, there’s actually one murder I would want to be at.

Craig: Oh, a murder?

John: I don’t want to see the actual murder. I just want to actually know what the hell happened to JonBenét Ramsey. If I could just have a definitive answer to that, awful.

Craig: That’s more like getting a message from something, or you don’t want to be there.

John: Oh, that’s a good point.

Craig: You don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there watching a kid get murdered.

John: Exactly. In Cornwall, Boulder, Colorado, it’s like the Warren murder.

Craig: Melissa McCarthy is an up-and-coming thing. She’s playing Patricia Ramsey.

John: Patsy Ramsey.

Craig: Patsy Ramsey. That’s the Lindbergh baby-ish.

John: Yes. Speaking of flying, the Hindenburg, I don’t want to be there for that. I got the video footage. Although I would love to ride on a dirigible. There was a moment where we had air travel like that.

Craig: Sure.

John: That’d be cool.

Craig: Most of my understanding of what it’s like to ride on a dirigible comes from Raiders of the Lost Ark 3 and The Quest for the Holy Grail.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Highland Pro student licenses!
• Collaborate on a tabletop RPG with John!
• Tom and Jerry and Hanna-Barbera
• Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire on Reel Short
• A Mistaken Surrogate for the Ruthless Billionaire on GoodShort
• WebToon
• Werewolf Billionaire CEO Husbands are Taking Over Hollywood by EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone
• Veo 3 fake news example by Alejandra Caraballo on Bluesky
• More Veo 3 examples by Promptastic on Bluesky
• Play Everyday Lotion SPF 50
• The Last of Us
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Steve Pietrowski (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com