Drew Marquardt

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 666 of Scriptnotes a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to Satan.

Craig: We will eat your soul.

John: Probably not, but today on the show it is a deep dive into the unholy trinity of films that established the genre of movies about Satanism. We are going to discuss how we got here how these films work and the future of the devil on screen.

Craig: The future of Satan. It’s like the worst deadline article ever.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Like Satan ankles hell.

John: Totally. 100%. Our bonus segment, we’re premium members. We will pontificate on our best candidates for the Antichrist.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. Who would it be? Who should it be?

Craig: Think of a couple of people.

John: I can think of a few. Let’s start off by talking about Satan. We don’t talk about Satan very much, Craig, at all. I don’t think we ever even discuss him.

Craig: Weirdly, it doesn’t come up.

John: It doesn’t come up that much.

Craig: I know that some people in certain parts of our country probably presume that here in Hollywood, we talk about Satan all the time. While we’re drinking the blood of children or whatever it is that they think we do, when in fact, mostly what we do are things like, figure out why there are all these fingerprints on the refrigerator door and take the dog out for a walk. So it doesn’t come up.

John: Quotidian life just doesn’t involve nearly as much Satan as one would guess.

Craig: Also, Satan’s not real.

John: That is true. Let’s talk about Satan, at least the modern conception of Satan. Because when we talk about Satan as an idea, I think we have an image in our head for who Satan is. Satan, in modern conception, is an individual who was thrown out of heaven-

Craig: Fallen angel.

John: -fallen angel, yes. Very, very powerful.

Craig: Yes.

John: The nemesis of God.

Craig: Right, so Satan occupies a very difficult narrative space because he is the antagonist in the Bible, or if you– the Old Testament doesn’t really talk much about Satan, but–

John: Also, we’ll get into that, the New Testament doesn’t really talk about it.

Craig: The church love to talk about Satan. They set up Satan as this rival. Then when you get into Revelations, and then here’s the narrative problem for Satan: Currently, the theory is he’s down there in hell, ruling over a lake of fire, where people burn for eternity but he’s going to come back through his form as the Antichrist or I guess that’s his avatar.

John: Yes, that’s one of the ways he could do it. He could be the equivalent of Jesus where he’s like is incarnate through the Antichrist.

Craig: Yes, he creates his Satan incarnate and son of Satan, whatever you want to call it. And that brings him back to earth where he gets into a huge battle with God and Jesus and all of God’s forces and it’s an actual battle that takes place in a place called Armageddon, I believe, or it’s Megiddo and it becomes Armageddon something, and Satan loses.

Now the narrative part here, that’s rough for Satan, said apparently he knows he loses. It’s already like. What’s he getting ready for? That big fight that he’s going to lose one day?

John: I would say often in our cinematic stories we have heroes who know they’re going to lose and yet they carry on the valiant fight anyway.

Craig: The heroes do.

John: The villains–

Craig: The villains never do.

John: Well, you know what? We’ve just had Wicked. We’ve just reformed the Wicked Witch of the West.

Craig: Yes, but that’s not–

John: That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Craig: No. This devil, this Satan doesn’t seem to be– he’s like he missed those pages. I assume everybody else has read it and then no one wants to tell him. It’s a preordained loss. That’s Satan for you.

John: We also have like the South Park incarnation of Satan, which is basically packaging up all these things and then making him a sad, lonely figure.

Craig: Also a musical theater figure, which is like the best.

John: Absolutely the best.

Craig: Yes, he just wants love.

John: Importantly, we should say that our modern conception of Satanism, and really Satan, is that there are cults who are there who are trying to bring about the end times, hell on earth. He has his minions on earth, which is, without that, there’s really no story to tell.

Craig: Satan is constantly using us to try and get his way and there are the versions where we never actually meet Satan. There are versions where we do, so for instance in Constantine, we meet Lucifer and he’s quite annoyed actually that his son is trying to get back because his son is going to take over his throne or something. Then there are versions where Satan is walking around among us and just by lying and manipulating gets us to just be evil and that would be The Devil’s Advocate where, “I’m a fan of man.” God is an absentee landlord. That is a great line.

John: It’s a great line.

Craig: Yes, it’s a great line.

John: Let’s go back into the roots of Satan and Satanism. This idea of an existential cosmic evil makes sense. It’s always sort of been there and so there’s always been some embodiment, some agent behind misfortune, it’s useful to believe that. It’s useful to believe that there’s some force that created the universe, some fatherly figure or motherly figure who is shepherding us all, but also that there’s a villain out there who is responsible for all the bad things that happen to us. You see that across all ancient mythologies.

Craig: Absolutely. Nyx was the Greek goddess of shadow, I believe, and she gave birth to a bunch of children, discord, war, disease, famine, all the baddies.

John: Then we have Hades who rules over the underworld, so the idea of like ruling over the land of the dead, you sort of combine and conflate these things.

Craig: Hades is a little bit more management than the traditional Judeo-Christian sower of evil. In American tradition, because we go all the way back to our Puritans who came over and Puritans, a lot of people think the Puritans left England because the English wouldn’t let them be freely religious. The problem was that Puritans were too religious. The discrimination was, “You guys are way too religious.” They were like, “Well, we want to be as insanely religious as we want.”

John: As hardcore as we want.

Craig: As hardcore as we want. “We’re going to go.” They really, really had a thing about Satan. They were very much convinced that he walks around. Today we indeed have churches who refer to Satan all the time.

John: Go back to the ancient roots of things too. You have, other religions like Zoroastrianism, had the sense of there’s an evil, there’s a balancing force of evil that’s out there. The idea of a duality between the good and the bad makes sense. You can understand why it’s naturally there. When you have a monotheistic religion like our Abrahamic traditions, it’s understandable that they would feel like, okay, well, what’s the counterbalancing force there?

Craig: Especially if you start to organize yourself, then you need something to scare people with. Jesus was like, “Here’s all this wonderful positive stuff. It’s really difficult to do. You have to be poor, you have to put everybody else first, you have to allow them to hit you and not hit back.” And everybody that came after him was like, “Great. Also, you have to give the church your money and you have to follow our rules or you will be sent to hell. If we don’t like you and you’re saying things we don’t enjoy, like for instance, the earth revolves around the sun, for instance-

John: Yes, heresy.

Craig: -clearly, Satan is working through you.” That’s a nice way to dehumanize somebody and burn them alive.

John: Yes, it’s good. Now, before we get to Christianity, we of course have Judaism, and we have the Old Testament, and we have all the other things that didn’t make it into the official Old Testament. Going back to your Bar Mitzvah days.

Craig: My Hebrew school days.

John: Your Hebrew school days. There’s not a lot of Satan there. There’s the idea of a Satan, which is any sort of adversary, it’s like an obstacle there, and they would use Satan as a verb, like to oppose. It’s not the same thing.

Craig: It was not a thing. I remember asking my rabbi about it because we grew up, everybody watches cartoons, you see the red devil with the pitchfork. Why a pitchfork? I don’t know.

John: Actually pulled from Poseidon is what they’re thinking.

Craig: Maybe. I don’t know why.

John: Maybe the trident of Poseidon.

Craig: Barbed tail, not sure why. I remember him saying, “We don’t even really have a hell.” There’s like a theory of a place you go if you’re really really bad, where it’s just like cold and empty and it’s a wasteland and you’re lonely. We didn’t have that personified guy, the guy who sits there and laughs as you burn and burn and burn, it was just more like, you’re going to be disconnected from other people and you’ll be miserable. Which is enough for me.

John: Yes, we had bad people and bad forces in the Old Testament. The snake in the Garden of Eden is often matched up to Satan, but there’s no direct connection there.

Craig: No, that was– he was not. Yes, it was just more temptation.

John: Temptation. Throughout the Middle Ages, you don’t see a lot of the devil, you don’t see a lot of Satan. If you see him it’s as a comic character, like a pathetic character, and just the same way we have a devil versus the Devil, it’s sort of a blurry line between the two of them. Book of Revelations, you mentioned before, is where we first start to really get into this notion of this capital S Satan of Armageddon. He’s this big third-act villain. It’s important to sort of put the Book of Revelations in context because I think the movies we’re going to be talking about will reference it.

Craig: All the time. It’s the worst book.

John: It is referring to specifically the Roman Empire, which it was written in. Even 666 is actually probably referenced to Nero rather than to any other sort of thing.

Craig: Likely was written by somebody who was mentally ill. It has all the hallmarks of somebody who experiences schizophrenic breaks, is hallucinatory, or I don’t know, it was John of something who was writing Revelations. Maybe that he was just snacking on shrooms because it sure feels shroomy to me. It feels altered. The imagery does correspond a lot to the way people experience hallucinatory images when they take drugs. It’s an incredibly unreliable book, even more so than all the other ones that are also ridiculous in their own way.

John: One of the things that’s different is though, like the rest of the Bible is a history and this is a prognostication of things to come.

Craig: It’s not gospel. A bunch of people kept telling the same story about what happened with Jesus and disagreed slightly from time to time.

John: Sure. That’s why you have four copies.

Craig: Then this guy was like, “Yes, yes, great.”

John: Let’s say what’s going to come.

Craig: I’ve seen, yes, I see the whore of Babylon.

John: He’s mapping out the future seasons.

Craig: Then she’s riding with a host of lions screaming and I’m like, “Get off the drugs, buddy.”

John: Early modern church starts to personify in the season. It’s increasingly powerful. It’s really with John Calvin, Martin Luther. It’s less of a metaphor of like, of temptation or wickedness, but actually an individual. Then of course we have John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is sort of mapping that out. It’s important to understand Paradise Lost is literature. It’s not actually canonical Bible anything.

Craig: No. It’s a story. Calvin was definitely– Look, here in the United States, we’re all still living in the shadow of John Calvin and his crazy ideas.

John: Yes. 2013, a YouGov poll found that 57% of Americans believe in the literal devil compared to 18% of British people, which is just such a shocking difference.

Craig: The answer is again, Britain said, “Go away.”

John: That’s true.

Craig: “Leave. Please leave. Stop saying things like babies are evil because they were simply predetermined to be predestined to be evil. Stop it. Just go. Go away.” I’m not surprised. I’m fascinated by the 18% of British people who are like, “Yeah, I do believe the devil is real.” It seems like such an unpopular thing to talk about in the UK.

John: Also, the British people are also living in popular culture. They’re living in a global popular culture that’s often dominated by American stuff. They’re seeing the three movies we’re going to be talking about.

Craig: True.

John: It’s possible that that’s the influence.

Craig: They’re movies.

John: They are movies.

Craig: They’re movies.

John: Milton’s Paradise Lost is a book.

Craig: I know. I know. Ghostbusters also is a movie. Do you think more Americans believe in– It seems like more Americans probably believe in angels than in Satan.

John: Probably so. I want the polls. I want the polls. People love angels.

Craig: People love angels.

John: They love angels. They love ghosts.

Craig: They do.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s like the idea of children flitting around on wings, just saving them from stuff or I don’t know, making sure Starbucks opens up on time, whatever people pray for.

John: It’s a lot. I think we also, as we get into this, there’s a weird connection to the Catholic church and the Catholic church, not that the modern Catholic church has done a lot of talking about Satan or Satanism, but I think there’s some sense in like the Catholic church being organized and like that it’s a secret conspiracy that they’re hiding from you. The movies we’re going to be talking about often have Catholic priests who are, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but–“

Craig: Yes. What we find when we’re telling this story is that the Catholic church is incredibly useful if you’re a screenwriter because A, it is powerful and it is wealthy. Also, it’s the oldest of the traditions, particularly in the United States. It feels like it goes back to the beginning. The Holy Roman Empire essentially was Catholic. That was what it was. They speak Latin. It has this ancient vibe. It’s almost like they’re as old as the devil himself. Therefore, we need to go into these old scrolls and talk about these things that only the Catholic priests would have access to.

John: I wonder if there’s also an aspect of racism there because you look at the Protestant foundations of the United States and the Puritans and all this stuff, and you had this influx of immigrants who were largely bringing in Catholic traditions, which were also Christian, but not the same kind of Christian. It’s a way of differentiating. We obviously have anti-Catholic leagues. We have this sense of anti-Catholicism. I wonder if some of that gets folded into why we’re thinking about them as being involved with all this.

Craig: Yes. There could be some catholiphobia going on there. I’m not sure it’s racism, per se, because in the United States, there was tremendous fear of white Catholics. John Kennedy, the big thing about him was like, no one’s going to vote for a Catholic. As if that were a thing, it used to be.

What’s interesting is that in our country, we’re predominantly not a Catholic country. Satan is talked about constantly in our Protestant churches, in our Southern Baptist churches. Satan is a massive thing. It’s sort of their big selling point, and yet it feels like a different Satan than the Catholic Satan, which is like older, creepier, more in the shadows. The Protestant Satan comes up to you and offers you a weed.

John: Yes, absolutely. Before we get into our actual movies, let’s talk about the Antichrist because that’s a thing that’s sort of come up in, I think, all three of these, which is the Antichrist is mentioned four times in the New Testament as sort of a false prophet to take the role of Jesus. Again, it’s sort of like a lowercase antichrist, it’s not sort of an individual, it’s like sort of anybody who’s standing in the way of the prophecy of Jesus. According to my Wikipedia research, the first big reference to all this is 400 CE, which is Martin of Tours saying, “There is no doubt that the Antichrist, has already been born, firmly established already in his early years. He will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power.”

Craig: I think it was a running theme. Every generation is like, “This is it.”

John: This is it. It’s always the end times.

Craig: There has to be a term for generational narcissism. Maybe that is the term.

John: Sure.

Craig: We always think that we’re the ones living at the end of the world or in end times because we’re the special ones. No, we’re not. Ever.

John: Ever. And yet, even as we’re saying this, it does feel like it.

Craig: Yes, like probably it is happening.

John: All right. Before we get into our movies, because we’re going to focus on three movies and obviously they’re not the first movies or only movies to talk about Satan or Satanism, we should talk first about Faust, because right from the start of cinema, there were a bunch of movies about Faust. Let’s talk about the Faust story, which is really the devil’s bargain. It’s the idea of a pact with the devil.

Craig: Selling your soul becomes this big thing. The soul itself, the concept of the soul is a very murky one that, at least in Christianity, it’s murky until it becomes part of this bargain story where it’s now this thing you can give away. Again, it’s one of those stories where everyone knows the ending and yet somehow people keep falling for it over and over and over.

This goes to even in the American Black tradition, blues. it was always, thought like this blues man sells his soul to the devil and so that he could play this well. I’m like, but you know how that’s going to end and then lo and behold, you get movies like Angel Heart where it’s how it ends. Every time.

John: Every time.

Craig: Every single time. No matter what. I can’t understand why anyone makes that deal.

John: No.

Craig: Bad deal.

John: Bad deal. Bad deal.

Craig: Totally.

John: We can understand where that story comes from because if you look back at like Rumpelstiltskin or sort of the classic fable myth kind of things, there’s that sense of like, we’re going to make a deal and that person is going to come collect on that deal. Always there.

Craig: Well, what’s interesting is like the Rumpelstiltskin story is a good devil’s bargain story, except in the end he loses. That story is sort of like, this guy took advantage of this poor woman who wanted a child and made the deal and she spun the straw into gold and — oh, that was it, because she just wanted to stay alive.

John: How dare she.

Craig: Right? He lets her turn straw into gold, but his price is, “I’m going to take your baby,” which is crazy. Also, what are you going to do with it? Then she figures out a way to beat him. The whole point of the devil’s story is you lose, every time.

John: That is a whole different class of devil stories. For this episode, I really want to talk about the Satan that is Satanism and how that all fits together.

Craig: I need a chorus going while we talk. [hums] There’s always a chorus. [hums]

John: Latin, you couldn’t understand, but it’s just creepy because it’s there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: The three movies I want to talk about are Rosemary’s Baby from 1968.

Craig: So good.

John: The Exorcist from 1973.

Craig: My favorite.

John: And The Omen from 1976.

Craig: Also a movie.

John: Also a movie. The commonalities, I should say, we’re going to put links to the scripts we found for these three things. You can take a look through those. One thing I’m struck by is they’re all about the horror of parenthood. It’s interesting that our window into these stories of Satanism and satanic cults is about parenthood, which is specific. I guess there’s an aspect of like Antichrist being born. Parents are just a natural thing. If you were to even take out the Satanism of it all, they’re all unified about stories of how scary it is to be a parent.

Craig: Even though they shift gears and sort of concentrate on the father in The Omen, they are all about the conception and then how to deal with the fact that this symbol of innocence, a child, is in fact evil. That contrast is horrifying to us. Even though in Rosemary’s Baby, there is no child until the very, very end and you never get to see him. But, “he has his father’s eyes.”

John: He does.

Craig: It is the year one.

John: We’re starting in 1968, which I’m going to count as the ‘70s because it’s really more– By that point, we’re in the ‘70s.

Craig: It’s ‘70s vibe.

John: Let’s talk about the ‘70s vibe because looking at these movies, they do feel like they’re responding to a thing that’s happening in American culture. We’re starting to realize like, oh, the year 2000 is not that far off. That feels like a marker. That millennial change feels like, oh, 2000 years ago, we had Christ being born, and so there’s that aspect. We have Ouija boards. We have that sense of like, there’s a spiritual outside world there that feels different. We have changing social structures. We have the women’s liberation movement. It’s a different time, so it’s not surprising that we feel like there’s some end-of-times angst going in here. What else about the ‘70s strikes you?

Craig: Well, that was pretty much America’s low point. The late ‘60s, early ‘70s, our cities were suffused by riots, racism. Even though the Civil Rights Act had been passed, the echo of what occurred after that was violent and long and led to multiple assassinations. Presidents were being assassinated. Civil rights leaders were being assassinated. Candidates for president were being assassinated. Cities were on fire. Crime was very high, and there was a sense that America had fallen into, you remember when we were kids in the ‘70s, pollution.

There were ads that were just basically begging people to stop throwing garbage out of their car window as they drove. There were also ads that said, “It’s 10:00 PM, do you know where your children are?” What the hell was going on where parents had to be reminded by television? Maybe it was five o’clock. I can’t remember what the time was. Like, “Hey, by the way, remember? You also have kids. Find them.” Everything was falling apart, and the notion that there was some explanation to this, that there was evil in the air made sense.

You had the Night Stalker, and you had Son of Sam, and serial killers-

John: I agree, yes.

Craig: -they were always there, but I think in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we suddenly became very aware of them.

John: I think we were also aware of conspiracies and things happening behind the scenes, and we had investigative journalism that was uncovering things. The idea that there is a group of people, a cabal, who has secret plans feels like a very natural fit for the time.

Craig: Nixon.

John: Nixon, yes.

Craig: It was happening. So it feels like a smart thing to do. America was still quite religious, and also, you were starting to see shifts in the politics of motherhood. The birth control pill was available. The idea of being a mother was now difficult. People were looking–

John: The idea of choosing when to become a mother.

Craig: That’s right. Single parenthood was now– single parenthood prior to the ‘60s and ‘70s was– and you and I both remember how, even in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Murphy Brown, the sitcom–

John: A woman who chose to have a baby by herself.

Craig: She was yelled at by a vice presidential candidate.

John: Yeah, she was the Antichrist, though. All right, let’s talk about Rosemary’s Baby. Written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin’s novel. I’ve not read the novel. Apparently, it’s a very faithful adaptation.

Craig: It’s a really good book.

John: Development-wise, we know that Polanski wrote a 272-page screenplay for the film in approximately three weeks. I guess it got cut down.

Craig: I’m going to go with cocaine on that one.

John: I think it’s a safe bet that some cocaine was involved. It apparently was very faithful, and it lifted dialogue and stuff directly out of the source material. In our story, we’re following Rosemary Woodhouse, who’s played by Mia Farrow, and her husband, Guy, played by John Cassavetes moving into a new apartment in New York City, they meet their neighbors, Ruth Gordon among them-

Craig: The best.

John: -iconically. It doesn’t start out being about a woman wanting to have a baby.

Craig: No.

John: Talk to us about your experience of Rosemary’s Baby.

Craig: It feels at first like a story about a little bit of a fish out of water, because Rosemary, as Mia Farrow plays her, she almost has that mid-Atlantic accent. She’s very refined, and she’s very delicate. Her husband feels urbane. She is not so much, and she’s trying to figure out how to be a good wife, and she’s trying to figure out how to fit into this world which is–

John: A young wife.

Craig: A young wife, which is very metropolitan, and there are the weirdos down the hall. It’s a pretty good start. We would never be able to get away with it now. The length of time you have to just feel the discomfort of feeling out of place. It also allows the film to zero in on her perspective. Much of the movie, you’re with her, feeling how she feels. Then some things start to go wrong.

John: Notably so, husband is an actor, so he goes off, he’s cast, and things are sort of percolating for him. She’s being left alone more, and the neighbors are starting to intercede. I didn’t go back to him when we watched this, but at what point does she have the chocolate mousse that sends her into slumber?

Craig: The mouse.

John: The mouse.

Craig: The mouse.

John: That sends her into slumber.

Craig: I think it’s middle-ish because there’s someone who dies. I can’t remember. There’s like an early death in the movie that’s very suspicious. It does strike me, we talked about agency recently, and so much of this movie is about somebody trying to find their agency, and everybody keeps taking it away. Ruth Gordon is concerned that she’s not– “Oh, you’re not feeling well, you’re not eating enough, I made this special mouse for you,” which is a mousse. Everybody then begins the gaslighting process. That is followed by one of the most terrifying sex scenes I’ve ever put on.

John: Yeah, it’s a rape.

Craig: Oh, definitely a rape. Also a monster rape. We should probably talk about Roman Polanski for a second because Roman Polanski raped a girl. He raped a child and fled the country, and has never returned. Is he still alive?

John: He’s still alive.

Craig: He’s still alive. And this town only seemed to acknowledge that recently, but even, it was like maybe 10 years ago or so, he got like an honorary Oscar or something, and everybody stood up and applauded, and you’re like, ”The hell is going on here?” Roman Polanski definitely falls into the, okay, person who did very bad things, person who made very good movies.

And that scene in particular is disturbing because it’s oddly restrained. There’s not nudity. There’s just this sudden flash of this thing. Then there’s a delirium that follows and paranoia.

John: Yes. The Satanism of the movie comes from this sense that this pregnancy that comes out of this rape, that there’s something wrong about it, that she’s not being told everything.

Again, we’re locked into a very limited POV, which is really helpful for our storytelling here. It sort of leads to the paranoia here. And yet the edges of the conspiracy are nebulous, which is actually a case with all these things. You never quite know, how big is this? Who’s behind this? Whose plan really was this? How far back did it go? I think that’s one of the hallmarks of these movies is that by being vague, they’re sort of more sinister.

Craig: Sure. The less the more scared you are. There is this entire genre of, I’ll just shorthand call lifetime movies, where a wife or a girlfriend is being gaslit by her husband. Other people join in but she’s like, “No, I know it’s–“ and then there are movies like, was it Flightplan? Is that the one where Jodie Foster is in a plane with her daughter and then her daughter disappears and they’re like, “You never had a daughter on the plane. What are you talking about?”

That’s this thing that echoes how people treat women in society. We now create this wonderful allegory and then you discover how mundane it all is. It’s the mundanity of Rosemary’s Baby that’s so brilliant. When she finally comes to understand what’s happened, everybody’s weirdly relaxed. They’re also so normal. You not only have Ruth Gordon playing the lovely old lady who lives down the hall, but you have just like, there’s this guy from Asia who’s taking photographs and he’s just like a tourist almost. You have Ruth Gordon’s husband, who’s just an old goof. Then there’s like women that look like from the steno pool. The evil, it says, is everywhere you look.

John: Let’s move on to The Exorcist. The Exorcist is 1973 and by that expression, you love The Exorcist. My recollection of The Exorcist is having watched it in like little small segments when it was broadcast on TV because I was too scared and my parents would be out of town. The Exorcist again is a story of the terror of parenthood and the terror of this child being possessed, literally possessed by the devil. What are the responsibilities of a parent?

Craig: Even worse, she’s possessed by a demon.

John: I’m sorry.

Craig: So it’s worse because the devil–

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: One of the things that they did that was so smart, it comes from the book, William Peter Blatty.

John: Yeah, so Blatty wrote the novel and the screenplay.

Craig: Right, brilliant. William Friedkin, of course, directing it. The entity that has occupied her is very powerful and not even close to being the devil, which makes it sort of worse. What you immediately note in the small amount of time between Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the gulf between how vulgar and how shocking things are in The Exorcist. Mia Farrow’s got this like, “What is happening? I don’t believe you. What?”

John: Meanwhile, Reagan is vomiting.

Craig: And masturbating with a crucifix, and using the most foul language possible, and just doing these things. She’s a child. The thought that we could, some of the scenes in The Exorcist now, you simply would not– you wouldn’t even be able to get past the script. People would be like, “We’re going to– No.” Are you going to have your intimacy coordinator come in and talk about how this is going to work? But it also was graphic, deeply graphic in ways that Rosemary’s Baby wouldn’t have even thought of.

John: Because I remember even long before I’d actually seen any clips of The Exorcist, I was aware of the tropes. I was aware of the spinning heads and the vomits and the crawling on the ceilings, because it was just part of popular culture. It was a meme before we had a word for memes.

Craig: I watched The Exorcist in the most ill-advised fashion. I was 9 or 10, which is the perfect age to be deeply traumatized by The Exorcist. I was staying at my friend Eric Freeman’s house, and he had a basement. This was 1980. There was a service in– that’s right, 1980, there was a service in New York called WHT. New York infamously did not have cable for a long time, because of like–

John: It was hard to plug wires and stuff in.

Craig: It was laws. It was just laws and the mob or something, I don’t know, for some ridiculous reason. Then there was a service, WHT, that you would pay for, and it would basically send an over-the-air, scrambled signal, and then you had a little de-scrambler. They would run movies. They would also run some soft-core porn after hours that’s when I also saw porn for the first time. Eric Freeman’s basement was like– it was the hottest club in town.

I knew nothing about what I was in for, and it was so impactful upon me. To this day, it still scares me. I know it shouldn’t, but just seeing her face sometimes scares me.

John: Let’s jump ahead, then, to The Omen. We’ll talk about this for all three of them, and sort of their financial success, and why that’s cemented their place here. Let’s talk about The Omen, because I’d never seen The Omen, so I watched it last night. Written by David Seltzer, directed by Richard Donner. This is where we get the popular culture or knowledge of 666 because they’ve mentioned it a lot in the course of the movie because it wasn’t known at that point. People didn’t know Book of Revelations 666, so they had to explain it a lot in the movie.

Story follows Gregory Peck, who is an ambassador, first we see him in Rome, then he’s coming into London. He and his wife have a young child. Only he knows that it’s actually adopted, because their child died when it was born. This is Damien, which is such a great name. It became iconic in terms of the demon child.

Craig: Basically, we were like, let’s take the word demon, and change it to Damien.

John: Perfect.

Craig: Yes, that sort of goes to why, to me, The Omen feels like somebody said, “Get me Rosemary’s Baby, get me The Exorcist, blend them, and let’s see what comes out the tube.”

John: I’ll try to find a link to it, but I was looking through one article, blog post that was arguing that the movie was deeply impacted by one episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which actually, an episode that had many of the same beats in terms of like politician raising the child, who is the Antichrist. This child, Damien, sinister things happen around them, a nanny hangs herself in a really graphic fashion.

Craig: That’s the best scene.

John: It’s the best scene.

Craig: “It’s all for you.”

John: It’s all for you. There’s a photographer who is tracking the family, who keeps noticing, funny that all these images are showing up in photos they’re taking of you.

Craig: Then he dies.

John: Then he dies. My frustration in watching it is that I really enjoyed how it started, I loved the filmmaking, and that ‘70s feel, it’s like this handheld–

Craig: Real grimy.

John: Yes, it was great to see, and then the movie gets dumber as it goes along.

Craig: Unfortunately, it does, because there’s nowhere for it to go. In the end, Rosemary’s Baby is about Rosemary. It’s not about the baby. The ending of Rosemary’s Baby is so horrifying, because all it is a mother who can’t help but be in love with her child, even though her child is the Antichrist. Because it is about motherhood, and it is about lack of agency.

Rosemary’s Baby is almost like, love is so powerful here that it doesn’t matter what happens, you’re going to love your child. The Exorcist is about saving a child. It’s about a priest who’s started to lose faith, and who feels like he hasn’t been able to help anyone, including his own mother, finally being able to do what Jesus did, give his life to save an innocent. The Omen is just sort of, just the kid is the problem.

John: The kid is the problem, and Gregory Peck ultimately doesn’t have to wrestle that much with it. He’s like, “Oh, I can’t kill my son,” but he can take those daggers. He’s ready to do it.

Craig: Yes, that’s the problem is, you’re just waiting, and then it’s just sort of the same thing of, okay, I can’t do it, I can’t kill him, and so then you end up, everybody dies, and Damien’s the devil who runs everything. That’s the thing. I just think it’s so much more remarkable that the ending of a movie like that, be the parent chooses to pick the child up and love it.

John: Yes.

Craig: That movie just got a little goofy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t like saying bad things.

John: No, not a bit. We should stress that all three of these movies were giant hits.

Craig: Huge.

John: Phenomenons, and they were lines around the block, which is the reason why they’re so anchored into place in popular culture in terms of establishing what we mean by Satanism. I would posit that we would not have our understanding of Satan and Satanism without these movies, in the same way, we didn’t used to be so afraid of going into the water until Jaws. It created a thing that is actually not really a thing. The moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music and all that stuff wouldn’t have happened without these three movies.

Craig: It would not. Just as our understanding of who Santa Claus is because Coca-Cola drew a picture of a guy, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a song written by an advertising firm for a department store in Chicago, I believe. We think these things have been there forever. They have not. We think that there’s been this concept, and it hasn’t. It came out of those movies. It came out of that time.

Then you’re absolutely right. What happened almost immediately, in terms of speed of a nation moving, was something called the Satanic Panic. These movies presented a situation where there was, not in the case of The Exorcist, but in the other two, a kind of conspiracy of people to bring about Satan in our world, who would then do bad things.

Very shortly thereafter, people started to say, I think that there’s a conspiracy to bring Satan out in our world. Just as they did with Galileo and everybody else, it became a great way to take people that no one liked and accuse them. It was Salem Witch Trials writ large. America got so stupid. We think of America now as stupid. No, no, we have been stupider than we are now.

John: Let’s jump forward to where we’re at now and the sequels to these movies. There were other movies that were in their same place. We saw Satanism in our television shows to some degree. Our serial killers that we would put in our stories, might sometimes be satanic. Right now, we’re not actually doing a lot with Satan or Satanism in our movies. Longlegs, head nods in that direction. We have a movie like Hereditary, isn’t Satanism, but it’s adjacent to it.

Craig: It’s adjacent but that feels more like possessory. Again, The Exorcist was about a possession, and the whole concept of exorcism, which is a very Latin word, is connected deeply to the Catholic Church, and it’s the idea that you can be possessed by something. There have been so many possession movies, all of which, ultimately for me, I just wonder, I wouldn’t know, it just feels so weird. It’s like making a movie about two young people falling in love on an enormous boat that’s going to hit an iceberg and sink. Now, do something original, and you’re like, I can’t. It’s done, as good as it can be done.

You’re right, Satan has gotten goofier now because we sort of, again, like The Devil’s Advocate, it’s broad, and it’s very winky, and sort of like, “Satan,” come on. When you see Peter Stormare’s depiction of Satan in Constantine, it’s almost like they said, “All right, you saw how big Pacino got, go bigger.” So Satan becomes broad because he presumes we’ve all heard of it, we all know it, and then it’s almost like he’s rolling his eyes about 666. It’s old-fashioned, it’s hokey.

John: It’s hokey, and I also wonder whether we’re reaching for other forms of cosmic horror. It’s not like we’re making Cthulhu movies all the time, but there’s other senses of just existential dread out there that don’t have to be so tied into one specific mythology there. Maybe we should be reaching for other ways of acknowledging the horror of the unknowable darkness.

Craig: Yes, and it may be that because we’re American, our tradition is so steeped in Satanism, going back to Salem and all the rest. It’s hard for us to feel the same things that we would feel about, say, Cthulhu, even though, of course, also a creation of an American.

John: Yes, 100%. I think we should also maybe wrap this up by saying, of course, this is all based on our very sort of Western views of what Satan is just because it comes out of that tradition. I’d love to hear what the Asian equivalent of this is. I guess we have The Ring.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Yes, some of those movies. Again, so we’re talking about this otherworldly horror that is unknowable and unstoppable.

Craig: Which, again, draws a lot of it, it seems to me, from The Exorcist. We are all people. We are all scared of the dark. It doesn’t matter where we grow up. We’re scared of the dark, we’re scared of the unknown, and we’re scared of ghosts. Japanese horror does a particularly good job of figuring out how to make ghosts really scary as well. Korean cinema does a beautiful job with this as well. Every culture has its nightmare creatures.

John: Absolutely, a way of showing those primal fears in a cinematic form.

Craig: Lord of the Rings. Sauron. That’s Sauron, Satan, nightmare. That’s on–

John: Absolutely. I say it as opposed to like a Voldemort who is a character who has a full, rich backstory and does it like, even though there’s a cabal trying to bring him back to life, there’s a little of that, but it’s not the same thing.

Craig: No, because Voldemort has not always been. The idea is that Satan was here before man. Before God made man, and Satan makes a bet with God about Job, and there’s all this stuff where it’s quite clear he’s floating above all of us or underneath all of us, I suppose.

John: All right, we have a couple of listener questions that are on topic.

Craig: Great.

John: Eric writes, “As you said, in a good screenplay, the protagonist goes from ignorance of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. It seems to me that in most movies, that involves a process of gradually embracing a positive truth that the protagonist needs to live a better life. What about movies with tragic endings, in particular horror films, where the protagonists end up dead, or at least much worse off than how they started the movie? Are they also still gradually learning to accept and embody a theme? It just happens to be a theme that destroys them instead of making them better. How does the journey from anti-theme to theme play out in The Exorcist for the protagonist, Father Damien, as he approaches his tragic ending?”

Craig: That one’s pretty easy. It is just a straight-up guy who’s questioning his faith. He has doubts. He is not sure how he is supposed to be an effective priest to anyone. He’s certainly not the person that the Catholic Church is thrilled about to go help this girl. They send– the exorcist is somebody else. It’s not him, it’s Max von Sydow. He’s the exorcist, but he dies. It’s really there so that Father Karras, at some point, can decide, “I’m going to commit myself to saving somebody at any cost, even if it’s my own life.”

And so in his final words, he says, “Take me, take me, take me.” It happens. Then he throws himself out the window and goes down those amazing stairs. That is about as clear of a going from anti-theme because in the beginning, he’s like, “I’m not very good at being a priest.”

John: I think other sort of horror films. the first Alien is a horror film. Ripley’s journey is great, to get singled out and actually rise to the occasion in ways that embody a lot of the themes we’re supposed to be doing here. In a lot of other horror films, especially slasher films, you can say that, yes, it’s actually tougher to chart the journey of that character. They’re surviving, but are they growing and changing in a way that is meaningful? Sometimes, yes, but a lot of very successful movies in that genre, you’re not seeing those same dynamics.

Craig: No. Myself, I’m not a big student of those films. Sometimes, when you look at how people describe the mechanics of screenwriting, you should also ask, what kind of movies do they make? I talked about the mechanics of screenwriting all the time, but there are kinds of movies that I’m not that into. I’m not that into– I was never a big fan of the Halloween films or the Friday the 13th films, because it didn’t really do anything for me, mostly for this reason. Didn’t seem like there was much there other than, “I’m not going to let you kill me.”

John: Absolutely, the final girl, “I will survive.”

Craig: The final girl.

John: I’ll see essays that really talk about the dynamics of that, and it’s great. I’m so glad you’re finding meaning in that. It just doesn’t resonate with me.

Craig: Right, and so what I would say to Eric is, you might not see this applying to some of these movies, and that’s okay because that is not really a skeleton key for everything. I think I pretty clearly said this is for mainstream storytelling of a certain sort.

John: I can imagine a better version of The Omen that has a lot more of that character arching, too. It’s not like the father’s desperate for a child and then to have to decide to kill the child.

Craig: It could be better.

John: It could be better.

Craig: It could be better.

John: Emily asks, “What’s the difference really between thriller and horror?”

Craig: Well, it’s whatever we want to say it is. Ultimately, it’s terminology.

John: There’s overlap between the two, but there’s a lot of thrillers that are horrifying, and there’s horror things that actually aren’t thrillers in the sense there’s not suspense. They’re just dark.

Craig: Thrillers, in my mind, are designed to quicken your pulse and get you chewing on your fingernails because you’re nervous. Horror movies are supposed to make you look away because you’re scared. Those are the two–

John: Sure.

Craig: Those are supposed to scare.

John: Absolutely, because there are political thrillers. I guess you could imagine a political horror movie, but it’s like it’s not the, it’d be very different. Michael, our final question. “I wanted to get your opinion on horror films never doing well during awards season. It seems like regardless of the quality of horror films or the performances in them, there’s never any Oscar buzz around them. Does Hollywood hate horror?”

Craig: Does Hollywood hate horror? Hollywood loves horror.

John: Loves horror.

Craig: That’s why they keep making horror films. What you’re asking is-

John: It’s so much money. It’s so cheap.

Craig: -do Oscar voters hate horror? I don’t know if they hate it. They just don’t seem to be that into it, but again–

John: If you look at the films that have incredible quality, they still do get singled out. The Silence of the Lambs, horror film. Well, horror film, thriller, both.

Craig: Thriller. It’s a thriller-

John: It’s scary.

Craig: -with scary moments. Look, the genre films, yes, of course, like comedies, they are generally overlooked in favor of the Oscars to some extent become about these smaller movies a lot. They’ve expanded it to make it a little bit better. Repeatedly, we end up in a situation where, yes, big movies that are very scary and have really lasting, deep impact on culture aren’t even considered.

John: No.

Craig: Because they’re genre and the Oscars are snobby.

John: Also, let’s be realistic that the makers of those horror films aren’t trying to win those Oscars and they’re not doing the work that it would take to win those Oscars.

Craig: Because they know it won’t work.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s a trick of the day problem, yes.

Craig: I think it would be fair to say like, “Look, you make a big comedy and everybody laughs and they have a good time. You also know, we’re not going to spend money on an Oscar campaign, it’s just not happening.” The Oscars are for dramas and they’re for a certain drama that appeals to a certain age of people.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing, I’m reaching back, I’ve probably, this has been my one cool thing, maybe three times, but it’s so topical that I need to do it, which is the short story Gifted by Simon Rich, which is about these parents who discover their child– the child is born with horns. It is the Antichrist. They are so obsessed with getting it into Dalton to get it into a really good private school and to make sure their son’s life is as awesome as it can be. It is just hilarious. It’s just a great reminder of, for all the tropes you set up in a genre, the antitropes can be just hilarious.

Craig: So funny. My one cool thing this week is a television series. You know me, I don’t watch a lot of things. I’m two-thirds of the way through, it’s called Say Nothing or in the parlance of the show, Say Nothin’. It is a series about a woman named Dolours Price, who was a member of the IRA and most infamously perpetrated car bombings in London and was imprisoned and went on a hunger strike and was force-fed and tortured and then sent back.

It’s also about Gerry Adams, who, and this is fascinating. I’ve never seen this before. At the end, so Gerry Adams, this show is based on a book, and Gerry Adams runs the IRA, he’s going through all this stuff, and at the end of every episode, it comes up and it says, “To this day, Gerry Adams denies ever being a member of the IRA or participating in any violent activities.” That disclaimer, I’m sure Gerry Adams’ lawyers thought would be real good for him. It is the most damning disclaimer I’ve– and the fact that they repeat it at the end of every episode is so brutal. I think it’s just beautifully done.

John: Great.

Craig: It’s gorgeously performed and filmed, and the writing is excellent. Josh Zetumer is the showrunner here. Just beautiful work. My kind of show. Congratulations to everybody that clearly worked so hard on Say Nothing. Oh, and also now, because I’ve been watching it, I think I can do this, and if you’re from Northern Ireland, please go ahead and write in and tell me I blew it. This is the phrase I’ve been working on, is do it now. Okay, ready? “Do it nye.” How is it?

John: Nice.

Craig: Well, it may not be nice. We’re going to hear from some folks from Belfast. I want to hear how bad I did, or how good.

John: How good, How good. Where do we see that show?

Craig: That’s on Hulu.

John: Hulu.

Craig: On Hulu.

John: Hulu.

Craig: Hulu.

John: Hulu. That is our show for this week. Scripnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Chilelli, who did our very special outro this week. Matthew, thank you for this.

[music]

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. It’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Antichrist.

Craig: Oh, there’s more Antichrist?

John: Yes.

Craig: Good.

John: Good.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Craig, thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, the Antichrist today. Let’s figure out who we should– Who’s a good candidate for the Antichrist? Because, and we should also specify, which aspect, is it just supposed to be the son of Satan, or is it supposed to be the false prophet who leads us away from the true teachings of Jesus Christ? Do we need the person who seems evil, or the person who seems really good? There’s lots of ways we can go here, so what are some of your instincts?

Craig: Well, the way that people tend to treat this is somebody shows up who is really slick and appealing.

John: Up-facing the crowd, yes.

Craig: Everybody wants to vote for this person, this person seems great, but then casually starts to convert us all to a one-world government, which is the worst possible thing.

John: Yes, of course.

Craig: Like a one-town government or a one-state government. Why would everybody just– what? Okay, so one-world government’s the worst possible thing, and then they start doing horrible things, and of course, it’s over. The person who would be the most hysterical Antichrist to me would be Kirk Cameron.

John: Oh yes, that’d be great.

Craig: Kirk Cameron was a child actor on sitcoms in the ‘80s.

John: Growing Pains.

Craig: Became very, very religious, and then has dedicated his time since to a lot of evangelical Christianity, but also making these movies about the Antichrist. In those movies, he’s the hero who’s trying to stop everybody from believing in the Antichrist. That is what the Antichrist– that is the movie the Antichrist would be making to get the lens off of him.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: It’s very clever, see? That said, Elon Musk is a pretty decent candidate.

John: Mr. Beast. Name is right there.

Craig: Wow.

John: Mr. Beast, he’s doing all this good in the world.

Craig: What a put.

John: He’s helping blind people see. He’s giving away all this money.

Craig: Mr. Beast.

John: He’s obviously the most generous person on Earth.

Craig: You’re right. It’s sort of like in Angel Heart, Robert De Niro plays the devil, and he introduces himself as Louis Cypher.

John: Yes, can’t figure that out.

Craig: Lucifer.

John: Wow. Mind is blown.

Craig: Jeez Louise, come on devil, do better.

John: All right, so if we’re starting with somebody who’s already powerful, then Elon Musk or some other billionaire feels like a good choice. Taylor Swift in terms of her influence, in terms of her ability to get the young people motivated to do terrible things like vote.

Craig: This is why I think people get real keyed up about the UN. If you know anything about the United Nations, you know that the one thing you never have to worry about is the United Nations doing anything-

John: Oh, 100%.

Craig: -in a particularly effective, quick–

John: People want to think of the UN as like a government. Does it govern anything? No.

Craig: It’s the biggest Zoom meeting where nothing happens ever. Yet, because it smells of one world government, yes, the person, whoever’s running the UN, the Secretary General of the UN is always looked at as a possibility.

Then I think you’re right, in the modern times what’s happened is kids through rap culture and through hip hop culture have swung over to this idea of the Illuminati. They’re super into the Illuminati, when in fact, I don’t think there is– there seems to be some really screwed up parties going on.

John: I think we should talk about it because I didn’t know that was happening.

Craig: You and I, I think, we are on the outs, man. We have never been invited to anything like that, nor did we– We’re actually quite sweet in that, I’m sure you were like–

John: I’ve been invited to board game nights.

Craig: What? Yes, when you read that, you were like, “What? Really?” Yes, we play D&D and I do my puzzles. It turns out that some bad things are happening. That said, they aren’t satanic. That’s the whole point, they’re just people being jerks, and a jerk is a very mild term for the things that they were doing. They were being criminals and violent criminals. That’s always been a thing. Maybe people would think like Sean Combs, but he’s in prison now.

John: Sort of by definition, you want the Antichrist to have a lot of sway and power in popular culture and he at the moment does not.

Craig: Who are we all cheering for?

John: Obviously a president feels like a good candidate for an Antichrist because they have so much power. They can literally do a lot of things. They can start wars.

Craig: Donald Trump, it’s too obvious. He’s too clumsy, he’s like Mr. Magoo.

John: Yes, so like Hillary Clinton would be a better choice.

Craig: Well, Bill Clinton, really. The thing is–

John: Oh, he’s charming, yes.

Craig: That’s the thing. The devil is charming. When these charming– Justin Trudeau, there’s so much weird pretty privilege that turns into-

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: -pretty paranoia where we are terrified of these good-looking men, more so than women, it seems. Good-looking men who get a lot of power, you’re like, “Wait a second.”

John: Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Ryan Reynolds. By the way, Ryan, the thing is, if we are going to have Satan, and it is Ryan Reynolds–

John: Satan or Antichrist, it could be a manifestation. It could be the son of the devil.

Craig: If it were, you want them to be Canadian and you want a nice– A nice Canadian Antichrist is going to be like, okay, it is one world and so we are going to– there are going to be more traffic lights and things. I’ve lived in Canada for a while now. We’re all going to drive the speed limit. We’re all going to drive like we have nowhere to go. This is my impression of a Vancouver driver. Just driving like I don’t need to get somewhere. That would be the worst of it. I think Ryan actually would be okay if he was in charge of the one world government. He does a really good job at the gin.

John: I think part of the challenge with the term Antichrist is that we think of it as being just like a polar opposite of Jesus Christ. Therefore it would have to be like, not humble, but like boasty and caring for only the rich and all this stuff. We can envision that, but it doesn’t actually– it’s unattractive. It doesn’t lead to power in any good way.

Craig: No. No. I wonder if Ryan’s going to hear this and just go, “What? I was just on the show.”

John: “I was just on the show.”

Craig: “I don’t need this. No.” Ryan Reynolds is not the Antichrist.

John: He’s not the Antichrist.

Craig: No, he’s not the Antichrist.

John: It would be, if you were the devil–

Craig: You would want to look like Ryan Reynolds.

John: Most men wouldn’t be upset with you.

Craig: I also want to look like Ryan. I don’t want to be the Antichrist. I just want to be able to do sit-ups.

John: Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Rosemary’s Baby – Screenplay
• The Exorcist – Screenplay
• The Omen – Screenplay
• Gifted by Simon Rich
• Say Nothing
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.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: Well. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 665 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we often talk about characters needing agency, but what does that look like on the page? We’ll explore agency on the scene level and in the script overall. Then it’s listener questions on sign language, screenwriting while blind, and credits when something is written for television, but then goes theatrical.

In our bonus segment for premium members, Disneyland. Craig, I just went to Disneyland for the first time in many, many years. I want to talk about Disneyland and our experience of theme parks as folks who create entertainment for those giant corporations.

Craig: My wife loves Disneyland.

John: But I’m guessing you don’t so much.

Craig: I’m not against it.

John: I’m not against it either.

Craig: I like Disney World, but it’s so far away and I’m never going to Florida again. So I guess I should probably get back into Disneyland.

John: Mike and I are not Disney adults, but we went as adults on election day to avoid all the anxiety of election time.

Craig: How’d that work out?

John: It was actually a very good distraction for the period of time that we were at Disneyland. Then we just did not open up any social media on the phone. Then we got home and eventually we had to break the seal and the bottom fell out of the world.

Maybe we’ll start with that. Remember back in 2016, we actually did a bonus episode of Scriptnotes the day after the election saying the title was Everything Will Be Okay but I was genuinely freaked out then. I was also really upset this time, but not as astonished, I guess.

Craig: First, let’s try and find some vague silver lining here even though a lot of people have very good reason to be concerned. This was eight years ago and we said everything will be okay. Everything’s not okay but the world didn’t end.

John: Did not end.

Craig: So that’s something. That’s a data point. Things definitely didn’t go great. This time it doesn’t feel good again. We’re going to have to see what happens. The only weird psychological difference for me this time was A, I already knew what it was like to feel this. It wasn’t a new feeling.

And B, and this might feel counterintuitive, the first time it seemed like everybody just made a really crazy mistake. People were just goofing around and mistakenly elected a guy. This time, no, they fully chose. They fully chose. This is the country we live in. This is the choice they made, and now we live with it. It’s not going to be great, and who knows?

John: The who knows is a big factor here because it’s as we talked about on our last episode, the uncertainty and the anxiety that comes with uncertainty is big. In that episode, we were talking about waiting on a decision for a thing and the situation of knowing that we have x number of years ahead of us of this stuff and that it’s going to be remembering how exhausting 2016 through 2020 was and just getting through that. Yet we know we got through it.

We also know that people throughout history have gotten through things. A thing that I’ve talked about on the show before is that the Great Big Book of Horrible Things, which is this book I read every couple of years which recounts the hundred greatest losses of life over the course of human history. It sounds so depressing, but what you learn about when you look at those terrible events in history is yes, but we still got here. For all the suffering that happened in the moment, humanity did pull through.

Craig: I think it’s unlikely that we will vaporize. The other, I wouldn’t call this hope or silver lining as much as notably pragmatic, is that now everyone is prepared. We take care of the people that we love. We look out for people that aren’t living in States where the laws are good, and we take action to help the people we need to help as best we can. And we do whatever we can. Acknowledging that there are limitations to what we can do until such time as this democracy chooses otherwise. That’s the best we can do. Yes, 2016 to 2020 was exhausting. There was also this insane pandemic. He didn’t cause that pandemic as far as we know.

John: Here’s the thing is that there’s going to be a bunch of unexpected surprises logged our way. You want to have people in those positions who can best deal with those things. I don’t feel like we’re going to have a highly staffed, competent government to do those things and that is a concern for me. For example, I’m concerned about the safety of the AI systems that are being developed. I don’t feel like this is a group of decision-makers who are particularly well-suited for the task.

Craig: They don’t seem particularly well suited for any task. I don’t know how that will end up, but I’m very focused on a couple of realities. The most important of which is, I must be aware of the things that are within my control. I know I can vote, I know I can donate money, I know I can talk to people, but I also know that there are some things I cannot influence whatsoever. I am not able to influence legislation about AI. No.

John: I’m not able to influence this man’s relationship with Putin, which I think is incredibly alarming, but not. We talked last week about the circle of concern and circle of control, and that they don’t overlap very much. Yet what I have found very helpful in these days after this election result was to make a list of the things I’m actually worried about. Actually, just chart them, because sometimes it’s just as a amorphous blob but when you actually list them down, you’re like, “This is a long list, but I can see them.”

For each one of them, is there anything I can control or effect about this? In most cases, a lot of cases, no, but in some cases yes. For example, I’m really alarmed about the damage that can be done to our US healthcare system under this person. But the actual steps I’m going to take is I can make sure I got my flu shot, I got my COVID booster, make sure I’m up to date on other vaccinations. I can get extra copies of the prescription medicines that I actually need. I can have those. My daughter can get plan B which lasts for four years. There are some things like that you can do.

I’m really concerned about the economy just blowing up. An individual can save money, they can also just think about, “What are the plans you could take if things got bad. What are the roommate situations? What are the moving home situations? What are the things you could do?” Because at least that’s something you can think about that’s under your control versus these uncontrollable issues.

Craig: If you extend that too far, you end up a prepper. You have to find the balance, which is difficult but trying to reengage the neocortex and kick the lizard brain back a little bit is valuable. It does help put things in context and it does give you at least a sense that you’re not just running around in circles screaming. That’s pretty much about the best you can do.

John: The other thing you can remind yourself is that it’s okay to feel grief and upset and outrage, but it’s also okay to feel joy and happy. You don’t have to live inside a horror movie.

Craig: It’s actually critical. I was talking about this with my older kid, how living a joyous life is the best revenge. We will have to do things to try and make sure that we can live a joyous life, including choosing where we live. If it seems to me over the course of time, if I look around and I’m like, “Oh dear, this is sliding towards something horrible, even here in California,” I’ll leave. I will. I’ve always felt like you got to keep one eye on reality.

Now, generally, I’ve never actually thought about that as an American, really. I’ve never thought, “Oh, would I ever have to leave?” I don’t believe I would ever have to leave here because I don’t really think that there is an America. I think there are two Americas. I think there are in a cold civil wars, how I would call it. It’s not a shooting war, but it’s a cold civil war. There’s a really good article in Wired. I guess I’ll make it one of my cool things about California and how California, despite everyone else’s screaming and gnashing of teeth, is just dragging everybody toward the future.

It’s what we do but the other thing that isn’t within my control and that I’ve absolutely exercised is even though I had a very diminished footprint on social media, I’ve turned it off entirely. Because I think at this point, it is fair to say nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about. Everybody is under the delusion that they can influence other people. They can’t. They are simply talking to each other and reverberating. I am totally with you, John, that the most important thing is that we don’t let any person steal our joy. Even in the midst of other people’s suffering, we do what we can to help them.

John: You and I are in the business of hopefully making joy or hopefully we’re making entertainment. It feels so trivial to be doing that in time when things could be– Things aren’t awful right now. But they could get awful. How are you going to continue to work? I do remember in 2016, I was writing the second of the Arlo Finch books, which is the best of the Arlo Finch books. It actually was a terrific privilege to just be able to disappear into that work at that time. So I would say, yes, all of the stress outside stressors can be a negative impact on your work, but they can also invite you into your work to focus on those and create meaning in them.

Craig: We’re in post-production. I gathered everyone together and I don’t presume what people’s politics are. I don’t talk to them in any way about, oh, everyone here hates what happened. I don’t presume that but what I did say was I imagine that there are quite a few feelings right now. We talked through what options were for people. Then I just reminded them that making shows like the one we make, it’s one of the last things that Americans seem to enjoy doing together, are watching sporting events, watching certain television shows, going to certain movies. Everybody’s happy to just do that together. There’s not much left. We don’t watch the same news, we don’t live in the same states, we don’t believe the same things, we don’t listen to the same music.

It’s all over the place. Then there are these moments where we’re all like the way it used to be, where everybody just does things together and we’re something that people can do together. It matters. It actually matters. We’re not making vaccines, we know that. We’re not curing cancer. But it’s actually significant.

John: It feels like a natural segue into our main topic today, which is on agency. Back in episode 627, Aline was here and she and I were talking about this term agentic, which is related to main character energy. People describing themselves as wanted to be agentic.

Craig: I hate that word so much.

John: You were gone for that episode. Here’s what I do respect about it. It’s about taking the reins of your destiny to do things the way you want to do them. It’s being the protagonist in your story. It can relate to that grind in hustle culture, but also about taking risks socially and professionally and not being afraid to take space and demand attention, which are generally noble goals. Sometimes we have this instinct to hide back in the corner when we shouldn’t do that.

It’s about taking that step outside of yourself and saying, “What should this person who is me do in this situation to achieve those goals?” Let’s now turn this back to the actual work that we do, which is our characters and our stories. How do we think about agency and what does agency really mean for them? Craig, what’s your definition of agency? What does agency mean for a character and a story?

Craig: I always think of it as giving a character qualities that allows them to change the plot. Basically they can make choices that change the plot.

John: Absolutely. They have autonomy. They have the ability to make choices themselves. They’re self-driven rather than be directed by others. They’re not on rails that they really have to do a thing.

Craig: And there are choices to make.

John: There are choices to make. Absolutely, and that they’re making those choices with intentionality. There’s a reason why they’re making this choice versus that choice. Sometimes they can make the wrong choices, but they still had the ability to make that choice. I think that last point is so crucial that there’s the possibility of effectiveness. It’s plausible that the choices could have an impact on their situation and in a meta-level, change the story.

Craig: Sometimes when people write stories, they’ll have a character make a choice because they, the writer, need them to make that choice to make stuff work. We can feel it every time. That’s where you’ll start to hear, “We’re not sure this character has agency because they just made a choice for no reason. It’s not particularly consistent with what we know about them or how they’ve lived before. They’re just doing it and it worked out well for your plot.” That’s not ideal. Then we don’t really feel the illusion of a real person there, because, of course, it is all an illusion.

John: Absolutely. I think the Inside Out movies do a great job with a sense of characters who are making choices that are having a direct impact on the story overall. In both movies, Joy has a goal. In trying to achieve her goal, she’s creating the plot of the story and her misguided assumptions are changing what’s happening there. You see that reflected in the real world too, in terms of the real-world character who’s trying to do things that we can understand why she’s trying to do them, even though they’re the wrong choices she’s making.

Craig: We, as we write, have to basically be all of the emotions of our character. We are joy and we’re anger and we’re sadness and anxiety. We’re all those things. We just have to figure out in these moments which one of those things is going to be driving the character.

There are some characters that play as purely logical, very rational. They are almost never the hero because we are not interested in investing our emotions in somebody who is not driven by their emotions.

Spock is a great side character. In the team that’s breaking into, the Russian intelligence building, there’s always one character who has no emotions and is just incredibly dry and matter-of-fact, but that’s never your hero. Your hero has to get angry, your hero has to be scared, your hero has to have worries, and your hero has to love something.

John: Those emotions that we need to be able to see. We need to find ways to externalize these internal stakes so we can actually see what they’re doing. We need to believe that they are informing the choices that they make, that they’re actually contributing to, that the actions that we’re seeing them take, that next line of dialog comes out of what is underneath the surface there that we believe exists.

Craig: Choices are difficult. If it’s an easy choice, it’s not a choice.

John: You brought up the idea of like, we mostly hear about agency when we get the note. It feels like the character lacks agency. Let’s translate that. What is an executive really saying when they’re giving you that note?

Craig: Usually that everybody else in the story is laying out for that character what needs to be done and that character picks one of the options that they’ve laid out, or the character is stuck. Someone says, “We’ve got to go rescue this person. They’re here. We’ve got to do this and this.” You’re like, “Okay. I’m going.” Then really what you’re left with as a character is, “How well do I aim a gun?” That’s not agency. That’s just skill, which is cheap. You start to feel like there isn’t a person there who is in charge of their life. They’re just an NPC.

John: I can envision two different scenarios where you might hear the agency note. They’re different situations. There’s the, it feels like this person is giving these choices and they’re just doing this thing, but they’re on autopilot, and it’s almost like they’ve been assigned a mission. Like, you’re going to do these things in this order, and this is how you’re going to do it. That feels like a lack of agency. That feels like a lack of choice.

You also see characters who, because of the situation you’ve put them in, like it’s a depressed young mother in a small town who can’t get out of her thing. It’s like, she feels like she doesn’t have agency. I’ve not created a situation where that person can actually make a choice that can influence their life. Those are different things and require very different solutions.

Craig: We used to hear passive. That was really what we, then somebody came up with agency and our business loves a buzzword.

John: At the end of the day, our business loves a buzzword.

Craig: The business of it all loves a buzzword or buzzphrase. Agency took over from passive but it’s similar. It is similar. There’s nothing wrong to be clear with a character who you define as somebody who is trapped because they have no agency. And then they are forced by your plot hand to start to make difficult choices, which forces them to experience what it means to have agency. 40-year-old Virgin, there’s no agency there. He’s just going through life on autopilot and then he is forced to try and do stuff.

John: I think what’s comparing that like, here’s the mission you’ve been assigned versus kicking you out of your comfort zone. The work the writer needs to do is so very different. The passive character lacks agency because they have no choice put before them. Fundamentally your story is different. You need to find a reason why you’re telling this one-time story of this character who’s changed and has to undertake this quest to do a thing versus the “you’ve been assigned this mission.”

That’s the carpentry job that you and I are sometimes hired to do is like, “How do I get these beats to happen in a way where our character is actually making the choices to do these things?” That’s why Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, he gets the self-destructing message, but then he’s making his– charting his own course.

Craig: This is our version of magicians forcing cards. They give you the impression that you have agency, that you get to pick a card, any card. That is what we’re doing too. You do not get to pick any card. This character actually doesn’t have agency. They don’t exist. But our job is to make it seem like they do.

John: A thing I’ve said often talking about character wants and motivations is the hero’s allowed to drive wherever they want to drive. We’re building the roads. Yes, you can drive anywhere you want. These are the roads you got. We are laying out the roads and it feels natural because there have to be roads, and so we built the roads for them.

Craig: It’s a weird job that we do.

John: It’s a very weird job.

Craig: It’s very strange.

John: Talking about the note about character slack agency, I think sometimes it’s a mismatch of character and story. You’ve created a character who doesn’t have the tools or expertise for this really interesting plot. You may have just picked the wrong hero for this plot or the wrong plot for this hero. And the gears don’t match, and so therefore the engine doesn’t work right.

Craig: None of my skills, abilities, desires, none of them have anything to do with the story that’s happening. The plot that we choose is designed specifically to test a certain human being who has certain limitations, needs, wants, or undiscovered strengths. If we don’t pick that plot for them, then it really doesn’t matter if we give them a choice because the choices don’t matter and it doesn’t feel like it’s purposeful.

John: The other problem I see sometimes is you have characters who feel like they are rats in a maze. It happens a lot in horror movies where they are just responding to the stimulus that’s being put there. Some of the very best horror movies, Alien is a great example of a scary movie that where the characters do have agency and are making choices and there are conflicts between characters because of the choices that they’re making. That is when it feels great. But when it’s just we have to get away from this madman and I can go through this door or through that door, that doesn’t really feel like agency.

Craig: No. That’s running. Now, usually, there is a character early on in horror films that has no agency on purpose who just gets chewed up. Poor woman swimming when the shark gets her. She has no agency. Usually, the first person that Jason or Freddy gets has no agency. That’s what NPCs are for, to demonstrate the formidable nature of the villain. Then our hero, they’re the ones who are like, and in horror movies, this does happen where you’re like, “Clearly plot armor has come into play.”

Plot armor exists specifically to protect characters who have agency. The reason we call plot armor is it’s not working well enough because the choices that they’re making in theory aren’t good enough to keep them alive based on the rules of what we know. You got to watch out for that one or else you just stop worrying about your characters.

John: Indeed. Let’s talk about what agency looks like on the page. In the course of a scene, how do you think about agency within a scene? You talked about it from your protagonist or from other characters in the scene. What does agency look like in a scene for you?

Craig: I always start with, what is the point of this scene? The point–

John: Your point as-

Craig: My point as the writer.

John: -as the writer.

Craig: The point is surely to change this character in some way, to express a need or want, or to fail. All of those things require the person to make choices. If they just walk outside and get walloped, it’s not interesting. They make a choice in every scene. No matter what, they must choose something. If they just walk outside and it’s like, “We’ve got to figure out how to get from here to here,” and there’s no choice, even if the choice is, “There’s only one way to get there, but it’s incredibly dangerous. Should we do it or not? We should do it.” I need to understand that choice and I need to know what the ramifications are of it.

John: They’re making a choice. They’re deciding to make a choice. They’re not being forced to make a choice. They’re deciding to make a choice. It’s plausible that the choice that they’re making is effective. You can believe that they think that that choice is effective.

Craig: That the choice is effective. It is also important to make sure that the choice is not irrevocable because if it is, then it doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t choose their way out of it. So running away is a great choice to always keep for your characters in whatever form running away would take, so that you know that you can back out of it. You don’t have to go through with it. Therefore when you do, it is either because of courage or folly. It’s a smart idea or it’s a bad idea, but the choice remains all the way.

John: Absolutely. If you’re designing your character as well, each different character would make us a different choice in that moment. Both in what they’re going to say and what they’re going to do, the choice that they’re making should reveal more about that character and more about why they are such a unique person in this situation but it has to be specific to who they are and what they’re doing.

Craig: You brought up the idea of arguing. Debating the choice is important. It underscores where each person is coming from. Arguing is a great instrument that we have, like sleigh of hand for magicians to create the illusion of agency because people are arguing for their points of view, which means they have a perspective that is individual and individuated from each other, which is also important. If everybody agrees, and everybody is like, it can either be A or B, and everybody votes B, we got a problem with the story.

John: I will agree. An argument or disagreement should reveal the differences, it should reveal power imbalances, it should reveal hidden things that are not being spoken about. If characters are disagreeing, it should be more than about A or B, it should really be about some other situation that’s behind the scenes.

Let’s talk about agency within a sequence. By this, I mean a collection of scenes that are driving towards one specific point. To me, even if you’re given a task, a mission of what to do, you want characters to have autonomy on how they do it. If we know that we need to blow up that bridge, great. If that’s the goal, fantastic, but let’s see our characters making the decisions about how to do that and then we as storytellers frustrate those decisions and force them to rethink their plans along the way.

Craig: Yes. There are also sequences that are defined by characters revealing, and this is a double negative, revealing that they really don’t have agency. Characters that are obsessive, that are losing the plot, so to speak, who convinced you they were being rational and then you realize they’re not. That’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

I love Star Trek: First Contact. That movie is great. A lot of it is basically lifted from Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab pretends he has agency. He makes you believe he has agency and then he exhibits this quality that we recognize in people, which is, okay now it’s a notable lack of agency. It’s not mistaken. It’s notable. They’re trying to hide it. That’s also fine. A lot of humans move through life without any real ability to shift the levers. They just keep doing what they do.

John: They keep pulling the slot machine and expecting the reward. Finally, let’s zoom all the way back out to a movie, an episode of that, a series, or the whole series in terms of what agency looks like in the course of those. Sometimes I’ve seen problems where it’s like, “You’ve made the wrong choices because you focused on characters who didn’t have agency or you had to make smart choices about who you were focusing on because of lack of agency. I was thinking about the movie Thirteen Lives, which focuses on the tie soccer team that’s trapped in the caves, the flooded caves. It’s important to see their perspective. Yet those characters, once they’re trapped, they have very little agency.

Craig: Correct. They’re trapped.

John: Exactly. Once we’re there and we have the means to get them out, then seeing that their decision making process about how they’re going to do it makes a lot of sense. They’re basically like Baby Jessica did down the well. It’s a story about them, but they’re not actually the central characters.

Craig: There are situations where we have an expectation that there won’t be agency. Let’s say for instance, you live in the Soviet Union and someone calls you and says, “We need you to do what the government is telling you to do.” You’re like, “Guess I’m filing that report.” Then the character’s expression of agency is underlined as some startling act that then has to be encouraged somehow, or else you, again take it away.

Or you have a story where you imply to somebody that they have agency and then you behave in a way that undermines them completely because only you deserved agency, not them. That’s also fun. Those arcs go across all the episodes or the whole movie, and you will find at the end of things, seasons or movies that you find out who really gets to choose and who doesn’t.

John: Looking at TV series, Lost is like– Let me talk about what you’re looking for overall. The audience has characters and wants to see those heroes accomplish a thing. You really can’t talk about agency without some goal or larger purpose. In Lost, it’s that you want those characters to get off the island. Severance of series you and I both like is a lot about agency and its characters deliberately severing their agency.

Craig: Then trying to get it back.

John: Exactly. We want them as an audience to be able to get that back and figure out just how to reconnect it. In Big Fish, we want to see the father and the son reconcile. They both have quite a lot of agency in trying to do that. But the mismatch of how they’re going about trying to do it is the frustration and ultimately hopefully the success of their story.

Craig: Every romance involves people who have a choice and we just keep waiting for them to make the choice and want them to make. If they just made it, there wouldn’t be a good story.

Then the question is, why aren’t you making the choice we want you to make? You got to give them a really good reason to not make the choice that you want them to make. It has to be compelling. Otherwise, you end up with a situation where you think you’ve given these characters agency and people who read your script will say it just seemed like they were not getting together for no good reason other than you needing to keep them apart until page 98. Now you’ve put your finger on a problem, you need to give them a reason.

John: Yes. Its tough. Let’s wrap up this agency conversation with, I’m trying to think if there’s any good general takeaways. Agency is one of those telescoping things. You see it on the very small scale. You see it on the very large scale. It’s not just for our heroes. We’ve mostly been talking about our protagonist.

Craig: Oh yes. The villains must have it.

John: Villains must have it. Yes, if you do a freeze frame and you’re looking at that third guard over there–

Craig: NPC.

John: NPC, we won’t care. Supporting characters too, we need to believe that they’re there for reasons beyond just the plot and to help out the protagonist.

Craig: Anybody that you want to foreground, needs to feel like they are not dancing on your string. If we can see the strings, it’s over.

John: I think you particularly notice that if a character who has been supporting character is allowed to drive scenes by themselves, if they actually can be a POV character on things, that it doesn’t feel like they have any agency. It doesn’t feel like they can make independent decisions. Oh shit, something’s wrong there.

Craig: You don’t want to follow what should be a day player. You have a scene between your hero and your villain are facing off at a diner. You don’t want to spend time with the waiter in the kitchen for any reason because they don’t have agency. They will be making no choices that impact the plot whatsoever.

John: I will never write this movie, so I’m fine to talk about it on the air. I’ve always wanted to do a romcom that was set inside the movie world of The Spy Who Loved Me. What I love about The Spy Who Loved Me is they’re inside this giant tanker ship, and we see all these other henchmen who are working for —

Craig: So many henchmen.

John: So many henchmen and I just want those henchmen to fall in love. I want to see their story, and I want basically a Rosencrantz and Guild’s turn in there. That’s a question of agency. They have no agency when it comes to doing their bosses deeds, or they have a lot of agency in terms of falling in love.

Craig: Mike Myers did this joke in Austin Powers where a henchman is killed, and then you just leave to go to his family, and they get the phone call to figure out what to do with that dad. It’s great and it’s funny because the notion that that person’s a real human being is hysterical to us because we just know they’re not. They’re just people dying in the background so that our heroes and villains can finally get to each other. It is amazing how we compartmentalize these things. We watch human beings literally murdered and we don’t feel their humanity whatsoever. None.

John: But if our guy get’s like, a cut on the arm, “Oh, no. Indiana Jones, you’re hurt.”

Craig: What will happen? This is important. Meanwhile, there’s guys in the background just dying. That’s Kevin Smith’s thing in Clerks, that Luke Skywalker is a war criminal because all the people on the Death Star were just doing their jobs.

John: Absolutely. They’re maintenance.

Craig: Literally. They don’t even know what the Death Star does. They certainly don’t know that it’s called the Death Star. Who would take that gig?

John: Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Seb in London.

Drew: Seb writes, I’m writing a pilot script where one of my characters is deaf and communicates through BSL. There are times when one other character in a group communicates with them through BSL, similarly to Sam and Henry in The Last of Us. How do I convey this when writing the script? Is it as simple as one line of action in the very first scene to give the reader the information, or do I have to preface every line of dialogue that’s signed?

Craig: Do not preface every line of dialogue.

John: No, that will be exhausting.

Craig: You can do a little indication early. I think, I’m pretty sure for that script, I just put that stuff in italics.

John: I have it in one of my scripts for a main character who’s deaf. The first time where it’s introduced, Garrett, who’s deaf, signs to Leyhill, parenthesis, we will always subtitle this so you know that it’s there. I boldface those lines just because it was a little easier to spot because there’s other languages that were sometimes in italics. To me, it’s important that I always show what that character is signing, even if other characters are translating the scene because there can be a difference in discrepancy there. I don’t just have the character who’s talking and doing the interpreting. I want to make sure that it’s actually clear that this person specifically had lines.

Craig: Sam would have dialogue.

John: Sam has dialogue in there.

Craig: It’s just in italics. We would understand he would be signing. By the way, that is how Keyvan understood what to perform. It was a little easier, I think, for us because so many of those scenes were really just between two brothers. It was quite clear how that conversation would go. But I think for the purposes of a page, even if you have 12 characters, 3 are deaf and 9 are not, just indicate how you’re doing it. Stick to some consistent method, whether it’s bolding or italicizing.

My personal opinion is don’t put too much garnish on the dialogue because you start to almost put something between you and that character. You don’t want to feel any difference there. Then step back and let the script be the script.

John: At a certain point, I remember I was listening to a podcast when they were talking about CODAs or how they did all the sign language in CODA. There’s a stage called glossing. Glossing, it’s specifically how are you going to sign that line because it’s not a one-to-one transition at all. That’s like when we had Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo talking about the Japanese in Shogun. You want the people who can really figure out exactly the best way for that character to express that.

Craig: That’s exactly how we did it. It’s not enough even to have a translator because as Justin and Rachel said, translators just translate, then you need somebody to understand the craft. So we had somebody whose job is to really understand from a literary point of view what was the context of this line, what’s the intention, what does it mean? Now let me figure out how that should be signed in a way that matches the intent here. Then the translator is really there just to facilitate communication between the filmmakers and the actors.

John: Absolutely. This thing that Seb is writing, if this gets produced, you would be working with the director, the actors, and some other person in there to help make sure that what is being signed accurately reflects what the intention is there. Let’s move on to Oren’s question.

Drew: Oren writes, my name is Oren, and I’m a blind scriptwriter living in Ireland. As a new writer who requires a screen reader to navigate programs on my computer, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find a script-writing program or application that is accessible with industry-standard screen readers.

In case you don’t know, a screen reader is a text-to-voice software application used by blind or vision-impaired people, which will read aloud any information, including text, button controls, menu ribbons, form controls, edit boxes, et cetera.

I’ve tested most script writing software, including Fade In, Arc Studio, Celtx, and Final Draft. Ironically, I would say Final Draft is the most accessible so far, and by accessible, I mean about 2% of the application is usable for the screen reader.

Craig: That is definitely stretching the meaning of the word accessible.

Drew: I understand that you created your own screenwriting software called Highlands, John. However, as I work on Windows and your product seems to be only available for Mac, I can’t try it out. I would even consider purchasing a cheap Mac just to run your software if I knew it was accessible with Mac’s built in software VoiceOver.

Would you consider talking briefly about this accessibility issue on your podcast as it might help kick start a conversation with developers and persuade them to look more seriously at this problem? A lot of these screenwriting software applications claim to be the industry standard, but I fail to see how they can claim that right if they’re not making products that are inclusive for all.

John: Ryan Knighton has been on the show a couple times. He’s a blind screenwriter and a friend of mine. He had been using Final Draft on this Toshiba laptop for many, many years, and then it stopped working with Final Draft. He was in a panic situation so he came to us. Highland fortunately works really well for him. He first tried it on his iPhone to make sure the voice over worked. He had to learn how voice over worked with it. He now does it on his Mac. He wrote us this really lovely message about he’s spent his first year on a room writing entirely in Highland. One of the nice things about Highland is because it’s only an Apple ecosystem, it just actually works with all the Apple stuff, and so it can actually tie into all the stuff.

Craig: Because Apple’s already got a framework for how to be accessible for people who are blind.

John: It’s not like we created a special version for blind writers. We just did it properly and have proper labels on all the controls so he can hear what’s there. He will text me occasionally saying, “How do I do this one thing? How do I see what page number this is on?” It’s like, “We’ll fix that.”

Craig: We’ll figure that out. I think, Ken Testman, who makes Fade In listens to the show. I’m pretty sure that the way he wrote it is native for Mac.

John: It’s not.

Craig: Oh, it’s not.

John: That’s how he gets it to put on the PC too, because it’s it goes through Adobe Air. That’s the challenge. The web-based ones, in theory, should be relatively accessible because there are–

Craig: They’re agnostic?

John: It’s agnostic. What’s challenged is inside the browser window that these things are working. It’s like, can the reader actually figure out everything that’s inside there? But there is accessibility stuff for the web that should work. It’s a question of could Arc Studio or the other ones or Celtx, could they do better? Probably they should.

Craig: Let’s put this out there in the world and see if it’s something that these folks can do. He’s absolutely right. He could get, I guess, a “cheap” Mac.

John: Get a cheap Mac or iPad now because we work on that.

Craig: That’s the other thing. There may be something that is cost effective. It is a bummer to have to buy an entire computer just because the one piece of software that takes advantage of this stuff only works on that platform.

John: My guess is that Warren probably is using an iPhone because from every blind person I’ve spoken with they tend to go towards the Apple ecosystem when they can.

Craig: Because it works.

John: It works for them.

Craig: Then he could theoretically be working on iOS in Highland. That’s a possibility.

John: We’ll send him a code to the beta and see if it helps him out.

Craig: Sweet.

John: Cool. Last question here is from Dan.

Drew: I’ve been fascinated by Disney’s decision to turn the Moana TV series into a feature length movie. Do you know how writing credits would get determined in this situation? Assuming there was some writer’s room for the TV series, how do they decide who gets the screenplay writing credit, and how does this impact royalties?

John: Oh, boy.

Craig: What a spaghetti pile of trouble.

John: Let’s talk about this from a couple different levels. Writing credit is one thing. Let’s just talk about why you make the decision to originally do it as a series and make us a movie. I think it’s because this started in the pandemic, and they’re, like, “Oh, we need to make series for Disney Plus. We’ll do Moana.” Then it probably turned out– It was going to be really good and really expensive. They were, “We can make so much more money theatrically.”

Craig: If we make fewer episodes, like one big episode, and put it in theaters, it’ll– Because the animation’s expensive.

John: So in terms of credit, I will tell you that there’s other stuff behind the scenes, which is, you’re going to start seeing some teleplay body credits on theatrical movies, and it will drive me crazy. Craig is already shaking his head.

Craig: Jesus.

John: It’s because these things were contracted under TV contracts.

Craig: This is where I feel for our credits department because they are tasked with codifying a system that is routinely rocked by the insane things that happen in the industry. The employers have no concern whatsoever about it. Their whole thing is, “We hired you under a WGA deal. That was our responsibility. You guys handle credits. See ya. Just let us know what to put on the screen.” Then it’s up to the WGA to hash through this.

That is a very, very difficult question. If you have, let’s say, eight episodes and then you turn to another writer and you’re like, “Take all eight episodes. We’re hiring you to make a movie out of these. Pull stuff from all of them or none of them, whatever. Make a movie.” They’re all participating writers but they weren’t under the feature thing. How do you consider the contributions? It’s a mess and my heart goes out to the arbiters and the pre-arbiters who will have to deal with this. But that is what we do at the Writer’s Guild. We handle our own credits. It’s the best of the worst systems possible.

John: 100%. The answer is a lot of internal discussion and figuring out what is the best way to apply the rules as written to situations that are new.

Craig: I’ll say, I would rather that, I would rather deal with this rat’s nest than be like, say, another union in our town that’s just one person pick a name, that’s who did it. No, it isn’t. That’s not right, but that’s how they do it. Hint. It’s not SAG.

John: No.

Craig: It’s not IA.

John: Those IA credits is like “Cool. Which gaffer gets credit for this?”

Craig: Many gaffers.

John: Many gaffers.

Craig: Multiple gaffers.

John: All right, it’s time for one cool things. I have two, one cool things I want. First is a Netflix documentary by RJ Cutler on Martha Stewart called Martha. Some backstory here. Back when Dana Fox was my assistant, she and I would watch the original Martha Stewart show, the one-hour highly produced version almost every day. It was so good and so specifically Martha’s taste. You could tell she loved doing it and that she had absolute control over every little thing. Well, she went to prison for lying to the feds.

Craig: What a world we live in.

John: Then did a season of The Apprentice, and then did this talk show aversion, which you could tell she hated. I spoke to people who were guests on her show and she hated doing it. She really hated it.

Craig: Really?

John: Yes. In the documentary, she’s also clear she hates it. Anyway, this documentary is really delightful if you enjoy Martha Stewart. If you don’t like Martha Stewart, you might still find it fascinating.

Craig: You might still actually like it.

John: Because she is such a fascinating character because she’s very blunt and she has self-awareness, but not necessarily insight. You see-

Craig: It’s so weird.

John: – that she’s talking about these things like, well, you don’t understand that that’s not how any other person would respond to this situation.

Craig: Right. Well, she’s special.

John: She is special.

Craig: She’s special.

John: She had a very distant father who loved her very much, but loved her on very certain conditions. That tracks.

Craig: Definitely tracks.

John: I really recommend seeing this if, at all, interested in Martha Stewart on what she’s done. My other, it’s a good thing, it’s a one cool thing, is the replacement ear pads we got for our headphones. We use the very classic headphones that everybody uses, which is the Sony MDR-7506s, which are these great headphones. The covers are this pleather thing that just flakes away and it just leaves detritus everywhere.

Craig: It feels like the kind of thing where later, when we’re dead, they’ll pull us out of the ground to measure how much of the pleather was absorbed into our bones. Like, “Why did they both die on the same day under circumstances that are not really–“

John: Pleather.

Craig: It was the pleather. It’s just inhaling pleather flakes. What will we do when the podcast population is decimated by pleather flakes? We will all be happy.

John: Our new replacement pads for these headphones, but the headphones, they’re going to last forever, but the new pads have a mesh coating, which is not going to–

Craig: They’re very lovely.

John: We have two other small, tiny one cool things, which are two new babies born into the John August ecosystem. Stuart Friedel, our former Scriptnotes producer, welcomed his second child. Very excited for new baby on that front.

Craig: Weirdly, his second child was born and then it said, “Two weeks earlier.”

John: The Stuart special right there.

Craig: His child was born at two weeks of age, bizarrely.

John: That’s crazy.

Craig: Incredible.

John: Chad Creasey, who is also one of my former assistants who have been on the show also welcomed new baby. I love babies.

Craig: I do too and their world will be good and they will never know some things.

John: 100%.

Craig: They just won’t know.

John: They won’t know.

Craig: They won’t know. Lucky.

Well, I mentioned earlier an article in WIRED about California and setting the pace and we’ll dig that link up. There’s another WIRED article that I’m obsessed with right now. The title of it is the kind of title that generally I’m like, “Hungh.” The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time. Now, usually, I go, “Ehh” because I’m like, “Either this is going to be some oversimplification bad science article like most of them are, or this will be impenetrable.”

There’s very little middle ground. This article actually appeared in Quantum Magazine and it has been, I guess, repurposed for WIRED and it’s outstanding. It does a great job of explaining what a big deal it is for how the mathematicians and physicists who think about the underpinnings of reality have started to reimagine it. It turns out that what was going on was we were stuck in a model. The model was all about what happens when collisions occur. The only way to figure it out was just to grind out like, “Here’s–“ oh my God, I think it was Feynman came up with the method, but it was the best we had.

Then through this combination of scientists, they’ve figured out like, “Oh no, no, this is a vastly simpler way to start to model how this works.” They reference it. They’re like, “It’s literally you could teach it to a fifth grader.” Which kind of makes sense. That when you really get down to it, what’s underneath, reality tends to weirdly be simple, like how weird is it that energy is mass times the speed of light squared? There’s three letters in that equation. What we keep finding when you really dig, dig, dig, dig, dig is it’s actually simple which is, of course, because we’re in a simulation, obviously.

Drew: No.

Craig: Of course, we are. We’re figuring it out right now. There’s no problem. It’s fine. Don’t let that upset you. Of course, it’s a simulation, but we’re figuring out how it works and we’re getting better at it, which I think is amazing.

John: It reminds me of you’ll see these formulas for weird things that don’t seem like they have anything to do with normal geometry and Pi is in there or E is in there.

Craig: Pi is a perfect example. Why does that keep showing up? Why would that be how circles work? Then when you look at it, you’re like, “Well, this totally makes sense.” They find that they can layer paths on polyhedrons in very simple ways to explain so much of what’s going on.

Now, I’m simplifying this because we don’t have the time for me to read this whole thing, but I would say if you are even a B-plus science student, and if you’re a B and lower, I’ll probably skip this one, but if you’re a B-plus science student–

Drew: You keep pointing at me when you say B or lower.

Craig: I don’t know how you were in school with this. I don’t know. See, I nailed it. B or lower.

John: He went to drama school.

Craig: Aww. Well, this isn’t for you. You take physics for poets.

John: Maybe have your wife explain it to you.

Craig: Yes. Have your wife explain this to you. Even if you have moderate scientific interest and capacity, this article really is mind-blowing and a great little, almost, like many science stories are, an exciting hunt with an awesome conclusion.

John: Oh, I love that. Very nice. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. A reminder that we have a live show on December 6th. I thought we were sold out, but apparently, we still have some VIP tickets left. If you don’t have, come to that.

Craig: VIP tickets?

John: VIP tickets.

Craig: What do they get?

John: You get cool first-row things. What else?

Drew: You get a drink ticket, so free drink and you get to stick around for an after party where you get to meet John and Craig and me, and maybe some other guests.

Craig: I like that you slipped in you.

Drew: I’m important.

Craig: You’re like, “This is what’s going to move those VIP tickets, folks.” I agree with you. I think a lot of these people have already seen us. Megana is basically a celebrity.

John: If Megana is back, we’ll bring her too.

Craig: Ooh. Yes. Let’s bring Megana. Everybody. People love– When you graduate to Megana status, you too will be–

John: It’ll be a different, yes.

Craig: It’ll be a thing.

John: We had some great cast we got lined up.

Craig: Yes. We always do. Who will we be benefiting this time for this show?

John: This is Hollywood HEART. Hollywood HEART is a fantastic charity that helps kids who otherwise couldn’t go to summer camp, go to a special summer camp.

Craig: We’re doing what we can do to spread some joy and make things better.

John: That’s all we can do.

Craig: That’s all we can do. Craig, thank you so much.

John: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: So Craig, as I mentioned on the pre-show or the early part of the show, whatever you want to call the intro, we went to Disneyland, which I had not been to for five or six years. Since pre-pandemic. It was good. It was a good distraction for this and it was already on our– I’ve talked about like Mike and I have this list of 24 for 24. We made a list of 24 things we wanted to do in 2024.

Craig: God, you guys are organized.

John: Going to Disneyland was one of them.

Craig: It was one of them.

John: Scratched that off the list.

Craig: Take that right off. My wife is a big fan of Disneyland. We have an old college friend of ours named Andrew. He’s a Disney adult. I wouldn’t say that Melissa’s a Disney adult, but she’s a Disney aficionado and she and Andrew will go, oh, probably three times a year. She goes quite a lot and she loves it. I haven’t been in quite some time.

John: Have you been there without kids?

Craig: I don’t know if I– maybe. Yes. One time. I do remember this very specifically. There was one time Melissa and I went with a couple of friends of ours, another husband and wife. It was four of us. We went to Disneyland, we did adult Disneyland. We made a reservation to eat dinner at the Blue Bayou. Melissa got food poisoning. We had to leave early. I will tell you this about my wife. She can hold on to not throwing up longer than anyone in the world who needs to throw up. That ride is not short. It’s like an hour. We drove, she just sat there clenching her jaw and trying to not throw up for an hour. Succeeded. Stepped out of the car and barfed.

John: Oh God.

Craig: It was like she was just waiting the whole time. Me, I’m like, “Pull over right now.” That, I think, may have been the last time.

John: Not a good memory there.

Craig: No.

John: No.

Craig: No, but a fun one because it’s funny now. I’m telling you, it’s an amazing thing to see somebody sit there for an hour. The second they open the car, they’re like, “Oh, good. Finally.” Blah. I’m like, “How did she do that?”

John: Incredible.

Craig: Oh my God. The willpower on this woman.

John: Part of the reason we wanted to go is we’d not been there since the whole Star Wars land opened up. Man, they did a great job with the Star Wars land.

Craig: See, I haven’t been there.

John: That Imagineering is fantastic. Rise to the Resistance is a great well-constructed narrative story in there, which is fantastic.

Craig: The showcase ride is on the Millennium Falcon or something?

John: There is a Millennium Falcon ride as well, which I didn’t think was quite as good. The full Millennium Falcon there is incredibly impressive. I took some photo there, which you should. There’s a ride that goes there, which I didn’t think was actually as good. It’s a little bit motion simulator kind of, I don’t really care.

Craig: Sure. We’ve done that before.

John: There’s some really good surprises in Rise to the Resistance, you get the Storm Troopers, you get like surly like Imperial Guard or First Order. Disney people being mean to you is just like a such a nice-

Craig: That’s hot.

John: -change.

Craig: That’s pretty hot.

John: Absolutely. I know you always like the empire and sort of the–

Craig: That’s my love language is park employees abusing me. I love that.

John: Really enjoyed that. It’s also just nice to see the attention to detail where we got our Bontu garden wraps, our veggie wraps at the little shop there. I was tapping to pay, but they even changed the font on the little card reader was like the Star Wars font.

Craig: Oh, the Star Wars font.

John: It was all tracked.

Craig: Well, they’ve always been great with the attention to detail-thing. That’s their bread and butter. I should go. I haven’t seen Star Wars land. Also Disneyland’s little shop borne in spots, but there are some things that are nice to see just for old-time’s sake.

John: Yes, 100%. You go through Frontierland, it’s like, “I don’t really care,” but I’ll get– Sure.

Craig: Sure. Every time Melissa goes, she and Andrew will do the Haunted Mansion I think every time. You could recite the Haunted Mansion at this point.

John: I was sad that Small World, which is my sort of Haunted Mansion. I just loved Small World for sure no good reason. It was not open the day that we went there.

Craig: Oh darn.

John: Oh darn.

Craig: Worst ride in the park.

John: Then over in California Adventure, which they’ve also done a good job sort of, it wasn’t terrific when they opened it up and they’ve done a good job recognizing their mistakes and fixing them. I loved Tower of Terror and I was actually attached to do a Tower of Terror movie at Disney, which didn’t end up happening. I have deep affection for it, but I would say the risk they did for Guardians of the Galaxy, again, the Imagineers did go through and really found clever small things. Like if you’re standing in line and reading little signs like on that sink, it’s like spinal fluid must be washed off. They’re finding all this stuff. They really do find all this stuff.

Craig: I would never ever go on Tower of Terror because I do not like the feeling of falling at all. I hate it. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you find joy. I’m glad you did.

John: Yes. I did like it. There were some frustrations and so there’s no comment form I can fill out. So I’m going to put this on the podcast.

Craig: Disney will be alerted.

John: Disney will be alerted. We were in the line for the Guardians ride and they only had one of the elevators open. We basically got stuck in a place where we hadn’t moved for 20 minutes and we’re like, “No, no, no. We need to leave.” It’s actually really hard to get out of a line at Disney, especially in this one. We try to walk our way back and they’re like, “Oh, no, no. You have to walk all the way to the front and then they can let you out.”

Craig: You have to constantly say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not cutting the line. I’m not cutting. I’m just trying to leave”?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s terrible.

John: That’s not good design.

Craig: No, that’s not great.

John: Because people do need to leave people.

Craig: Sometimes they need to throw up.

John: Yes, exactly. If Melissa were there, she’d have to wait until-

Craig: She’s capable of it. She can do these things.

John: The other thing I would say is that there were situations where maybe they were training people or something, but we were waiting in line for five minutes to get a soda and they were like seven people at the counter–

Craig: That’s training.

John: That’s training. I felt like if I were the Disney executive, like Disney Park executive there, I would’ve had some strong words where whoever was letting guests wait around for five minutes.

Craig: Well, you went there on a Tuesday in the middle of the day.

John: That’s true.

Craig: That seems like that’s when they’re like, “Uuh.” They’re not training anyone on a Saturday.

John: The last thing I’ll say is, I fell down a little bit of a rabbit hole with– at California Adventure we went to where the Starbucks is and it’s this cafe thing. I could see there was branded stuff around it. Like, “What is this for?” It’s for the Silver Lake Sisters. It’s just like this weird imaginary story of this trio of sisters who were big singers in Los Angeles in the ‘20s who were inspired by Disney’s version of the Three Little Pigs. It was like this whole ouroboros like, and it was a fun, just brand essential because like no one would ever know or care. It felt like the way–

Craig: What a weird misfire. [chuckles]

John: Not actually misfire. I get it.

Craig: Really? It worked?

John: It kind of worked for me because I actually– I googled the fair like, “What is the deal with the Silver Lake Sisters? Were they a real thing?”

Craig: It would work if you’re a guy in your 50s doing adult Disney and like–

John: Who was supposed to write the Tower of Terror movie which they were actually– they tied into the Tower of Terror politics.

Craig: The Silver Lake Sisters.

John: Yes. They performed at the Hollywood Tower Hotel.

Craig: Got it. Inspired by Disney’s Three Little Pigs.

John: Inspired by Chateau Vermont.

Craig: It’s a big mess there.

John: It’s a big mess, but anyway, it made me think about sort of the stuff that we do in terms of storytelling. It’s about finding the story that will carry you through for two hours. The storytelling that Imagineers need to do is like, how do we make the experience of this place that you’re in rewarding for the time you’re there but feel like it actually has a bigger footprint than that? I think that’s a cool job.

Craig: Yes. It is a cool job. I never forgot when I was taking my kids to Disneyland or Disney World, because I took them there too. I never forgot how I felt when I went to Disney World as a kid, which was awe. I felt awe. I also remember how big it was because I was small. I think they do a really good job of that. There are things that I notice as an adult that I certainly didn’t notice as a kid. I didn’t notice the air vents in the ceiling of It’s a Small World.

John: Yes. Now you can’t help but see it. It’s just a black drop ceiling vents.

Craig: The first time I went on Pirates of the Caribbean, I honestly believed I was outside at night in the world. Now I’m like, that ceiling is not that far up. It really isn’t. Nice job painting it. You see everything because you’re grown and the scales have been lifted from your eyes. But the Imagineers do get how to create this for children. They know their audience. That’s why I actually love the whole adult Disneyland thing because it’s like we just love it now. We forgive it. It’s air vents.

John: I would say the Marvel Avengers area, it’s fine. The Cars Land, which I don’t like cars at all as a concept.

Craig: I’ve done the Cars Land, I believe.

John: Incredibly well-designed.

Craig: Yes, really well-designed. Because they know that’s where the kids are going. The experience of seeing the animated car people is really weird. It’s like the whole car thing is actually– I have so many questions. Do they have sex? Do they like–

John: Why does Mater have teeth?

Craig: Why does he have teeth? Why do cars race like cars even though they’re people and there are cars in the stands? I guess it’s like people watching people race, which we do, but with crashing. I have so many issues.

John: Drew, you were saying at lunch that the Marvel and Star Wars things were about the lifestyle of keeping people in the Disney ecosystem.

Drew: I heard that Disney basically has– They had for a long time too, a system that was like cradle-to-grave for women of like this is how you interact with the Disney ecosystem. When you’re a baby, it’s Mickey diapers through every phase of a woman’s life.

John: The Tinkerbell, the princesses.

Drew: You have your princess phase, you have all that stuff, through becoming a mother, and then, theoretically, the phase resets.

Craig: Resets.

Drew: That’s how you keep people in a loop. One of the reasons they bought Marvel and Star Wars was because they didn’t have that loop for boys.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: Because it does make sense, then dads want to take their kids to see– to the Star Wars and all.

Craig: I get it. They’re like, we’ve mentally dominated half of the population. How do we mentally dominate the rest of them?

John: I did see a couple of folks who were clearly had been just married at Disney, but I also saw– one of my favorite things I saw was this group of 16 cousins. I know they’re all cousins because it was Cousins Trip 2024. On their back, they said, were they the Lopez or the Alvarado or Cousins by Choice? It was all checkmarked on the back of their shirt. I loved it.

Craig: The organization there is, coming from a family that was super isolated because everybody was in a feud with everybody, I’m always fascinated by the families with their matching shirts.

John: It was one or two women in the cousins who organized that whole thing. Of course.

Craig: Of course. Melissa’s family is pretty big. Melissa’s mother was the all-time organizer. She woke up in the morning and was like, “What can I be in charge of and how can I organize stuff?” Now that she’s gone and it’s sort of like– it was almost like everybody just went, “We’re not doing this anymore, right?” Yes. Because there were… There were so many events and they were fun and they were great and it’s actually sad, you need that bossy pants. You need bossy pants. You need bossy pants. To make you go have fun. You will have fun. But then you do.

John: Yes, absolutely. You need somebody to sort of take away some of your agency and you’re just making things. It’s like, no, this is what we’re going to do now. Full circle, folks. Craig, thank you for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John. Thank you.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE! December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter
• Even Under Trump, California (Yes, That Hellscape) Will Keep Moving the World Forward by James Fallows for WIRED
• The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White
• And Yet It Moves by Ken White
• Martha on Netflix
• Replacement ear pads for Sony MDR-7506 headphones
• The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time by Charlie Wood for WIRED
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.