The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 587 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Often on this program, we’re answering questions, but today we’re going to be asking perhaps the most fundamental question of them all. How Would This Be a Movie? That’s right, we’ll be looking at stories in the news and trying to fit them into a three-act structure, or more likely, an eight-part limited series structure. We’ve got doppelgangers, Craig, family drama, romance, and more.
Craig: My goodness.
John: Craig, you sounded sad in your hello. Do you want to explain to listeners why you’re sad?
Craig: Yeah. I’m in a new office, and everything’s wrong. Nothing’s in the right place. All my wires are messed up. My seat feels weird. The room is weird. My monitor’s funny, and it’s not in the right spot. I don’t do well with change. I really do not do well with change. I struggle.
John: Therefore you’ve chosen an industry in which day by day, week by week, you’re going to be doing new things. Maybe fundamentally, 50 years ago, you made some choices that brought you here. The first thing is acknowledging that you’re uncomfortable and then being able to move past that, learning to live with some of the discomfort, and rather than raging against the dying of the light, just accept that this is where you’re at.
Craig: I want to throw a tantrum.
John: Tantrums are great.
Craig: I don’t throw tantrums like angry tantrums. In Hollywood when you hear about people throwing tantrums, you immediately think of Scott Rudin stapling his assistant’s forehead to a desk or something.
John: Throwing a phone.
Craig: Or throwing a phone at someone’s mouth. All I want to do is just cry. I just want to get on the floor and cry.
John: Craig’s over-tired.
Craig: I kind of am. Honestly, it’s been a lot. We do this podcast. Then I also do a podcast for the show. Then I’m on other people’s podcasts. I feel like every day I’m podcasting.
John: That’s what the 2020s are is podcasting.
Craig: You know what? That’s all right, because this is the OG podcast.
John: Indeed it is.
Craig: You guys are my happy place.
Megana Rao: Aw.
John: Aw.
Craig: Thank you, Megana. See, John had no emotional response to that whatsoever, and you were immediately like, “Aw.” That’s why we love Megana.
Megana: Aw.
John: [inaudible 00:02:27]. We’ll talk through all these things on our podcast, but also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to discuss the frustrations surrounding and solutions for overpowered characters, both the characters we write but also obviously the DND characters that we’re playing, because I now have a 15th level warlock who has an 8th level spell. It’s so powerful, and yet limited in a certain way. With that power doesn’t come just great responsibility, comes really great challenges. We’ll talk about overpowered characters.
Craig: Which Level 8 spell have you chosen?
John: I chose Feeblemind. I’m questioning my decision.
Craig: That’s a great one.
John: It’s a great one. It’s a great one for a DM to pick against players, but I’m not sure it’s such a good spell for a player to pick against a DM.
Craig: That’s an interesting-
John: I’m dependent on you.
Craig: You are. We have only seen Feeblemind in action once, and it was you guys that got Feebleminded, weirdly enough.
John: It is brutal.
Craig: One of you did. When it works, oof. That’s all I have to say about that. Oof.
John: Let’s do some follow-up. Back in Episode 579, we had Rian Johnson facing off against ChatGPT. Megana, Bobby wrote in with a question.
Megana: Bobby wrote, “At this current moment, can a studio use a bot like ChatGPT to create stories, a basic outline, and then hire a WGA writer to write the teleplay? That is, instead of hiring writers to pitch on a story, they do that internally, they figure out the story they want to tell, and then they hire a writer to write it. They’re not paying a human being for the story by credit, the outline phase, or the pitch. Not like they were paying for pitches anyway. Am I right, folks?”
Craig: First of all, you don’t want them paying for pitches.
John: You really don’t.
Craig: I’m just going to keep saying this over and over. They don’t pay for things the way that we think that they pay for things. What they’re doing is buying things. Never say pay for pitches. Always say buy pitches. If they buy your pitch, they own it. They don’t do anything if they don’t own it. Please, for the love of god, no paying for pitches.
John: That actually speaks to one of the issues surrounding this. They don’t want to pay for things that they don’t own. They want to own things. It’s really unclear at this point whether something they generated through ChatGPT, a work of literary material they’ve created through ChatGPT, whether that’s even copyrightable. That’s still unsettled law at this point. That’s going to be one of the first things.
Backing up a little bit, I would say, Bobby, you have to keep in mind that a studio executive producer, anybody could say, “Hey, I want to do a movie about a guy who loves paperclips.” They could write up a thing and then give you the thing. If they’re writing up something that’s big enough, long enough themselves, they are a writer. They are creating literary material, in theory. The ChatGPT is a new wrinkle in this, but studio executives always could make up some stuff themselves if they wanted to.
Craig: I think that there’s probably some copyright law that’s going to need to be written. Many people don’t know this, that it’s enshrined in our Constitution itself. The founders, I think it’s fair to say, did not foresee artificial intelligence or guns that could shoot rapidly, side note. I think we’re going to need to write some law to make it clear that copyright is something that is afforded to humans and not AI.
Here’s what I think. I think that if a studio does this, then a lot of writers may be less inclined to actually come in and work on it. Even if they were, they would still have to rewrite the story no matter what. A story would have to be assigned to them. No, I don’t think this would work this way.
John: A thing to also keep in mind is that the MBA, the basic agreement that the WGA has for all writing work being done for the studios, already does have language in there that says a writer is a person, that the writer shall not be deemed to be any corporate or impersonal purveyor of literary material or the rights therein. There’s a lot of stuff in it that already says we’re talking about human beings there.
Is there space for clarification about how and when these tools can be used? Absolutely. I think it’s an open question about how we best do that. I don’t think at this moment as we’re recording this in 2023 it’s an imminent crisis. I do know that there are some projects out there where there’s folks who are saying, “We’re having a computer write this script. It’s going to be written by a computer.” Okay, but I don’t think that is the crisis next coming down the pike.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Another bit of follow-up, Yusef was writing about other people’s voices, Megana.
Megana: Yusef writes, “This is mainly for Craig. I recently got Apple Plus, and I’ve been catching up with Mythic Quest. I noticed you wrote a couple episodes for the series.”
Craig: One episode.
Megana: “In Scriptnotes podcast 585, you said you can’t imagine writing in other people’s voices.”
Craig: Correct.
Megana: Since Mythic Quest isn’t a show that you’re running, in typical TV fashion, the writers would write in the showrunner’s voice or the showrunner would rewrite the episode themselves. I’m curious if Ganz, Day, and McElhenney allowed you to do all the writing yourself, or did they still give you an outline and you wrote it in your own voice? Did they ever rewrite your episodes themselves?”
Craig: Okay, episode. Just want to be really clear. One, Yusef. I wrote the episode called Backstory! I have been in some episodes as an actor, but I’ve only written one episode of Mythic Quest. It was the episode called Backstory. It was in Season 2. Mythic Quest each season does a standalone episode. That was that season’s standalone episode.
I still continued to not write in the showrunner’s voice, because Backstory! did not take place in the same timeline as Mythic Quest. It took place decades earlier, in the ‘70s. There was one character in it that was from the main cast of Mythic Quest. We are portraying that character at a much younger age. It was consistent with that character’s voice but in a much different way. It’s a difference between a man who’s 80 and a man who’s 25.
The way that worked is I was in a room. I’ve never done this before. There are a lot of writers at Mythic Quest. You can break off into a little smaller group of writers. I’m going to apologize if I forget anybody who was on Team Idiot. That’s what we called ourselves. Team Idiot was myself, Katie McElhenney, Ashly Burch, Humphrey Ker. I think that may have been it. I apologize again if I’m missing anyone.
We just talked through how the story could function. We had the basic idea of it. We talked through what it could be. We outlined it on the wipey board. Then we brought in everybody, Rob and Megan and David and everyone, and we just pitched it out, told the story. They were all happy. They made some suggestions. We incorporated some of those suggestions into the story on the board.
Then I went away and wrote it by myself, because that’s how I write, like a weirdo alone in a small, dark room with the windows closed. I wrote a draft, and I sent it in, and they shot it. That was it. That’s how that worked. It wasn’t the normal way of doing things, I must admit.
For instance, I think Katie McElhenney, who did Dark Quiet Death in Season 1, which was that standalone episode, and stand-above, I’m pretty sure she did that Mazin style, in a dark room by herself, with the windows closed.
John: Circling back to Yusef’s assumptions is that if you were writing a traditional episode that had a bunch of the standing characters, you were on the normal sets, it was a normal episode, the expectation might be that you would need to match a little bit more of the style of how the scripts are normally working, just because stuff could be changing around, and everywhere else is doing the same. If you, Craig, had a really strange style on the page, it would be weird for everyone to have to grapple with a script that felt so different. That was not the case here.
Craig: This one was designed to be different. I don’t think I would ever dare to write a standard episode of Mythic Quest, because I think I would blow it, for this very reason. I think I can do one that’s carved out and has its own thing, with an ending, by the way, a real, solid kachunk ending.
I am amazed by the things that those guys can do in that style and also their ability to work with each other so well. It’s pretty great. A ton of credit to the showrunners there and everybody, honestly. They do a great job.
John: Last bit of follow-up, I just want to point out that on our podcast, we’ve had four of the Celebrity Jeopardy contestants on. We’ve talked to Ike Barinholtz and Joel Kim Booster at our live show. We knew they were both on it. Also, B.J. Novak and Matt Rogers.
Craig: Wow.
John: Out of 20-some people, 4 of them are Scriptnotes guests.
Craig: Maybe the rest of them should show the hell up.
John: I think so.
Craig: How have we not had Patton Oswalt on this show?
John: That I think is the greatest oversight of all.
Craig: Can I just say… Maybe this will help get Patton Oswalt on the show. Maybe he’s reluctant. Maybe he doesn’t like coming on podcasts. I don’t know. I will say this. He’s my favorite stand-up comedian. I think I’ve listened to everything he’s done, all of it. I think he’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant, just special. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t come on the show. Maybe he knows that and he doesn’t want to listen to me talk about it.
John: I think it would also be fascinating if the folks who were putting together the next round of Celebrity Jeopardy, if they are just going through our Scriptnotes guest list and figuring out-
Craig: Probably.
John: … “Who are we going to get on the show? They clearly will do very well and be incredibly popular on our program.”
Craig: I bet you that’s true.
John: The Venn diagram overlap is so exciting.
Craig: Venn.
John: How excited is Venn that, whoever Venn was or is, that their name is just always going to be there?
Craig: I think Venn is dead. I gotta be honest with you. There’s no way Venn’s alive. Megana, can you do a quick Google search for us to see if Senor Venn is still alive?
Megana: “Popularized by John Venn in the 1880s.”
Craig: There we go. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’ve heard enough.
John: I think Venn and Overton of Overtown window, they’re just up there in Heaven looking down at what they’ve created. It’s pretty great.
Craig: Yes, indeed.
John: Let’s get on to the question of the day. How Would This Be a Movie? We got a couple really good ones here from our listeners. I added one late to the podcast here, Craig, and I apologize. Just moments before you signed on, I added this here.
I want to talk you through this first one. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s simple but juicy and compelling. This is from NBC News, Andy Eckardt and Aina Khan writing this up. It happens in Germany. This 23-year-old woman, with the help of a friend, killed a stranger to stage her death and, quote, “start a new life due to family problems,” police and prosecutors in Germany said.
Basically, what happened in this story is you have this 23-year-old woman who starts setting up dummy accounts on Instagram, looking for another one who looks a lot like her, with the plan that she and her friend are going to track down this person, lure them under false pretenses, kill them, and make it seem that she’s the one who’s died, basically faking her own death by killing a stranger.
Craig: What a bummer. All you ever did was nothing. You just happened to look like an asshole. That asshole finds you and kills you. Oh, man.
John: Man. A couple of ranges of thoughts here. First off, I could picture the A-level movie version of this, like sort of Gone Girl, that kind of thing, where it’s actually more from the perspective of these people trying to commit this murder. It’s almost like Hitchcock’s Rope, where you’re there with the killers and you’re trying to do this thing or cover up this thing. That’s a total possibility for the A-list version of it. Also, this feels like this could be the A-plot of any given CBS procedural. It’s shocking, but it’s a way to do it, or a Law and Order.
Craig: In the old days there would be a movie, I think. These movies don’t get made as much anymore. There was a time where we were getting some really good neo noir films, Body Heat. I think you could make an interesting neo noir out of this. I’d love to see what Scott Frank would do with this. Do you want to know what my twist twist is?
John: Tell me, tell me.
Craig: Imagine this story. You’ve got a woman, and she’s murdered, and you’re trying to figure out why. Then you realize, oh, wait, the woman that we thought was murdered isn’t even the woman. It’s somebody else who looks like the woman, who’s gone missing. Somehow, if there could be triplets or twins… If there’s twins and they both are like, “One of you needs to die or seem to die. Let’s find somebody that looks like the two of us.” I don’t know, there’s gotta be some sort of twin thing that we could do.
John: Another thing that we’re discussing goes back to the actual, real people in Germany. Interestingly, the story that we are basing this off of, the names are all suppressed, because Germany has these very strict privacy laws. We don’t even know the names of the people who are involved here, which is just wild. For our purposes, I don’t think we’d need to know the names. I think we’re just taking this as a premise and applying it to something completely different.
Craig: I think so.
John: We’re saying this could be a movie. It can really scale. It can go all the way from A-plot of a given episode of a procedural to an actual, full movie.
Craig: I think it’s more likely that just by you bringing this onto the show, we will be seeing this on a procedural within a year.
John: I agree, because the ChatGPTs will have looked through the transcripts, found it, and therefore [inaudible 00:16:22]. That’s a possibility.
Craig: The ChatGPTs. I like that there’s an army of them now. I like it.
John: There’s a whole army.
Craig: I love it.
John: Let’s get to our next story. The headline for this is The Godfather, Saudi-Style. It’s Anuj Chopra writing for The Guardian. Craig, you did have a chance to read through this. This is a long one. I’m sorry for the long read there. I thought it was really compelling. Do you want to talk us through what you remember of it/
Craig: Sure. This is the story of Mohammed bin Salman, who we tend to refer to as MBS, came to power. I did not know any of this.
John: Nor did I.
Craig: He was not supposed to be the guy. There’s this interesting thing going on in Saudi Arabia that I was also not aware of, where the same family, which I guess they’re the Sauds, the House of Saud, has been running Saudi Arabia as a monarchy for quite some time. The way they’ve done it is by alternating I think between cousins or uncles.
John: It says in the family, but never direct, same family line. It always goes laterally, which honestly, I have to say, feels really smart.
Craig: The point of it was to avoid what just happened. The point is, no one little family line is the only one. This way, the family as a large entity doesn’t fall prey to what a lot of palace intrigue ends up with. It’s just families breaking apart and then one person just dominating the others. Yet that is what’s happened here.
John: Yeah, it is. There was a plan in place for who would be the next in line. You can think of this as Succession to some degree. It’s who is the next person who’s supposed to be there, who’s Nayef, who’s the king’s nephew.
Craig: Nayef, the king’s nephew.
John: Basically, he gets tipped off that there’s potential problems. It’s clear that he’s going to be… Basically, him and his guards get pulled out [inaudible 00:18:22] sign these documents saying that they are not seeing a succession and that MBS should be the next real person that should be doing this. It’s a palace coup. It’s not violent. This isn’t guns and such. Basically, by locking somebody down and not letting them leave the country, you’re forcing them to sign over their succession.
Craig: It was as close to violent as you can get without being violent. In fact, it did turn violent. Initially, it was just we’re going to lock you in a room and tell you that you’re going to resign and you’re going to pledge allegiance to MBS. If you do not, as the article states, your female family members will be raped. That’s an interesting way to just immediately go to 100 as part of your patriarchal monarchy. Just fascinating.
It also mentions in the article, I’m sorry to laugh, but I find this darkly amusing that they said, “First, your female family members will be raped. Second, we are going to withhold your medication for hypertension.” I think I’m stuck on number one. I gotta be honest with you. I gotta be honest. Number one is worse than me not having my hypertension meds, but fine.
I think at some point he was in fact re-detained, so he was, “Okay, you can just live here for a while.” Then at some point, as is often the case with these situations, the paranoid dictator does what paranoid dictators do and decide, “You know what? Actually, I think you are still a huge problem. I think what I’m going to do is lock you in a room and beat you.” There’s an implication that that also occurred.
While this is all going on, we also note that they had killed Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist. These guys are terrible. The extent that our country continues to do business with them, it’s just startling. Just startling.
John: The other main character involved here is a man named Saad Al Jabri, who is Nayef’s advisor and intelligence chief. He’s the man who was trying to give advice to him and help sort through the situation. He was out of the country as this all happened and was able to get most of his family out, except for two family members who were still there. Those two family members were not allowed to leave. MBS is basically saying, “No, no, come back, come back, and everything will be fine.” When Al Jabri doesn’t come back, MBS starts to trump up charges about corruption and other things, and so Al Jabri has to flee first to Canada and then to other places and ultimately is now in the process of filing a lawsuit against MBS.
Craig: Now that a lawsuit has been filed, I’m sure everything will be fine.
John: It’s a question of at what point do you speak up, because in keeping your silence, you might be trying to keep your imprisoned family members alive, but at a certain point, you have to speak up.
Craig: From the point of view of what we are doing, there are a lot of elements here that would suggest that this could be a movie. There are main characters. Al Jabri is a potentially great protagonist, because he’s very smart. He’s very capable. We love watching movies where protagonists are smart and capable and are attempting to out-maneuver very powerful people with entire states behind them. Al Jabri has done it. He could smell that trouble was coming and just went, “I think I’m going to go to Turkey real fast.” I think days later, it was clear that he had made a very smart decision. The challenge in bringing this story to film is that I don’t know if it’s over yet.
John: It’s not.
Craig: That’s the biggest issue for me.
John: You’re right in the middle of it. I feel like with some time, with some closure, you can really tell the whole story, but right now it just feels like a dot dot dot. There’s not a way out of this. I think there’s useful things you could take from this in terms of the dynamics and apply them to another story, but I don’t think you can directly take what’s happening in the House of Saud right now as the meat of either a movie or an eight-part limited series. There’s exciting moments that are happening, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a resolution here.
Craig: I do think this is also tricky territory given that access to information is difficult here. Also, to be fair to writers, the Saudis apparently have no problem committing violence against innocent people who do nothing other than report the truth. You have to be aware if you’re going to be digging deep into the situation that you’re going to be drawing some unwanted attention.
John: Scrutiny that’s not only applied to you but applied to the production, applied to anybody who’s involved with the production. That makes it much less likely that you’re going to see something, this exact story being told. That’s just the reality.
Craig: Until there is a resolution, yeah, I agree with you.
John: Let’s talk about Nikki Finke.
Craig: I swore I never would, but okay.
John: You never would, but here we are.
Craig: Here we are.
John: This is actual context for it.
Craig: It’s a great, great piece that was written here.
John: It really is a great piece. This is Jacob Bernstein writing for the New York Times. For folks who are outside the industry and don’t know who Nikki Finke was, Nikki Finke created Deadline Hollywood, Hollywood Daily if you want to call it that. It was a website, a blog that rivaled Variety and Hollywood Reporter, ended up supplanting them and becoming more important in the daily workings of the town. It was always about breaking the news in a very bombastic way, a lot of opinion mixed with facts, a lot of bullying on behalf of Nikki Finke, who was this larger-than-life character. She was feared and loathed, but also sometimes admired.
What I like about this piece is that I think it was fair in the sense of talking about she was not a good journalist in any sort of good journalist sense, but she was just a smasher and destroyer of things in sometimes ways that needed to happen.
Craig: I don’t know if she was good enough to quality as a double-edged sword. She certainly broke stuff around her. It reminds me of, you’ve seen Glass Onion, the wonderful speech that Rian Johnson wrote about what disrupting is. It’s mostly just breaking shit. She broke a lot of shit.
She was journalistically irresponsible. I don’t think that that’s any kind of slanderous thing to anyone. This is a woman who would report things. They were wrong. People would tell her they were wrong. She would then edit the article to change them but would not indicate that any correction had been made, which is fundamental standard of journalism. She was a bully. She did scream at people. She was mean. She would threaten.
The only thing that was really fascinating about me to Nikki Finke was that she was not doing it for the reason everybody else does stuff for in Hollywood, which is money. She didn’t seem particularly concerned about money. She lived alone in an apartment. She was angry. You could just tell that she was really angry at Hollywood. She liked to put on the mantle on angry companies on behalf of the working people. I don’t think that’s true either, because she was super buddy-buddy with a lot of these people that ran Hollywood. I think she just liked breaking stuff. I really do.
John: I think you’re right. I think you could say inadvertently she had maybe shined a spotlight on some real problems in entertainment journalism in the sense that because of advertising and other things, they are so uniquely linked and tied. They’re never objectively reporting about the things that are happening in the town. Because she wasn’t beholden to those things, she could report on things that no one else would report on and say things other people weren’t saying in print, but they weren’t always accurate or truthful. That’s why she developed this terrifying reputation.
What was interesting about this stuff that was brand new that I’d never seen before was really her relationship with Jay Penske, who was the very rich person who bought out Deadline and Hollywood Daily and ultimately I think Variety as well, plus a lot of other magazines and journalism places. Her relationship with him was really fascinating, the ups and the downs and how she hated him and yet how he was the one who actually showed up in her last days in Florida.
Craig: You get the feeling that Nikki, for people who knew her, because we sure didn’t. I only had one brief exchange with Nikki Finke, and it was terrible. I think that was true for a lot of people. For the people who knew her, you can get this thread of care-taking, that they were worried about her a lot. The article talks about what appears to be, if not a suicide attempt, a legitimate threat to do self-harm. She was sick. She was physically sick. She had diabetes. This sums it up. I’ll read from the article.
“One year, Miss Finke lamented to Mr. Penske that she wasn’t looking forward to Thanksgiving. She didn’t cook and planned to spend the holiday alone in her apartment on a day when restaurants were closed.” That’s rather sad. “Mr. Penske stopped in at the Beverly Hills Hotel, ordered a three-course meal, and took it to her building,” himself, by the way. He’s a billionaire. “Soon after leaving it with the doorman, he heard from her by phone. The meal included a sweet dessert, which enraged the diabetic Miss Finke.” Quote, “’She said I was trying to kill her,’ Mr. Penske recalled.”
Now we can laugh about this, but I have to say, so much of what I read in this article implies that Nikki Finke was struggling with mental illness. Her mood swings, which apparently were quite extreme, her, what would you call it, shut-in-ness?
John: Reclusivity or agoraphobia.
Craig: Yeah, her life as a recluse. Also, you could tell from her work there was something compulsive about it. She would be there, sometimes reporting things within seconds of them happening. Then a lot of times, if her reporting was late or somebody else got the scoop, she would make these bizarre excuses, which I guess goes way back to when she was working for other people. She would just constantly be calling in with strange and bizarre excuses for why she was late. That’s why she got fired from everywhere. She just would not make her deadlines, amusingly enough, for a woman that created a site called Deadline.
It seems like there was a lot of mental illness going on here. To the extent that she was suffering, I feel bad for her. To the extent that her suffering led her to inflict that pain on other people, I am not sorry for her. She was a fascinating person. I think you could make a very interesting story about her. It would need to be rather small, because I think this is about as inside baseball as it gets.
John: I was looking for comps and thinking about what kind of movie this is. Can You Ever Forgive Me might be one, in that you have a character who is abrasive and really off-putting, and yet ultimately because the lens is on her, you can actually understand why she feels she needs to do the things she needs to do is an option.
Craig: It is, but that story I think is better because it’s not about Hollywood.
John: Agreed.
Craig: That’s the part about this that… Remember The Late Shift, the movie, the Betty Thomas film about the late-night wars?
John: The late-night wars.
Craig: That was well done, but it’s a confection, because ultimately, the stakes are as low as they can be. Who will get to host The Tonight Show? It’s not that important. It was well done. I think you could do something like that. It would need to be in its own way funny. I don’t think you can do a super heavy version of this. I just think it would be too much.
John: I do remember that too. I think it’s also a question of where you start and where you stop. Do you start the story when she’s dismissed by the trades or basically unable to get the job that she wants and creates this site for herself, which is inspiring rise, and then the crash and the sale and all that? Maybe. It’s a question of is that the course of a movie or are you doing that as a limited series. I don’t know that there’s probably enough stuff to make it more than two hours worth of entertainment.
Craig: I think that there is the potential for a camp classic. You’re talking about this emotionally wild human being who is a shut-in in her apartment and yelling at people on the phone. This could be Mommy Dearest. If it is, I’m there.
John: I think it’s a good point. I think to take this as a jumping off place to get to something bigger and funnier, great. Movies about Hollywood sometimes get awards, but they’re not generally huge hits is the other thing to be thinking about.
Craig: They are not generally huge hits. Generally speaking, I don’t like them. There is something inherently narcissistic about movies about movies, which is why I’m still so impressed by The Fabelmans, because I just loved it so much. It was about Hollywood. Generally speaking, I just don’t like movies about Hollywood.
John: We have two more here. The first one comes from a listener, Josie. She writes about the nun and the monk who fell in love and married. This tells the story of Sister Mary Elizabeth and Robert, who’s a Carmelite monk. They’re both in their 50s when they meet. What struck me so much as so interesting about this is they barely spoke. It was like he touched her elbow or something, and that was the spark that sat the whole thing up and going.
Craig: So hot.
John: Craig, you’re saying so hot. Do you think there’s a story here to be told?
Craig: No. It’s adorable. I think it’s very sweet. It shows you that love can flourish, even in the strangest ways. It was such a sweet thing to read the way that the two of them were like, “Wait, what did we just do?” and then all the things they have to go through, and then somehow yet on the other end of it, there they are in love with each other and it’s working is beautiful.
I think there’s been another article at some point before about arranged marriages. This isn’t an arranged marriage but it almost is, in the sense that if all you know of each other is that one time, my elbow hit your elbow, you arranged your own marriage. The fact that it lasted… There’s something fascinating about this. I wonder what’s going to happen.
We’ve gone so far down the road. Megana, you knew I was going to turn to you at this point. We’ve gone so far down the road of, everybody just pick who you want and it’s entirely up to you and choose what you want. Everyone’s just drowning in choice to the extent that people really are struggling to make choices.
Here’s my proposal. You do a Tinder, except instead of hookup culture or even just dating, it’s like, we’re going to give you a choice of 20 people. You can meet five of them and you’re going to marry one of them. Now you’re married. Do you think that app catches on in the future?
Megana: I think what’s so fascinating about this story is that it was an accident, and she only met him once after, what, 24 years in this convent?
Craig: Yeah.
Megana: How do we simulate that?
Craig: Basically, then what you’re saying is you can use this app, but when you register for it, you are sworn to celibacy for 24 years. At that point, I have to say everyone’s going to start looking real good. Great point. Not sure we have a way to monetize this. Concerned about the business plan. I don’t know. I thought there was something very inherently encouraging about this, but I don’t know how I would make it a movie. Can you figure this out?
John: We should say that the article we’re reading about is from Aleem Maqbool for the BBC, and there’s probably other versions of this that may go into more depth on certain things. I wouldn’t be surprised if they write their own book at some point.
Here’s the thing that sparked for me, is that we always think about this love at first sight happening to teenagers, because that’s when this should happen, but the fact that these two characters who should not have been looking for love at all, suddenly it happens, it’s just overwhelming when it happens, is nice and is inspiring.
I wondered if it was a play, and then I decided, no, it couldn’t be a play, because I think I need those close-ups. I need those moments. I need to see those elbows touching that make that happen. I don’t think it’s a play. I think it’s an Emma Thompson and some other British actor in it. Maybe it’s great and it wins a bunch of awards.
Craig: Isn’t that Howards End anyway?
John: It is Howards End to some degree.
Craig: I think when it comes to restrained romances, Age of Innocence comes to mind, with the little touch of the hand, or even in a very sick way, Silence of the Lambs, is the moment where their fingers touch, and it’s like that’s the extent of our weird romance. There is room for that. I just don’t know if this is the story that’s going to get you there.
John: I’ll say unlike Silence of the Lambs, I think there’s a gold circle movie to be made here. You know what I’m talking about, which is that classy British but also very cheery, or a working title.
Craig: A working title sounds like a better fit.
John: You can see how this whole package came together and why Universal is releasing this now. I think there’s something that can be charming about this. Also the fact that everyone else around them should be like, “You’re not supposed to be falling in love.” It’s just like, but why? They know it’s love. That could be inspiring.
Craig: Don’t you want to write this scene though? I’m quoting from the woman here, Lisa, who was Sister Mary Elizabeth, when she told her prioress how she was feeling. “The prioress was a little bit snappy with me, so I put my pants and a toothbrush in a bag and I walked out, and I never went back to Sister Mary Elizabeth.” I’m like, wait, okay, toothbrush I get, sure, but then also “my pants?” Socks, shirt, underwear?
John: Nope, don’t need none of those, just pants.
Craig: Deodorant, scissors, hairbrush? Just toothbrush and pants. I guess when you’re a nun, that’s what you got.
John: Got what you got.
Craig: You got what you got.
John: We also have a history of… Looking back to The Sound of Music, the decision to leave the nunnery is a big, momentous decision. Any movie that we make about this is going to echo back to that, just because that’s one of our favorite references, which is great too.
Our takeaway from the story of the nun and the monk, I think there’s maybe a movie here. This is a case where you might actually want to use their life rights, so you could say it’s based on a true story. You would have to get their official version.
Craig: My feeling is, as we often conclude with these stories, that this may be good fodder for side characters in a movie. If you’re doing a romantic comedy and your neighbors are a former nun and former monk who fell in love and married, that might be a very interesting side amusement. I don’t know if I would want to watch a whole story just about the two of them.
John: Let’s wrap up on a story that Rosario sent in. This is about 13 stranded strangers who go on a road trip. We’ll link to a version by Francesca Street for CNN. Essentially, it’s a bunch of folks. Their flight landed in Orlando, but they needed to get to Nashville. There was no way for them to get to Nashville because of plans getting canceled. A bunch of them had to get to Nashville by a certain time. They decided let’s just rent a van all together and drive from Orlando to Nashville, Tennessee. Craig, what do you think of this as a premise?
Craig: It’s a fine premise. There’s a wonderful musical called Come From Away, which is very similar in its own way. It’s about a plane that was diverted on 9/11. The only place it could land was I think in Newfoundland. It’s about this tiny, tiny little town with all these folks who are there stranded, because the airspace is shut down, and people coming together and meeting each other and all that. Yes. It’s just it’s very small is my concern.
John: It’s really small.
Craig: It’s just people in a van.
John: It’s people in a van. It’s a road trip story. You’ve made some road trip stories. They’re not easy, because you don’t have a place to come back to. It’s not quite clear. You have a destination, I guess, but you just have a physical destination. You don’t have an emotional destination for where you’re trying to get these characters to. The fact they start out strangers can help to a degree, but you’d probably want to build some relationships already within those characters so you can really see what it is that’s happening, so you can see progress and growth. Think Little Miss Sunshine. It’s not about the journey. It’s about the people in the van that are important.
Craig: I think part of the problem is there are too many people in the van. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles basically is this. That’s what happens. Their flight is canceled, and there’s only one car to share, and so these two strangers have to share a car and drive. It’s been done. I think if you can concentrate on two people or three, that’s fine too, but 13, eh.
John: That’s going to be too many people. I think Breakfast Club rules kick in at a certain point. You would have five. More than that, it’s too much.
Craig: Have you ever seen Spike Lee’s Get On the Bus?
John: Never have.
Craig: It’s fascinating. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a very simple plot. It was back when they did the Million Man March. Spike basically gets more than 13. It was probably 20 guys on this bus. The entire thing is the trip. It’s just the bus ride, with little breaks here and there. While there are a few moments of some small, what I would call plot action, mostly it’s these men talking and arguing and laughing and fighting. It’s really interesting as an experiment, because you are stuck on the bus with so many people.
What holds it together is the fact that it’s about a social issue, clearly. The point is they’re going to the Million Man March, and they are debating their own lives and their own history and their own future. There’s something to discuss. I don’t know what they talk about on this.
John: You’re not going to be obsessed with Nashville. Getting to Nashville is important to the individual characters, but it’s not important for the movie.
Craig: Exactly. There isn’t anything that connects them other than the fact that they were all supposed to be flying to the same place. It wasn’t like they were joined together by social issues or anything like that. I don’t think this is a movie.
John: I don’t think it’s a movie either. Let us talk through now our candidates here and see which ones are going to be movies and which ones are not going to be movies. Doppelganger murder?
Craig: Television show episode. Episode of a TV show.
John: The Godfather, Saudi-Style?
Craig: One day. Not today.
John: One day. Not today. Last days of Nikki Finke?
Craig: No.
John: The nun and the monk who fell in love and married?
Craig: Side characters.
John: Side characters. Thirteen strangers we think is probably not it. I’m going to say doppelganger murder is probably most likely to be the movie. I think it might be a Sundancey movie that could potentially break out.
Craig: That’s our best bet.
John: Thank you to everybody who sent in these suggestions. Sometimes they come in to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. A lot of times, people are just tweeting them at me or stuff, and they’re good. We love it when you find those and send them in our direction. I propose we answer one listener question, seems timely, from Embarrassed. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Embarrassed asks, “What do you do when the movie you wrote gets terrible reviews and you agree with them? I had a movie get made at a big level, and I’m so grateful that it got made, but I don’t love what the director did with the script. I don’t want to seem bitter or burn bridges with anyone or seem ungrateful. How would you recommend handling this in meetings and even just with your own family? How do you talk about a project that didn’t turn out like you dreamed it would?”
John: Craig and I, we’ve both been there.
Craig: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
John: First off, Embarrassed, it’s amazing that you had a movie get made at a big level. That’s fantastic. You’re better for having gone through the experience of it all. I’ve been there. What I will say in meetings is like, “Oh wow, yeah, thank you. It was a real challenge. It wasn’t quite the movie I wanted it to be, but I’m glad it worked. I’m glad it had success.” You can say things like, “It was weird to agree with the critics on it.” I would say you don’t need to volunteer about the bad experiences you had unless you think they’re relevant for the discussion you’re about to have, like why you never want to work for that director again.
Craig: There’s really no great advice here, Embarrassed. When it doesn’t come out the way you want, the only thing you can say is, if someone mentions it, you can say, “Ultimately, it was not the movie I wrote. The director took it in a different direction.” That’s I think fair to say. That’s all you need to say. I think everybody will get it.
John: There may also be a way to put it in a positive direction, say, “It’s a really interesting situation, because here’s a story that I actually wrote,” and basically talk about what the plan was. Then you don’t have to get into… They saw the movie. They know what the result was. They can see, oh, you’re that kind of writer. You’re the kind of writer who wrote that script that would’ve been a different movie. That can be useful.
Craig: There’s another thing, Embarrassed, that I think is worth mentioning. That is that these days, everybody is absorbing and soaking in review culture. When John and I were starting out, there weren’t even that many reviewers. Reviewers worked for newspapers. There are only so many newspapers. There’s four billion outlets right now online that write reviews. Everyone writes reviews. The old joke “everyone’s a critic” is now a fact. Everyone is a critic. There are so many reviews. They all get slurried into the Rotten Tomatoes score or a Metacritic score, and so now there’s metrics attached to reviews. Then on top of that, even people that aren’t writing reviews professionally are writing reviews on Twitter. Everyone’s reviewing everything constantly. It’s just what people do.
You may therefore feel a little worse about this than perhaps you should, because in the old days, you’d get your ass kicked in a bunch of newspapers. You’d feel bad. Very few people are even reading those things. Most people are just like, “Oh cool, you got a movie made. That’s awesome.” That’s it. Nobody would really dig any deeper. It just wouldn’t matter.
Just keep that perspective in mind that you may be feeling this intensely just because you’re swimming in the waters of reviews. It might be worth taking a break and turning some of that stuff off, because here’s what has happened. You got a movie made, and that this the beginning, my friend. Somewhere down the line, something great is going to happen for you. You will be happy. You will feel terrific. People will come up to you and tell you it’s wonderful. You don’t get there until you do the first thing.
The other thing is let time do its job, because 20 years from now, people are going to have a very different opinion of that movie. I don’t care what it is. They just do. That’s how it works.
John: I think we can also offer some very specific advice for Embarrassed, because we’re not going to say this on the air, but Megana has a note in the Workflowy about what the actual movie was that came out.
Craig: (singing) Megana has a note.
John: I’m looking at the title. I know that’s a movie. I know it’s a movie that came out. I have no idea what the critical reception was. I didn’t see it. I don’t know what people are saying about it. I would say that was a big movie. That’s what a lot of people are going to know about that movie. It’s a movie that came out, and that’s awesome. I honestly think that credit is not going to hurt you. Your feeling that it’s not a great movie is not important. It’s not going to weigh on anything.
Craig: You’re in the business. You’re writing movies that get made. In features, directors get all the credit. We know that. They also get all the blame. Your job is to write a movie that people agree to make. You didn’t cast it. You didn’t shoot it. You didn’t edit it. You probably weren’t on set. If you were, you were visiting, because that’s how features work, unfortunately. You did your job.
Of course you’re going to want it to turn out better. Of course you’re going to want the director to have done better and all of that. I completely get it. This is a great beginning for you. Don’t apologize for this. You can just say, “That really wasn’t the movie I wrote, but the movie I wrote got everybody to agree to make a movie,” and that’s of value.
John: Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Nothing Forever on Twitch. Craig and Megana, if you’re not seeing it, Nothing Forever is an animated, pixelly animation of a Seinfeld episode.
Craig: I’ve seen it. It’s cool.
John: It’s the Larry stand-up bits, which are Jerry Seinfeld’s monologue things. Then you’re in this apartment. These characters are moving around in really awkward ways and sitting on couches and on their heads. It’s all crazy and goofy. It’s all generated basically by AI and algorithms and a bunch of prebuilt assets that are just doing this thing. Basically, it’s constantly creating a new episode of a Seinfeld-like show in real time. It’s really unusual and unnerving to watch. It’s not good, but it’s fascinating.
I think the degree to which we talk about AI coming for our jobs, I don’t think they’re going to be writing the kind of stuff that we’re writing. I think they’re going to be making stuff like this that’s actually compelling and strange, that no human would ever actually try to do. I think that’s in many ways the real danger, like what is it that I’m watching, and why can’t I stop watching it? I think it’s really interesting.
If you’re clicking through the links right now, you may find it’s not available, because just this morning as we’re recording this, the account was suspended for transphobic content because of things that the algorithms itself had generated. It had characters saying bad things that the creators had not intended, and so the creators are apologizing and trying to fix it, which is again another exciting challenge to this kind of thing. Nobody wrote it, but it created a thing that actually got itself banned.
Craig: It’s canceled. We have canceled AI. Listen, it’s important for artificial intelligence to learn. These are learning machines. Maybe it needs to learn from what it’s done and do better.
John: Indeed. It’s taking some time to listen and really reach out and reflect.
Craig: I’m looking at what it was suspended for. It’s very strange. In a weird way, it’s almost anti-bad. There’s actually a weirdly subtle thing of it’s making a comment on the thing that’s not good, but still. Let’s put it this way. There is a line in the thing where it’s suspended, where the AI comedian, the Seinfeld literally says, “No one is laughing, so I’m going to stop.” I think that’s incredible. Wow.
John: Craig, did you have something for us?
Craig: I do. I purchased an item called the Manta Sleep Mask. This is available wherever you shop online, I’m sure. It is not expensive, like the last thing that I thought was not expensive but turned out to be expensive. This one’s $35.
John: Great.
Craig: You may say, “$35 for an eye mask?” Here’s why I love this one. I don’t wear eye masks normally at night, but if I’m on a plane and I need to sleep, I absolutely wear one. One of the things that we have been learning over time about light and sleep is how important it is to keep it out of your eyes. We talk a lot about some of the fancier, newfangled things, like not as much blue light. You probably have the night shift thing set on your tablets and so forth. I certainly do. That’s nice, but it seems like blue light, not blue light, the most important thing for sleeping is no light.
The thing with eye masks is they’re super annoying. I hate them. They come off my face. They squeeze my head. They pinch my eyes. I don’t like the way they feel. This thing is great, because they’ve designed it so that there are these eye cups. It floats away from your face, but it really does a good job of sealing out the light. It doesn’t mush around to the left or the right when you turn your head and sleep on your side. The eye cups themselves are Velcroed to the straps. You can move them to fit, because the distance between our eyes is different for everybody. For me, I’ve found this to be an excellent travel solution. Big recommend for the Manta. What a nice name for it too, the Manta Sleep Mask.
John: I think I’ve recommended sleep masks before, because I’ve slept with a mask for 10 years or so. I sleep every night with a mask on.
Craig: Really? In your own bed at home?
John: At my own house, absolutely.
Craig: Wow.
John: I want absolute darkness. I think they’re great. Yes, they take a little getting used to. So often, I think people’s only experience with masks are when they’re on a plane and they’re using those cheap ones that come in little kits.
Craig: Those are bad.
John: Those are really bad. That’s not what we’re talking about. These are going to need to be soft. Definitely they don’t touch your eyeballs, which is crucial. You should be able to open your eyes with a mask on, without your eyelashes touching. That’s what this will allow you to do.
Craig: Exactly.
John: It’s great. I really recommend, if you’ve not tried sleeping with a mask, get one of these, because it really is just a better night of sleep, and you’re out.
Craig: Love it.
John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Pachoo.
John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Chow.
John: Our outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. For short questions, I’m sometimes around on Twitter @johnaugust, but not consistently, so send it in to ask@dev.johnaugust.com.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on overpowered characters. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so this past week at DnD, we leveled up. We went down a level in the dungeon. We went up a level of our characters. I got to pick a new spell for my warlock named Klaus. Here are the choices I had. I had Demiplane, which was not going to be situationally very useful, Dominate Monster.
Craig: In the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, no. Dominate Monster, excellent spell.
John: Excellent spell. It basically lets you not just charm but really control a creature.
Craig: Control a creature.
John: Feeblemind, which was done against us shortly before, which basically just knocks somebody down to a Level 1 intelligence. They can’t do anything meaningful.
Craig: And charisma.
John: And charisma, yes. It really keeps them from casting spells and things. Glibness, which is a skill I don’t have, which is the ability to speak extemporaneously and [inaudible 00:54:13] charisma checks. Maddening Darkness, which is a powerful darkness that does damage on the people who are inside it, and Power Word Stun, which stuns people.
I picked Feeblemind because there’s a recency bias. It had just been done against us, and it felt great. It also felt like a good way to knock out a spell-caster, except I’m also thinking a lot of spell-casters could counter-spell that, and then I’ve just burned an incredibly expensive spell on them.
Craig: Hard to counter-spell that one though. It is a higher level spell. As they go up, trickier to counter. I think Mind Blank probably-
John: Protects against that?
Craig: … protects against Feeblemind. Yeah, it does. Mind Blank is a pretty awesome spell. It’s is also an 8th level spell. That’s 8th level wizard spell, pretty sure. Oh, and bards apparently can do it as well. Feeblemind is a great spell against casters for sure. You don’t want to cast it against a dum-dum monster, because it’ll just still punch you. Really good spell against anybody that’s using charisma in particular, so warlocks. If you’re going up against another big warlock, Feeblemind would be a really good one.
John: This got me thinking about overpowered characters, because now Klaus is at a level where he can do some really impressive things. I can lock somebody in a force cage and basically take them out of a fight, which is great.
It got me thinking about overpowered characters in DnD but also overpowered characters as they relate to the stories we’re trying to tell. I think we talked about the challenge of Superman on previous episodes, where you have a character who can do so much, who’s so powerful, that you end up having to look for his small weakness. You have to find the kryptonite so you have some ability to stop him. It makes it very hard to fit him in with other groups of characters, because he’s just so overpowered.
Craig: Overpowering leads to power inflation. The more powerful a hero is, the more powerful the villain has to be, so that we care. What ends up happening is this blunting of ability, where you get very excited that somebody is such a badass. Then you’re like, oh no, a mega badass has appeared. At some point, isn’t it just all the same then? If Superman is trading punches with-
John: Darkseid?
Craig: Yeah, Darkseid. He’s going up against Darkseid. Now it’s just these gods punching each other in the face, which is fun, but it does turn into the whole Thor is fighting with Hela, and you’re like, they’re the same.
John: They’re gods.
Craig: Now it’s just fistfight again. You get that weird inflation of power, all the way to Thanos can wipe out half of the universe and that we can do these things. For me, as a DM, the challenge of running a campaign with… There are seven of you guys, who are all Level 16. You’re a Level 15 warlock, but you’re also a Level 1… What’d you dip into?
John: Artificer.
Craig: Artificer. Seven Level 16 characters are demigods. The danger now is that every encounter will either be trivial or you’ll all die. The ability to craft close battles is becoming much, much harder because you guys can beat almost anyone. It’s tricky.
John: What you’re describing in terms of the DM’s challenge is really the screenwriter’s challenge or the TV writer’s challenge in terms of figuring out ways, when you have characters who can do all these things, how do you create scenarios in which they are challenged, and yet it still feels like they are recognizably human, it still feels like they’re relating to things at a normal human level. That becomes just really, really tricky thinking about the Superman problem, like Doctor Strange and Wanda Maximoff, which again, super incredibly, incredibly powerful characters.
In the case of Wanda, you’re looking for what is she really trying to do, how do we set up the things that she’s actually focusing on, which is basically to get back to her sons. How can that be a driving factor? Yet we as an audience have very little ability to understand what are the limits to her power, what is it that she cannot do. You end up having to have other characters describe someone that’s putting other guardrails around where the edges of her power is. It’s really tough. I think we sometimes under-appreciate how tough it is to write incredibly powerful characters versus people with more normal levels of ability.
Craig: You begin to get stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. There was a video game I played years ago called Turok, the Dinosaur Hunter. It’s a cool game. You were running around. I think you were on another planet. You must’ve been on another planet where there were a lot of dinosaurs but also bad guys. As you go, no surprise, the monsters get tougher, bad guys get harder.
Like a lot of first-person shooters back then, it was about weapon fetishization. You start with a gun, but then you get a shotgun, but then you get a big shotgun, but then you get a rocket launcher. Where it ended up was you have a gun that fires small nukes. That’s where you ended up. You were literally firing nuclear weapons out of your gun, which of course should theoretically kill you as well. It just got stupid. That is stupid. It was fun. Oh my god was it fun, but it was stupid fun.
The one time in Predator, way way back when, in the end, spoiler for the movie from the ‘80s, the Predator explodes himself and it’s a nuclear explosion, which Arnold Schwarzenegger runs from, jumps, does the whole something behind me is exploding jump, lands and takes cover behind a log or something, and he’s fine.
John: He’s fine.
Craig: He was at Ground Zero of a nuclear blast. He’s all right. They don’t show his character going through intensive cancer treatments years later. That was hysterical but also stupid. I know I’m going to get angry fan mail about that. That’s part of the fun of overpower is like, oh my god, what a badass, but then what it costs you is…
Another case of overpower, Highlander. There can be only one. He’s the one. Now let’s make more Highlanders. They’re overpowered. They’re eternal. They can kill everybody with their swords. This guy killed all those people with his sword.
John: I want to point out though, going back to your Predator example, because the most recent Predator I thought was a really, really good version of Predator. I loved it.
Craig: Grounded.
John: Grounded. I think one of the reasons it was grounded is that the Predator character could seem overpowered and yet it has put limits on what it’s willing to do, in terms of it could fly off in its ship. It’s not going to fly off in its ship. It’s going to do some stuff. Therefore you can use the overpowered character’s abilities against itself. That’s ultimately how they are defeated, which is true to the Predator ethos. An overpowered villain is not nearly as much of a problem for the screenwriter as an overpowered hero is.
Craig: Yes, although the overpowered hero will lead to overpowered villains. I see in the notes here you reference The Matrix. That’s what happened in The Matrix. What a great movie.
John: Great.
Craig: I love The Matrix. It is just gorgeous from beginning to end. It has a wonderful end. Then the demands of sequel made it so like, okay, he’s definitely God in The Matrix, so what do we do? Let’s bring back the bad guy, but let’s bring back a thousand of him.
There are so many interesting things that are happening in The Matrix sequels that I really enjoy, that are fascinating. That was the part that was the least interesting to me, because you could feel it getting silly. You were losing a sense of reality to anybody getting really hurt or really dying. It was getting so mythological as to disconnect me from a relationship with it. That’s one of the costs of overpower.
John: I’ve been thinking recently about why there are not more movies being made about the Greek gods. I think it really does come down to that. It’s very hard to have any sort of grounded things happening to them, because they are just literally gods. Their powers are so vast, it’s hard to find a challenge for them.
Craig: The great Greek dramas were about humans that were being toyed with by the gods or encouraged by the gods. The stories of the gods in their internecine warfare feels more like reading bible stories, where you’re like, “I don’t really think that that happened like that. I don’t believe that Jesus is fighting Satan in Hell.” I don’t really believe that, I don’t know, Chronos ate his children. I don’t know where any of this stuff comes from. It’s all rather silly. What is interesting is Persius.
John: Exactly.
Craig: He’s interesting. That story is fun. Jonah and the Whale, Jonah is interesting. People are interesting. One of the problems with the proliferation of the superhero genre is that we’re just disconnecting with people. The more superheros are like people to me, the more interested I generally am in them. I love Spider-Man. I love Batman, because Batman’s a person. Spider-Man’s a kid. I love that.
John: Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you!
Links:
- ‘Doppelganger murder’: Woman accused of killing Instagram lookalike in plot to fake her own death By Andy Eckardt and Aina J. Khan for NBC
- The Godfather, Saudi-Style by Anuj Chopra for the Guardian
- The Last Days of Nikki Finke by Jacob Bernstein for the NYT
- The Nun and the Monk who fell in Love and Married by Aleem Maqbool for BBC
- 13 stranded strangers went on a road trip. Here’s what happened by Francesca Street for CNN
- ‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI by Chloe Xiang for Vice
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- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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