725 - Torn from the pages of Squash Magazine

26:31So she holds herself outside of it and sort of is then forced into it. Weaver describes this sociological paradox. To have many friends is a desirable condition. To plainly seek to make friends is unseemly and pitiful. Millennials brought acceptance of the taboo around extending oneself in friendship, perhaps an aversion to participation inherited from their direct predecessors, Gen X, is particularly irrational given that millennials report feeling lonely often or always at much higher rates than members of previous generations. And yet Weaver herself says like, I am pathologically that person who will try to make friends with people.

27:05I don't understand. Like, so millennials have a taboo about reaching out, which is insane. And also, weirdly, millennials are lonely. Yeah. Like, if that's your taboo, then yes, you will be lonely. Also, don't put that on Gen X. We love having friends. We never did. We don't know taboo about making friends. And also, millennials aren't our kids. They're boomer kids. Yeah. I defend my generation. That said, what you have here absolutely is a movie. There's a bunch of different kinds of movies to make. Yeah, there are. I mean, one version is you've got a woman who is type A who had a group of friends that she has sort of started to leave because she is on a more successful track because she does feel so pitiful, whatever her weird millennial problem is.

28:00Or her friends started having kids and she doesn't have kids yet. And that's a factor. That's a thing. So she starts to feel like either I'm lonely or I need new friends. I'm going to sign up for this thing because this is a very like, Like, hey, I did a test and I got a good score. I win. She goes on this vacation. Meanwhile, her friends and their kids happen to also go on vacation at the same place, but like on the one beach over or something. And she's having her new friends and this type A maximum lifestyle. And over there, the other character who was like her best friend is like having a horrible time because her kids are sick and someone's barfing and they're crying.

28:41And yet they are each getting something valuable. And they're each also looking at parts of this going, this is horrible. And maybe it's better if the friends that we have are the friends we actually made because we're friends and not because we were in a program to make friends. Yeah. Intentional friendship is a real, own special flavor. So a couple of different movies this is reminding me of. bridesmaids, obviously, because it is about female friendship. But I was also thinking about a real pain. So we had Jesse Eisenberg on in episodes 6, 7, and 2, and that's all centered around a trip to famous Jewish sites with a bunch of strangers.

29:25Well, Holocaust sites, but also the town where his family grew up. Only famous Jewish sites. Yeah. I mean, some of them are infamous. Infamous famous, yes. But a group of strangers and of course his cousin as well. Yeah. Sideways, which is, you know, friends traveling. So that idea of like, okay, this is, the whole movie is about this trip and this travel and sort of what you've learned along the way. It's also a hangover. I mean - A hangover, yes. They get drunk and they go crazy. And there's somebody in charge of them who you can quickly see becomes the villain. There is a kind of bonding that occurs possibly through perfect people who have been selected because they're perfect people behaving extremely imperfectly together.

30:14And through that, actually, friendships are created. I was also thinking about David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which is about him going on the cruise. And what is the conversation between his perception of what his role is there as a documentarian there and Katie Weaver's, who is actively trying to make friends? They're very different characters in similar situations. This last year, I went on a cruise with my family to Alaska. And so we started in Anchorage and went down to Vancouver. And because Mike and I are the people who will try to make friends, we went to one of the mixers and met a bunch of the solo travelers.

30:51And there's a whole community of people who go on cruises by themselves. And they will do it all the time. And they make friends on the cruises. And then they all plan to go on the same cruise again and again. And they love doing that. Nightmare Cruise people deserve to be loved also. Yes, they do. I think there's a lot of really good, rich space here. Yeah. You could use this article as a jumping off point. I don't know that you need it because you're probably gonna want to just do your own thing. And there's not, there aren't a lot of great specific characters that felt like, oh yes, that's somebody you want to pull through into your movie.

31:27Yeah, it's the sort of article somebody options so that they can feel like they have a project that they can get writers to come in on. It's such a producer thing to do. I can just see that. I've gotten sent articles like this. Well, someone will do it. And I can imagine this or essentially this idea becoming a movie 100%. And it could be a theatrical feature, but it could also be made for a streamer. Totally. Love it. Or it could even be like a limited series. You could do the Mike White version of this. And I've been - Well, yeah, I mean, I guess Mike White has done the Mike White Lotus of this version in a way, but I kind of feel like this feels like movie to me.

32:08Yeah, I think it's a movie too. I think it's a comedy. Yeah, I think it's a comedy for sure. Next up, switching gears even more radically, how the US hacked ISIS. This is an article by Dina Temple-Raston for NPR. It was sent in to us by Brian Naughton. Drew, help us out. In the spring of 2016, Steve Donald, who's a captain in the Naval Reserve and a computer whiz, is ordered to put together a team to conduct cyber operations against ISIS. At the time, ISIS is the first terrorist network to use the power of the internet to recruit and launch attacks. And after tracking them for months, Neil and his team learned that ISIS has just 10 core accounts they do everything through, from file sharing to financial transactions.

32:49So he presents this to his higher-ups, and they begin Operation Glowing Symphony. They use phishing emails to gain access to the administrator accounts one by one. They map the entire network. And then in a coordinated attack, they take over the 10 accounts, lock the administrators out, and take everything down. Then after the initial takedown, the task force shifts to ongoing disruption and high-tech psyops to cripple their organizing efforts, frustrate their users, and tank ISIS morale. Craig Mazin, what do you see here? What's interesting? What's challenging to you? All of it is interesting.

33:22None of it is a movie. It is so hard to make drama out of somebody going, okay, click, yep. All right, I deleted that. Click, yep. I blocked him out of his account. Click, yep. I could see this as a scene in a movie or like a moment where we're screwed. We don't know what to do. And someone's like, I know who to call. And these tough soldiers end up in a room with a bunch of nerds who are like, oh, this is what we do. but the problem with this kind of thing is it is impossible to portray on film the effort and ingenuity required it's because you can't sit there and go through hours of people going how do we break through their firewall and da da da and the ssi and you remember one day they do and they type things on a keyboard and it happens it is profoundly uncinematic which is why when we do show hacking in movies, it tends to be ridiculous and overblown because we're trying to make it cinematic.

34:27And so we have things on screen going rah, rah, rah, I think it's a great moment, scene possibility. I would not know how to make this a movie. Yeah, I'm a little bit more optimistic that there's a movie to be made here. I'm thinking about sort of what have I seen of hacking that truly is cinematic. And I think Mr. Robot is the best version of it I've seen. You have a very compelling character and what he's doing when he's click, click, click, typing, typing, typing, we quickly see what's happening, what the actual effect is. And that's why I think this can't just be from one side where we're just seeing what we're doing.

35:01I think you have to see ISIS's side and sort of what they're actually able to achieve and who these people are so that when we're doing things, we know who those people are as stuff gets frustratingly worse for them on the other side of this. That scene is awesome. They're really funny because they do it. And on the other side, someone's like, oh my God, what's going on with my password? John, my password doesn't work. Just restart. Yeah. So you need to see the same people who've done like, you know, a bombing and who've done like serious things and killing people. And then they just can't get into, they can't log into Instagram.

35:36I can't get my, I can't, who? Yeah, someone took my Insta. So the other thing this reminded me of a bit was the imitation game. So in that movie, Alan Turing has to figure out how to crack the Nazi codes. and that movie was successful in sort of physicalizing a lot of stuff that is otherwise an intellectual process. Yes. And so there's moments in just the story as written, which is like, he's going in on the whiteboard and he's actually drawing all the things. And it literally, he evokes the image of Charlie in, it's always standing in Philadelphia with the red strings of it all. And so that, sure, that's one little snapshot, but you have to then figure out like, who are the people that you need to do?

36:16to what degree is this a heist kind of mentality and that could be exciting which is like this is the plan but these are the things that kind of go wrong but because they are physically separated because there's not the there's the whole internet in between them it's the the stakes don't feel quite real enough I guess you know I recently saw House of Dynamite which Catherine Bigelow directed so brilliantly and that is a bunch of people typing into things, but it ends up being quite cinematic. And there may be ways to take some of that grammar into this. Well, so House of Dynamite, that's a good example of a kind of Altman-ish view of what happens over the course of, you know, one hour of real time, but divided among three different stories where there are quite a few different things.

37:05One of them is the president of the United States. The imitation game obviously had the great character of Alan Turing to explore and the difficulties in his life and how that impacted him. But the other thing about the imitation game is that what they were trying to break, the Enigma machine, to do it, they had to build this big physical thing that was awesome to look at. And it's accurate. With these dials, it was so cool. And the stakes, of course, were World War II. And no offense to ISIS, but they haven't World War II'd the world. They haven't yet hit Hitler status. So there's stakes, but if there were a great character in the heart of this, if Steve Donald, the captain of the Naval Reserve, was also a fascinating person with a challenging life story, then maybe you could sort of see how this could be a thing.

37:58Yeah, we're sort of like, you can't believe it's him, but it could only be him. That's an aspect that is, we don't know if that's true or not. And so that's why you need to do a lot more research beyond what we see in this story. Yes. All right. So that's three of our stories. Our fourth is completely different on another axis. So Drew, help us out on this fourth one, which is based around the best college squash team in history, James Zug, writing for Squash Magazine. There's a Squash Magazine. Of course. It was sent in by Dan Ziches. So in 1977, the student editors of the Whitman College newspaper start writing stories about how the university squash team is having this incredible undefeated season.

38:39Except the school doesn't have a squash team. This is a joke, and the editors try to make it as obvious as possible with ridiculous scores and matches against world champions, but no one at the school figured out it was fake or bothered to fact-check them. So they continue to write about this championship squash team and are eventually invited to a real squash championship in Calgary, Alberta, which the school administration gives them money to go to. They lose their matches quickly, and they party for the rest of the trip. When they come back, they report factually about their trip and thank the administration for the money and encourage them to support the drag racing team.

39:11In 1977, I loved the period setting of this story. There was a bunch of college kids just sort of pulling a prank that sort of went on too far. And then, of course, they get recruited into doing the thing. It's such a comedy premise and then a comedy consequence to have to go do the thing. A lot of stuff you're going to want to bend and change. But Craig, do you think there's a space here that's interesting for a comedy? No. No, only because the problem is you sort of put your finger on it, actually. You have a group of people that, as a joke, make a fake squash team. As it turns out, one of the guys actually played squash, I think.

39:47Yeah. But most of them did not. And then the joke is somebody believes you and puts you in a tournament. You have to go. And now it's kind of like a dodgeball, you know, underdog situation. But anyone can play dodgeball. That's why dodgeball worked. squash is a sport. Yeah. And you're just going to lose fast and you're obviously fake. And that's not fun to watch. Not fun to watch it. If you go and you're awesome and you end up losing, that's interesting. If you go and you stink, but you prevail, that's interesting. But if you go and you're just fake, what happens? Is flatlining lose and then you go home?

40:25I don't know. It just feels... Also, as pranks go, this is the most milquetoast sort of like mealy-mouthed prank. Like, you know what we're going to do? We're going to make a fake squash team. I know it was supposed to be like, oh, those scamps. But mostly I was like... Yeah, so I think what you're hitting on is that it's like a prank just for the sake of the prank doesn't feel like enough of a driving engine. There has to be something they're actually going for. And some of this reminds me of former scripted producer Stuart Friedel. One of the characteristics I love so much about Stuart is he will have a goal or like he'll see an opportunity and he will engineer things to achieve that opportunity.

41:07For example, Stuart wanted to sing the national anthem at a major league sporting event. And so he engineered the way for him to get to sing the national anthem at, I think, a minor league baseball game. And he did it. He figured out like this is an opportunity to do it. And so a Stuart Friedell type character who is driving this for a specific goal, which is not just sort of an inner ambition, but something he wants to achieve. You can imagine that being enough to get us to like why we're creating the fake squash team. Yeah. To win the girl, to do the thing, to get the scholarship, to do something.

41:41I could see where it's a little adjusted, where you have a squash team that is pretty bad. They want to be good. And you get all the different reasons why. My dad was a squash player. He wants me to be a squash player. Whatever it is. They're okay, but mostly they're in the cellar in their very tiny Division III, you know, college league. And somebody, as a joke, because they're so bad, somebody as a joke just starts flipping the scores when they print them. And they get invited to a tournament because of it. And they're like, we're going, we have to try. We can be better. You ever hear like, you play up to your competition.

42:23And then they have a chance to be a Cinderella story. And then, you know, and then of course, right before they're about to go into the championship match, somebody discovers that the records were flipped and they're disqualified and everyone's like, let them play, let them play. Bad news bears. And I could see that. Yeah, so I think we're talking about what are the interesting edges of the sports comedy genre And so we referenced Dodgeball, which is, of course, a parody of the sports comedy. Challengers is also sort of a parody of what a sports comedy is. Happy Gilmore, another great example of a movie that is a comedy that is existing because of what our expectations are of sports comedies, Bad News Bears, you referenced.

43:03So I think there's something smart you could do there. But this is just a very tiny little seed of an idea. and you'd have to really have characters who are interesting and have a good way to introduce the audience to like, what does 1977 feel like? Because you and I were little then and we have some image of what that's like. But in that pre-internet era, I can see them getting away with this because anything that was in print was like true. Of course. Yeah. This is of all these, well, they're all execution dependent, but this one is especially execution dependent. Like this either works great or it's like, oh, it's a nothing.

43:42So once again, our listeners totally stepped up. Thank you to our premium subscribers who got this email and sent us in these great suggestions for stories. I really loved talking through all of them. Same. Let's answer a listener question. Heidi has a question about querying reps. A few years ago, I wrote a feature script based on a quirky and obscure historical event. I rewrote the script as a picture book manuscript and sold it to a major publisher. The book's coming out this year. I've since revised the original script and now have a few more scripts under my belt. I think I might finally be ready to seek representation.

44:20My question is, should I send the picture book and the press kit with my script when I query managers? The illustrator the publisher chose is fabulous and the illustrations are quite cinematic. I'm wondering if it will serve as a sort of early pitch deck or I'll just seem hokey. I think, Heidi, yes, you have something that people can see, which is nice. Mostly, you want them to be reading your scripted material to get a sense of like, oh, this is who they're going to try to sell you as, as a person. But like the book is the thing they're going to send out to get people interested. And so, yes, you should send them the book.

44:53Of course, of course send in the book. If for no other reason, then it makes you legitimate. You wrote a book and a major publisher bought it and published it. Now you're somebody that is different than the just, hi, I'm a 23-year-old from Kansas and I wrote a movie that's mostly based on my life. And you go, fwap, into the other pile. This is different. It'll at least get attention. Yeah, I think you have to be crazy not to. Yeah. Fred sent in some rage bait. Here we go. should writers repeat the plot three or four times assuming that most viewers are watching while on their phones? Oh. Well.

45:34My. God. All right. I can see the color changing in Craig's face. Oh, my God. Yeah. I have heard about this. Yeah. Mostly in reference to Netflix, honestly. Correct. Netflix. And nobody at HBO has ever brought that up. Mm-hmm. Apparently nobody at FX has ever brought that up. I think Justin probably would have complained to me by now. This is not a thing. This is just the computer spitting out too much data and their pattern recognition. I mean, it's just pattern. This is faulty. This is faulty. People know when they're not paying attention that they're not paying attention. It's not like people don't pay attention to something then turn back to it and go, what's going on?

46:21This movie makes no sense. They're aware. They go back and watch the part they missed. This is silly. I hate it. I will never do it. No one should ever do it. It's gross. Why don't we also repeat the ending twice? Why don't we do that? Why don't we just repeat entire scenes? Let's do that. Yeah. Let's make soap operas. Let's make soap operas that also repeat within the episode of the soap opera. And everyone should always say their name when they talk to each other. So, John, as you know. Craig, I absolutely know what you're saying. Right, John? But let's rephrase it, shall we, John? So, this is maddening, and it's not real.

47:06It's not true. Also, we're saying Netflix here, but Netflix's biggest hit, Adolescence, that was not recapping what was happening moment by moment. You actually had to watch the screen and pay attention. and people don't mind paying attention to things. I don't think it was developed by Netflix either. So here's where I think that the reality is coming in here. If you're doing a competition show, if you're doing like a baking show, they are trained to repeat things again and again, like going into a challenge, coming out of a challenge. They're just constantly filling up with that kind of stuff, but not in the scripted dramatic stuff.

47:42Don't do it. No, don't ruin your story. Nope. Don't. Just don't do it. All right, it is time for our one cool things. Mine is a paper by Cornell University and Anthropic looking at disempowerment in the age of AI. And by disempowerment, it's where people sort of see control or see decision-making on certain axes. What I liked about it, and there's a little table chart, which I thought was the most useful part of the article, is a sort of summary and classification of kind of ways that people disempower themselves. So they talk about reality distortion, which is on a spectrum from none to severe.

48:23So if you're going to an AI, sort of like you're going to just look something up in a book, and you're just trying to get information and context and understanding that that's not disempowerment. But with increasing sycophancy, the AI is telling you like, oh, yes, you're absolutely right. Even if you're absolutely wrong, if it's reinforcing negative beliefs, that can be very, very bad. And there's a person in my life who has fallen down that rabbit hole and clearly is believing things that are not true because the AI is just telling them that they're right when they're clearly wrong. That is troubling.

48:57And that's a thing we need to be aware of. But they also talk about outsourcing decision making, which is basically like when my dog got sprayed by a skunk, I was looking up online to see, well, what should I do? Because that's an answer that I can find. There's an expert out there. but if I'm exporting more fundamental life decisions to this kind of thing, that is disempowering and it's taking away your own agency to do a thing. I mean, I think it's like, oh, I'm making a choice to ask something and to ask for advice, but honestly, you're giving up the insight and the self-determination of what is best for you.

49:33So I thought this chart was really helpful. The paper is good at looking at sort of what the issues are without providing good solutions to these issues. but we have to think about the guardrails that are beyond just like, let's not let AI take over all of our systems, but let's also not let it take over our internal determination of what we want to do, what we believe in, what is objective reality. Those were some really good observations, John. I think we're really onto something. Absolutely. I hate that. Oh my God, do I hate that. If anyone talked to me like that in real life, I would be like, what is wrong with you?

50:13Stop your toxic positivity. I hear the feedback. I'm happy to make that adjustment. Oh, gee, I'd be up. Yep. So I do have one cool thing. Please. You're familiar with the song Day in the Life by the Beatles from Sgt. Peppers. And there is a young man, he's British, And it's like a 20-minute video where he goes through how that song was first written. So it was initially written by John because the song has two distinct parts to it. And then there was this hole where John said, Paul, you put something in there. And then they began to record it. And while they were recording it, Paul then came up with his little bit.

51:02And they literally were like, okay, there's going to be 24 bars in this song where Paul's thing is going to go. So they record the whole thing. And then Paul, this is the part that blew my mind. Then Paul's to go in and do his bit. But back in the day, if he goes too long, he's going to overwrite. Okay. Literally on tape. So there was this very tense moment where he had to, and I went into a dream. La, la, la, la, la. So that part, that part's recorded. Went into a dream, had to like fit right there. And if it was like a little too long, it was going to mess it up. It was going to erase it, not over like erase.

51:46So there was all these like crazy things. And then getting the final note and how they got that final note was fascinating. how they were able to get an orchestra to play the way they did because they wanted an orchestra to just play crazy and classical musicians do not know how to play crazy. That's not a thing they do. It's just really well done. It's a fascinating history of how that song came together, literally down to the fact that I read the news today, he blew his brains out in his car and then 4 ,000 Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. Those were two articles in one day in a newspaper that John read and he goes, I'll take that one and I'll take that one.

52:30It's pretty remarkable, but there's also some really good footage of them doing it all together. It's just a great analysis of a song that deserves analysis because it's very complex. Yeah, I love any sort of explainer video that really dives deep into how an artistic work was created because we just have the assumption like, well, this thing is wonderful and perfect. And until you know the actual genesis of how it got to be there, it just looks like, oh, well, this person was clearly just a super genius. And you'd see like, oh, there were actually many steps along the way and there was collaboration and there were decisions that were made and reversed and other things.

53:06Song Exploder is a great podcast and video series that also talks through a lot of other songs. It's just fun to watch people solving problems that today are not at all problems. Yeah. So like that final note, they've got six different pianos and they're all hitting versions of and the problem they had was getting everybody to hit exactly at the same time. And it was like a little off. They wouldn't take it. I think it took them nine tries. Now, hit one, record, hit one, and you would never have that problem of like, fit your lyric in here or you erase. It's wild that that's the way it worked.

53:45And it's awesome. I think it's also worth noting, just like there's really frustrating things about YouTube and the short form video and sort of how it's destroyed our attention. But short form video like this is also just an amazing opportunity to sort of see how things are put together. And the fact that somebody made this video, that wouldn't have been possible in a normal TV documentary way. It's like you can have very specific channels and focus on very specific interests. And that's incredible. Yes, it is a great feeling going into something that is documentary and knowing I'm going to get the thing I want and then I can go away and do something else.

54:25As you were able to know right from the start, like how long is this video? Do I have time to watch this now? Yes, yes. All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Gloom Canyon. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books.

54:57So thank you for continuing to buy the Script Notes book. You'll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram, also at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. Thank you. Both for what you sent us in solutions to email problems and great articles to discuss. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week.

55:28You can become a premium member at inscribnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on CDs and DVDs and what the hell we're going to do with all these plastic discs in our homes. Craig, Drew, thank you for a fun show. Thank you. Thank you.