746 - How Would This Be a Crime?

21:40John August:It would be a place with its own time zone filled with hot air balloons and run on a seashell-based barter economy. That's where he lost me. He believed the project, which never broke ground, would draw billions of people in a matter of months and usher in world peace. Pericocon. So this man was an incredibly successful businessman, a visionary. He built Zappos, which had a well-deserved reputation for quality and things. And if it was just a story about Tony Hsieh, it would be just the tragedy of this person who's, I don't want to say he was bipolar, but there was something going on that sort of made him, his drive ultimately.

22:21John August:He was mentally ill and had a serious substance abuse issue. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Craig, what handholds do you find in here that make this interesting to you as a movie or a series? Well, it's an interesting basic concept for a good courtroom kind of drama. I've never seen this. I don't think anyone's ever seen this, which is why David Siegel likely wrote the article. It's some random will shows up from some guy and weirdly the courts need to take it seriously. They're not saying we accept the will as correct, but we can't just go beat it. We have to actually go through this probate process to decide if this will is real or not, which is going to cost a lot of money and both sides have to spend money.

23:09and I think my guess is that these two lawyers took this because they're like, at some point, these guys are just going to pay us to go away. But regardless, if you had a situation like this that basically combines a mystery with a court battle, who was this 90-year-old man? Why did he have the thing? And if it in fact is possibly real.

23:33John August:Did the 91-year-old man exist? Did he exist? or was he somehow always there in a connection to this person and nobody knew? It becomes a very interesting kind of whodunit-ish sort of thing. The only issue is that the stakes are a bunch of money and that's tough. Yeah, well, it's$500 million, which is a bunch, a bunch of money. And I think it wouldn't be hard to imagine there's ways to create stakes that are actually meaningful for the characters involved. So obviously a fundamental decision is, are you basing it on the actual real events or are you taking this as a premise to do a whole separate thing?

24:11John August:I go premise. I go premise too. And so if you're going premise, then you can create stakes that are meaningful in terms of like, what is going to happen to this land? What if you actually were married to this person who died this way? And it's a whole mysterious thing. So it's the wife of the man who dies. And you know what you're struggling? You're always struggling with, I'm just thinking about the audience. They're like, well, so a bunch of people who did not invent Zappos and revitalized downtown and so on and so forth are fighting over the money that was left behind that they kind of didn't earn.

24:43So, because like there's something about inheriting money that's slightly, it's hard to root for it per se. I mean, you want, you know, I certainly want, what I root for is that there, it would go be distributed in some fair way. Yeah. But it's hard to break down over somebody that didn't get money that they didn't earn in court cases. Except that, I mean, there are charities

25:05John August:which he would have given to. Yeah. That's different. So if it's not a person, I mean, that's... There are orphans who are basically going to die because of this weird world. That's plausible. But I also say that succession, like no one is... You're not rooting for anybody in succession and yet you're at every moment fascinated by what's happening. So if it's a series where you get to learn all these snakes and it's Game of Thrones, which is sort of succession with sort of Game of Thrones. Yeah. Who gets to sit on the Iron Throne? Then it becomes a fun soap opera and it's not about the concept anymore.

25:39Then what this is, is the thing that happens in the pilot that sends everything willy-nilly, but ultimately it is just a spark that starts a much larger problem.

25:53John August:Yeah. So let's think about the movie versus series thing. I think you can imagine so many twists and turns that the series is really appealing. I think one of the challenges with thinking about this as a series is that fundamentally there's kind of is an answer. And I think because there's an answer, that's a really movie idea. It's a one-time closed thing. It's conclave. Like we're going to elect a new Pope at the end. There's going to be a decision that is finally reached. That's why I think it probably is more a John Grisham courtroom investigation thriller or some field work to sort of get you there.

26:25John August:You're puzzling together the mystery. It's a Rian Johnson movie versus a Rian Johnson series. Yeah, I feel like my gut is telling me mystery. That you treat it sort of like a whodunit. And that the person who's fighting for this money is not fighting to keep the money, but rather is fighting to... Also, they're like, hey, this company... Obviously, I'm not talking about Tony Hsieh now. I'm talking about our fictional guy. This company did bad things. And now this guy's left all this money behind. and one of his kids wants to fix the bad things that happened. But there's this other group that suddenly shows up saying, it's our money.

27:04Now I get like, you know, the vest. Now it's Aaron Brockovich fighting for people. Not, I just really want money that I didn't earn. You know, but I think it's a whodunit in a way.

27:17John August:Yeah, I think it's kind of a whodunit too. So going back to the actual real story, if you were to imagine an adaptation of that story, the characters. So Tony Hsieh would largely be a character in flashbacks, I imagine. So we might sort of reconstruct what had happened before, sort of how Citizen Kane reconstructs who he was after his death, or Evita reconstructs who she was after her death. Obviously, characters would be those lawyers who are named in the will. I think there's all sorts of choices you can make for who those lawyers are and why they would be doing what they're doing. They could have very noble purposes for why they're doing it.

27:49John August:It's like, this is the thing we're going to do. There could also be shady things. You could make a lot of choices about that. If you're using the real people, Of course, you're being very, very careful because these are real people and their attorneys. I don't think you need to. I don't think you need to either. I mean, this feels like if it were, let's say, a Knives Out movie. Yeah. Someone knocks on Benoit Blanc's door and they're like, guess what? You were named in this weird new ghost world. And you're in line to receive$400 million. And now he has to solve a mystery so that he doesn't get the money because he doesn't.

28:19And that could be, hey, Ryan, write that. Write that, Ryan. Write that, Ryan. Ryan may be writing that, by the way. Yeah, what if he is? Ruining another thing. He just ruined more Ryan to ruin Johnson. Ruined Johnson.

28:32John August:I'd also say, in the reporting of the story here, we bring up Eli Siegel, who's a Las Vegas journalist. She's done most of the reporting on the boots, on the ground, reporting about this. And someone like that, who follows a very small lead that becomes a bigger lead, we have a whole tradition of journalistic mystery thrillers. I think there's something to do here. I don't know that it's going to be a direct adaptation, but I think it's a very ripe space for a story. And I say this is framing as like, how would this be a crime? And it's not even clear that it's a crime being committed, but there's some weird motive.

29:06John August:And that's the thing. It's like, who's trying to do this thing? Because it's not clear that anyone's trying to directly benefit. That's why it's a great basis for an Agatha Christie style mystery. Yeah, it's a good thing for a mystery. Anything involving a will or sheep or both. two things go well together. There's always a will. Where there's a wool, there's a way. My last woolen testament. Yeah. Okay. I wish it had. Wouldn't be so nice. Let's get to our next mystery, our next crime story. This is about luggage tag switching, which seems like kind of innocuous unless it lands you in jail and this looks not good.

29:50John August:This was reported by Avery Haynes and Joseph Loyero from CTV News in Canada. Yay! Yay, I like Canadian media. Meredith, talk us through what happens in this story. At least 17 passengers from various Canadian flights were detained on drug smuggling allegations over the past year. But turns out the passengers themselves were innocent. Somewhere along the line, their bag tags were switched onto suitcases filled with drugs. How the scheme works. A corrupt airport worker unsticks the luggage tag from an unsuspecting passenger's bag and reattaches it to a suitcase packed with drugs. A bag tag switch can happen in seconds in security camera blind spots.

30:34John August:If the drug bag makes it through undetected, someone at the destination country receives it. You get to your destination and you pick up your real bag, missing the tag, none the wiser. If it's intercepted, the innocent passenger is left facing the consequences. Holding the bag. Yes. Yes, literally holding the bag. And so in real life, all of these innocent passengers were eventually released, but some had been like, they're stuck there for months. They're all handcuffed, arrested, jailed overseas. In some cases, they were pulled off the flight before it left Canada. And so they've arrested some baggage workers and ramp workers at the Toronto airport, but it's not clear whether this has all been resolved.

31:15John August:So Craig here, I don't think any one of these stories individually is compelling. it's not going to be an adaptation of this specific thing. But this as a scenario for starting a shitty thing that happens that gets characters trapped in a bad situation. What are you thinking? It feels like the plot of an episode of a procedural. Yeah. Where you finally uncover that it was the baggage guys all along. It doesn't seem meaty enough or even exciting or interesting enough to be the concept of a film. And certainly there's no series called the luggage tag switchers. So let me flip it though. Let's say instead of it from like the police's perspective or from these passengers' perspective, this is a scheme hatched by a group of baggage workers or other drug kingpins, Canadian pot kingpins who are going to try to do this thing.

32:09John August:It's not pot, John. Oh, sorry. No, it is. It is. It is. It's all cannabis. It's all cannabis. The weed literally everywhere in Canada. What is the problem? I don't understand. That's the thing. No, it's Canadian weed to foreign countries. Oh, really? Yeah. That's the fun. I think that's the fun twist of it. That's what it is? Yeah. Oh my God. That's just, there's no real money. The real money's in fentanyl. I don't know what these people are doing. So they are. That's what they're doing? So it's the vacuum sealed bags of pot. Hold on. I'm looking through the, because I don't remember that. So it's from various Canadian flights to overseas.

32:45No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Tell me more. This is what Nicole says. They brought out the bolt cutters, opened her luggage. It's just massive, massive vacuum sealed packages of pills.

32:56John August:Okay, so some of this is pills, but some of this is not because you'll also look through that same article. You'll see all the weed. Okay, hold on. I saw meth. I saw pills, meth. Where's the weed? Oh, sorry. It's in the video. Oh, I didn't watch the video. Dominican Customs posted a video of three Canadians being led to face charges of importing 79 packages of Canadian marijuana into the country. Well, those people should have probably been doing the pills and the mess. Smaller, yes. It's just easier. All right, so the scheme, which maybe you're flying things back and forth. Maybe there's a whole network you're setting up.

33:33Yeah, it could be like in The Sopranos. In this particular season, there might be a four-episode stretch where they're trying to do a new scheme. You know? Yeah. They were doing like WebEx, I remember, was like a stock scam that they were doing. This could have been like, we know a guy at Newark, he's going to switch the tags. We're going to hand, you know, we get a taste, whatever. It just feels like an element that gets used and burned and then you move on.

34:02John August:Yeah, I agree with you. And we're going to have another drug smuggling thing, which I think has more cinematic potential than this does. Or maybe we're combining the two and it's just like, we got to get the drugs moving. We got to like drug logistics movies. That's the thing. There's like, in general, I have this issue about the drug smuggling movies because it's like, obviously the tension is we're trying to do something illegal. And then there is law enforcement that tries to stop you. The problem is we all know that generally speaking, it's like traffic or rain. It just keeps coming. Yeah.

34:34I never think to myself like, oh, the drug war finally has been resolved. it's just you know even if the good guys win it's like right behind them you should see trucks going by full of fentanyl because that's how it goes

34:46John August:well let's jump ahead to our next drug related thing this is about uncrewed narco subs and how they could transform the Colombian drug trade this comes from Peter Guest who's writing for MIT Technology Review yeah not uncrewed as in C-R-U-D-E but uncrewed as in there's no crew inside yeah robots robots Meredith, talk us through it. Colombian drug traffickers have been using narco subs to move product for decades. But in April, government officials intercepted the first autonomously operated one. Usually when officials intercept a narco sub, they board the vessel to find a few exhausted men amidst diesel fumes and a cargo compartment full of cocaine.

35:29John August:This time they found no crew and no product, but a fuel tank, an autopilot system, and control electronics and a remotely monitored security camera. Bolted to the hull was another camera, as well as two antennas for connecting to Starlink satellite internet. This was Colombia's first confirmed uncrewed narco sub. It could be operated by remote control, but it was also capable of some degree of autonomous travel. It's likely a prototype built by the Clan del Golfo, a powerful criminal group that operates along the Caribbean coast. Uncrewed subs could move could move cocaine over longer distances and they wouldn't put human smugglers at risk of capture.

36:10John August:It can wait out patrols or bad weather, loiter near a meeting point, or take longer and less well-monitored routes. So Craig, what I think is fascinating here is that in many ways, the remote-controlled robotic narco sub has taken away so much of the potential coolness and drama from the story. It's like basically like, what if DAS boot didn't require sailors? Absolutely, yeah. Then I don't care. Absolutely. So it's like all things with drones, it's like you have to find a different frame for how you're doing it because the thing itself is not, there's no drama to the thing. You're not worried about an empty submarine.

36:49John August:Whereas I'm worried, if I know there's a guy who's crouched in that little submarine, I'm scared for him. But for a robot, no, I'm not. Yeah, I agree. This article figured out how this would not be a movie, like right in the headline almost. I think it's interesting to think about warfare overall in the era of drones, because you look at what's happening in the Ukraine war with Russia. It's at the front. There's not fighting in the same way. Everything is way back in sort of video. Sort of? Well, that's right. They had to be close enough so that they can... That's the thing. There really is kind of this very exciting thing going on where there are guys who are hidden in some half-bombed-out church because they have an antenna.

37:34And they are sending these drones super duper far. And while they send them super duper far, the Russians are like, we're picking up some drones and we know somebody's driving the drones. We have to triangulate and use our capacity to figure out exactly where they were and drop a bomb on that church. And it's like, okay, they figured out where we are. They're going to be here in six seconds. And we blew it up. Let's run through a tunnel. And then they blow up the church. It actually is crazy.

37:58John August:So I rescind my concern that we'd move too far from the front lines because with the requirements of the drones that they're using, they need to be close in order for these things to work, which is important. So if we want to apply that back to these narco subs, I think you would have to create a scenario in which you have to actually be close enough to the sub to control it during certain things and you put yourself at risk. and obviously with the strikes that this administration has been taking on fishermen in the area, it's very perilous just beyond those waters overall. So that is some of the stakes.

38:32John August:I'm not going to have tremendous sympathy for the pretend fisherman who's remote controlling a narco sub. No, I don't really care. Yeah, right. So again, I think in both these cases with the luggage tax being switched to get drugs in or the narco subs, we're lacking characters, were lacking stakes, were lacking reasons to feel like this is more than just a runner in some other story. It's really just about a new tactic for doing a thing that we've seen people do a long, long time in shows and things. All right, let's do our last story here, which is titled Footage Shows Cop-Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her with a License Plate Reader.

39:10John August:Yeah. Yeah, this is a grim one. Jason Kobler writing for 404 Media. Meredith, help us out. Another Florida man story, and this one unfortunately starts on a film set. A Florida police officer allegedly used multiple law enforcement databases and automated license plate reader technology to track a woman he met while working security on the set of Apple TV's show Bad Monkey. After allegedly harassing the woman on set, catcalling her and asking her for her Instagram, he put her license plate details on a surveillance hot list so that he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.

39:51John August:Dashcam footage shows the officer pursuing her at high speed and conducting a traffic stop despite having no legitimate investigative reason and nearly causing a head-on collision in the process. The article asserts that this case illustrates how powerful surveillance tools intended for policing can be when abused for personal stalking. It raises broader questions about oversight and accountability. Yeah. Florida, man. I think this is a movie, not this specific case, but I think this scenario is a movie. I think it has a visceral fear to it. I think you're seeing probably both perspectives, both POVs on it, and yikes.

40:30John August:Craig? Yeah, no, I think it is, you would obviously have to have a smarter villain. So this particular Florida man was an idiot. He did all this stuff knowing full well that it would be completely logged. I didn't know this when I read the story. I didn't realize that, and I don't know if this is everywhere, but in this particular municipality, if you drive your police car over 70 miles an hour, the dash cam automatically turns on. Yeah, great. And all of this would be so obviously trackable and reportable. He knew it. Even when he was like, even when law enforcement was investigating him, he was like, yeah, and then I knew that was stupid, but I did it.

41:12So you'd need a smarter cop. The amount of power a policeman has today with access to these things does turn them into a pretty dangerous cat and mouse type of thriller, killer. Yeah. I mean, it's a woman in peril. We've seen this a lot, you know?

41:31John August:Yeah, but I think that woman who recognizes the situation, so it's a familiar situation of a guy who is hitting on you, who can't take a clue and is pursuing you. But generally, you feel like if you leave a space, they're not gonna be able to find you. But of course, now they can find you. And it's not just because of the internet, it's because he literally has this sort of superpower of having access to all of this technology to track a person. And then the people you're supposed to be reporting him to, you don't know if you can trust them either. Right. And so it gets out. And so you can imagine scenarios that go much further and beyond the complications before it gets to judgment and conclusion.

42:13John August:Yeah. You can imagine there's a lot of scenarios there. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm not a big fan of just sort of like a person hunts another person down and eventually the person that is being hunted gets them and kills them. I just, it's an incredibly predictable format, but there is another way of thinking about this, which is, I mean, yes, you could absolutely do that movie. There's also, again, this could be a fascinating episode of something. The concept that you can get a ping when a driver's license goes by is pretty, that's because, you know, like when you, so I have, I have like the little Metro pass thing that allows you to drive like in the HOV or the Metro lane, Metro express.

42:55That's what it is. Yeah. And Jessica thought that was just like, oh, it was just like our family. So she drove down the 110 in the express lane and they send us a bill. And they take a picture of her and the car and the license plate. And these cars are flying by, right? Yeah. 75 miles an hour or whatever. And it's perfect. Yeah. So that plus like some report back. This guy's crazy though. I mean, this is nuts. like how does he honestly think this is going to work no i mean but there's a sense of like you

43:32John August:know characters should take agency and do whatever it takes to to get the girl and i think he like all great villains of stories he sees himself as the hero in the story yeah but like i want him to be smarter i guess that's really what it comes down to like i would love for him to not high speed chase him but rather have him blocking off a street that he knows she's going to get to So she has to stop and he has to get out. Sorry, man. The streets, but oh, hi. Sorry, there's a thing down there. But how are you? I mean, I want him to be smarter. Yeah, you do. And that's going to be the fun is that I think he should be smarter up until the point.

44:07John August:Yeah, this guy. Jeez Louise, what an idiot. Yeah. So there's the aspect of, obviously we're always stalking the people we are interested in on the internet. So like looking at their Instagram, like that's just a thing that happens. It's, it's, it's, it's part of - This is why I'm not on Instagram. But it's part of the courtship ritual is sort of like looking a person up. It's crazy to me. Well, it's Olivia Rodrigo's song. I know, but it's so sad. But we didn't have Instagram, but we always had ways of sort of finding out about a person or asking about a person or figuring out what they liked. It's just a bummer that like, I get it.

44:45Like I would do it too, of course. It's just, it's sad to think that there could be very good relationships between two people that could last a lifetime and they don't happen because somebody reads some weird thing on Google and they're like, I don't know. That's weird. They're into blank play. Next.

45:04John August:So here's what I would stress. So I don't think you need this specific story. I think this is a jumping off point. 15 scripts will be written about this general topic. And the good scripts about these topics, the woman at the center of this will be interesting and would be a fascinating character even if this never happened to her. That she's not just a generic victim waiting to happen. And so, and whatever her goals are and the things she's trying to do, it should thematically relate to, it should be the benign version of his extreme version of this. And so, I think if she's pining after somebody and does like the mild version of this, but then he's the insane version of it, that is interesting.

45:43John August:All right, let me pitch, let me pitch an idea. All right, here's my pitch. Smarter cop. Yeah. Using technology and his wiles to stalk this woman and she has no interest in him. Also, she is doing a crime. Oh, fun. So the more he stalks her, the worse it gets. Yeah. I don't know how this goes, but I like that. I like that. Somebody do that. I'd watch that movie. Okay. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. I think we've taken so many bad lessons from obsession, but I think a good lesson to take from it is like sometimes you can do something that is simple and focused on people and stakes. And we will love those things.

46:27John August:So it's not a horror movie, but it's a thriller in a way we're not making big screen thrillers often. So I'd love to see this. All right, so let's do a recap here. We think that is probably a movie and we're going to see some version of a movie like that, I suspect at some point. I don't know if we'll trace it directly back to this, but this type of movie will happen. The$500 million mystery, we think, is a really good premise and it's set up. So I don't know if you'll get a specific adaptation of the Tony Hsieh story, but a mysterious will showing up, that's going to happen. Whodunity kind of thing, yeah.

47:01John August:And we are both low interest on drug trafficking-centered movies. And we think it's probably more of a episodic, a runner in something else. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. All right, it's time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that I've been using for like 10 years and I've just never talked about it on the air. Craig, you and I play D &D with a bunch of folks and we're playing on our laptops. And so I get to see people's laptops and I see their desktops, which have like 19 ,000 documents on them just scattered all over. Ask me how many documents are on my desktop. How many documents are on your desktop?

47:37John August:Zero. Zero for me too. Zero. The desktop must be clean. Yeah. And it's not just an OCD thing. It's important to understand on a Macintosh, all of those icons are potentially animated and doing things. You're actually burning cycles and you're slowing down your computer by having a bunch of shit on your screen that doesn't need to be there. It's also just, it's messy. Messy for your mind. I mean, people who are like, look, my actual desk is a bit messy, but that's because that's not my real desk. This is my real desk, the computer, and I keep it clean. And so in previous episodes, we've talked about sort of folder organization, which is basically stick stuff in project folders so you can find it later on, use sensible numbering schemes.

48:15John August:But there's always those documents which you don't need for very long, but you need to hold onto it for a little while. So my one cool thing is the pending folder. You make a folder called pending and you stick all the things in there that are just kind of temporary that you need for maybe a day or two or a week, but they're not part of a project. They're just there. So instead of putting them on your desktop, just make a folder called pending. I put it in Dropbox so it shows up on all of my devices. And it's just where I stick all of those things. So blog posts, lists, test documents. If I need to send somebody something through Dropbox, I stick it there and I copy the Dropbox link out of there and send it on.

48:53John August:I urge you to think about a pending folder and put that in and drag it over to the sidebar on the Mac so you can always see it right there. I will save you so much agony and I will clean your desktop if you just use a pending folder. If I told you that I do, it's just I have exactly what you have. I do exactly. That's amazing. It's just a slightly different name. What's it called? Holding pen. Perfect. Holding pen. Exactly. It's my holding pen. So like. How long have you had this? And do you know when you've got the notion to do it? Forever. I mean, like, I can't remember how long I've had it.

49:30This one, the holding pen currently has 646 items in it. Yeah. If I scroll down, I'm going to find images that I needed to grab and then throw onto something. I'm going to find when I take a picture of my driver's license for the four millionth time, if I'm going to find, I need to send somebody a photo of a COVID test or a receipt. I'm looking through this mortgage form, a bunch of like sides that I had to send somebody for the show. It's all there.

50:02John August:Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly how mine works as well. And the crucial thing is if this got deleted tomorrow, I wouldn't care. I would just make a new pending folder because nothing in there is crucial that I have to hold on to. That's right. And I do only because storage is cheap and easy. But my holding pen happens to be nested inside of documents inside of the iCloud drive. Another great place for it. But I just keep, like you, I make sure it's on the sidebar so it's right there. And that is different than downloads, which is specifically for things that get downloaded. And so I'm with you completely.

50:36I think it's essential to have, it's like the packet drawer in the kitchen. You know, the one with all the catch-ups and paperclips and crap. That's what that is. And yes, people should have that. And nothing should be in your desktop.

50:49John August:Clean it. I would also urge you to empty your downloads folder often because the stuff gathers up in there. And it means that every time you are downloading something new, you have to like look through it to find the stuff. Like, nah, don't do that. Just get rid of those things. I have my folder download and holding pen are both set to sort by date added. So it's last in first out. Lefo. Lefo. Craig, you said, as we were starting to record, you didn't have a one cool thing, but I actually have a one cool thing on your behalf. Thank you. If that's all right. Yes. All right. So this is the 40th anniversary of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a movie I deeply enjoy.

51:23John August:40. Megan Garber wrote up a piece about it for The Atlantic, and there was a friend of the show who was mentioned in it, and not surprisingly, she had a significant role in baking the movie the way we love the movie. This would be Lindsay Duran. Once again. Once again, so Lindsay said, if Ferris was destined to be an enduring influence, Duran did not want him to be a bad one. She convinced Hughes that Ferris would be more compelling as a character and more responsible as a cultural power broker, where his rebellion framed as a day-long lark rather than a way of life. Thus, Hughes edited the joyride that Ferris takes with Cameron and Sloane into a journey that is, in the end, notably wholesome.

52:03John August:There's no strip clubs in sight, which there were in the original. He turned Ferris into a rebel with a decidedly vanilla cause. He is a teenager who skips school to expand his horizons, who frees himself from the stultifying confines of Shermer High and receives a more meaningful education from the wide world beyond the school's walls. Absolutely true. I mean, when you look at what Ferris Bueller does throughout the day, even though he lies to his parents and skips out of school and hacks the school computer and so on and so forth, he's been absent nine times nine times so where does he go? The museum the museum!

52:43He goes to the museum he goes to see a Cubs game there's a parade that he joins they have lunch at a fancy restaurant it's all like and as many people have noted the real key to unlocking all this is that he's not even the protagonist of the film it's Cameron and so all of this is like your sneaky angel coming to get you to stop being such a depressed loser. And it works. He's Manic Pixie Dream friend. He is Manic Pixie Dream friend. He really is. Yeah. You know? It's good stuff. Yeah, it really is. And it's a fascinating movie because it is. John Hughes, in general, didn't seem to care a lot about what I would call like the really hard fundamental rules of, of like basic commercial narrative.

53:33He went, he would go all over the place, but what a great thing that Lindsay did here, because yeah, we don't want Ferris to be an, and a devil that shows up and gets you to do bad things, but we want him to be fun. Good angel. It is nine times, nine times. You want a gummy bear? They've been in my pocket all day. They're soft and warm. Meredith, Have you seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off?

53:59John August:Oh, tons of times. It's so good. Okay. I just wanted to make sure. Because, you know, now I get to like say to somebody, like, I, who did I, oh my God. I won't say who it was. Yeah. But it was a, it was a 31 year old person who was a lesbian who did not know who Martina Aperturaba was. And I was like, like one of the, like one of the first athletes to come out. Iconic. iconic and an incredible tennis player, one of the greatest of all time, still active out there commenting on tennis and all the rest of it. I was, but then I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. Cause we're old. So now I'm like, I check on everything.

54:41I'm like, do you? You don't? Okay.

54:44John August:A movie I watched this last week was Citizen Kane, which I'd seen in like college or maybe started film school. I hadn't seen since. And yeah, it holds up. It's a really good movie. and it's also modern in ways you don't expect that the narrative structure is racing ahead and it's taking its time in other places. It's really good. It's so odd to watch a movie about like, here's a narcissistic rich person who wants to be a media titan and a politician and yet the movie's not, weirdly, like not judgmental about it or less judgmental than you would sort of expect it to be. It gets to, you know, the core of the problem.

55:20It holds up in part because so much of what we do

55:23John August:comes from that movie. Yeah, absolutely. So it's seeing the overtext of things. The other thing I appreciated about watching it now after having made a lot of things is that so many of the sets have ceilings on them, which is nice. And then sort of later in the movie, as houses get grander, where you can't see the ceilings anymore, you notice the change. A lot of low angles. A lot. Yes. And a lot of times we don't build ceilings because that's where the lights go and the point we don't look up there. It is fascinating. to watch that film. That is our show this week. Script News is produced by Meredith Stedman with Help.

56:00John August:I accept that. From Lauren Loesberg. Oh, interesting. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli. Supposedly. Outro this week is by Gloom Canyon. Whoa. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnagust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer on this program. You'll find transcripts at johnagust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We recently had an issue that was all about is dystopia getting worse? And which is delightful. And the answer is kind of, but also dystopia is always a reflection of the time that we're in.

56:33John August:So it's fun for that level. The Script Notes book is out and available wherever you buy books. You can 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 at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear you can break out to celebrate Script Notes on any other day. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Where possible, we try to give you like the non-paywall links to things so you can actually read the articles, but some of these are behind paywalls and sorry.

57:08John August:Thank you to all our premium members. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We really adore you. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on betting markets Craig, I bet we'll have a good conversation but this was a delightful talk about daydreaming and other things you got me on that one, thank you thank you Craig, thank you Meredith

57:52Thank you.