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May 24, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:16:56
Orson Scott Card | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 96
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People think that what I do is I write novels about children.
No, I don't.
I write novels about humans, but humans begin as children.
And my model was, I want to write novels as if they were biographies.
Ender's Game is one of the biggest science fiction stories of all time.
It won the Hugo and Nebula awards, those are two of the most prestigious sci-fi literature awards.
It spawned a giant franchise of books, 19 of them, soon to be 20, as well as graphic novels, even a Hollywood blockbuster.
To this day, it's still read and cherished by millions of readers 35 years after its release.
This week, we're going to change gears with a different kind of guest.
As many of you know, I'm a huge sci-fi fan and a bookworm, so we're talking with Orson Scott Card, one of the biggest names in the genre.
The Ender's Game story starts with humanity's attempt to prevent the next great war with foreign invaders by having government agencies breed child geniuses and then train them as the ultimate soldiers.
Aside from the foreign invaders being aliens, this future doesn't seem all that improbable.
Scott's work is often set where he can imagine the technology and politics of the future.
These days, sci-fi has been invaded by radical left ideology, writers focusing on social justice street credit rather than stories about the human condition.
But Scott continues to challenge his readers and himself with a massive body of work, telling stories not just of sci-fi, but magic, fantasy, even religious fiction, and Shakespeare adaptations.
In our conversation, we discuss why many sci-fi writers are entering new genres, what drove Scott to write an entire novel as a narrative response to Stephen King's Pet Cemetery, why the Force is the worst part of Star Wars, and attacks from critics on the themes of Ender's Game.
I'm excited to welcome Orson Scott Carr to today's Sunday special.
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There's going to be all sorts of good stuff over there.
Go check it out right now.
Orson Scott Card, welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
So why don't we start with the sci-fi genre itself.
So most of the books that you've written are in the sci-fi genre.
Why do you choose to write in that genre so much?
Oh, do you want the short version or the long version?
The real reason I started writing sci-fi was that back when I was starting to try to write, to make money, to try to pay off the debts of the theatre company I had started, because I was a theatre guy, I thought the only thing I could write that might make money would be science fiction, because if I tried to sell mainstream fiction to the New Yorker or women's fiction to Redbook, I was going to run up against the top writers in those fields.
But with science fiction, you can't make very much money writing short fiction.
So all of the short fiction writers that get introduced through the magazines, I knew that they quickly moved to writing novels from which they can make a living.
So I figured the competition's always removing itself in the science fiction field.
I'd read enough science fiction that I thought I could write it.
I was almost right.
I was close with the first few things I wrote, but then I wrote one that I thought was a surefire winner.
I'd thought of it years before, and it was the short story version of Ender's Game.
And even then, it still took a couple of years before it found its way into print.
But then, ever since then, that's the place where my fiction has been welcome.
I've written some things that are definitely not genre, and no one cares, because what the bookstores want is something that they can put in the same section with those books of mine that have have sold, and so it works better if I work within that genre.
It's not just science fiction.
In fact, I'd say I've probably written more fantasy than science fiction, but that's where the field has gone.
Most of the science fiction writers from my early years are writing fantasy now, like George Martin.
He was the Best New Writer of the Year, I think, right before me, and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
And so George has obviously moved over to fantasy in a big way, and he's doing great.
So I also do some fantasy.
That doesn't do as well as Game of Thrones, but then nothing else does.
So actually, I was going to ask how you distinguish science fiction from fantasy.
I know this is sort of a rich and ongoing debate in the sci-fi fantasy world.
is where the separation lies.
The description that I read that made the most sense to me is that in the world of fantasy, there is sort of an element of the mysterious that doesn't exist as much in the world of science fiction where everything is supposed to be explainable through reason.
But what's your take on that?
That is closer, that one, than the usual one, which is that science fiction is stuff that has not happened but is possible and fantasy is stuff that doesn't happen and isn't actually possible but we can imagine it.
And that...
Almost works, except for the fact that it's considered science fiction if you do things like faster-than-light travel or time travel.
And those can't happen.
Time travel especially, because the string of causality is unbreakable.
You can't move back to cause that which caused you.
So it's arguable either way, but I learned the practical definition right away.
I had written some science fiction stories, and I sent them off to Analog.
And the new editor, John W. Campbell, had passed away during the time that my manuscript was in the mail.
And so the new editor read a couple of drafts of stories that now are in my book, The Worthing Saga.
And I knew they were science fiction, but what I got back was a letter saying, Analog publishes science fiction, and these are obviously fantasy.
And I thought, why?
Why?
And then I remembered looking at the bookstore, the books in the bookstore, looking at the covers, and I realized, here's the difference.
And it's the one that actually functions in the real world.
The covers of fantasy books have trees.
The covers of science fiction books have sheet metal with rivets.
And so it's rivets versus trees.
And if your story is illustratable with rivets, it's sci-fi.
And if it needs trees to be effective, then it's fantasy.
So when you're creating one of your books, do you start with the characters, or do you start with the plot, or do you start with sort of the world?
What usually comes to you first?
There's no usual.
Anything can come to you.
It's an exercise I do with my writing students.
I call it a thousand ideas in an hour.
And I just sit there and ask them questions and they come up with random answers.
And the answers will trigger something that makes you go, Oh, now what about that?
That awakens a response in you.
So sometimes it's a world.
Sometimes I'm just doodling the map and I start naming the countries.
And then I start thinking, why would it have that name?
That's weird.
That's dumb.
And as soon as I get to that's dumb, then I know I'm probably on to something because I thought of something that doesn't make sense to me.
And if I thought of something that doesn't make sense, it means it came out of my unconscious because my conscious mind is so flamingly rational that I don't come up with nonsense.
So the nonsense, then you find a way to explain it.
So it stops being nonsense.
Can you start finding that you're in a world where a story can take place?
But sometimes I start with the characters.
Sometimes I start with somebody who has a certain power.
Sometimes I start with just an idea, like there's some recent books I've written.
I started with the idea, you know, I'm tired of superpowers.
What about micropowers?
What about powers that barely do anything, but they do that thing?
uh and and the kind of power that you could believe somebody might actually have somebody passing you on the street not wearing spandex might have a power like this uh the most absurd one is that there's a person who in this in this fictional world who knows when someone approaches whether they have an innie or an outie navel and uh this is meaningless absolutely meaningless until she realized that she can detect it even with people that she didn't know were there
So nobody can sneak up on her because she knows the belly button before they get get close.
So ends up having a somewhat practical use for her, but is absolutely trivial.
There's I have a girl who can make people yawn.
Yawn uncontrollably.
And she uses it almost as a mercy killing for guys who are trying to ask her out on a date that she intends to refuse.
Is that she just makes them yawn before they can get the proposition out and just gives up and walks away because they can't stop yawning.
But it ends up, you know, if somebody's running away from the cops, it's really hard to run fast while you're yawning.
It really is, you know.
Think about it.
Think about what happens to your vision when you yawn strongly.
You kind of go blind for a minute.
And so she ends up having a practical use in a crisis.
Things like that.
And those micropowers have spawned two novels so far.
I expect to do more because I have such fun with them.
Now it turns out that my hero always has something that's maybe a little bit more major than those Deliberately trivial examples, but it's just fun.
So I started thinking about what micropower would make for an interesting story.
So I decided with one.
It was a person who finds things.
Not really anything he finds, he knows who it originally belonged to, and he can take it back to them.
He knows where they are.
And so it's not that you can say I lost my whatever and then he goes and finds it.
It's that he finds something and he can bring it back except if it has any value.
People are going to assume that the reason he knows where it is and who to take it to is he stole it from them.
And so he spent his childhood, early childhood, learning the hard way that returning things to people brands you as a thief and gets you beaten up sometimes.
And so he's shy about it.
But the story Lost and Found is about the idea of how does it come to have a practical use?
To maybe help somebody, save somebody's life.
And you've got to have something like that.
Somehow your protagonist has to be able to do something heroic, or you might as well be James Joyce and have no readers on purpose.
There are many readers of James Joyce, most of them in graduate school, because you can't do that to undergraduates.
They're not ready.
They haven't got the discipline.
They haven't proved that they're willing to put up with that amount of garbage and try to say smart things about it.
And so if you want to have no audience at all, then by all means have a character no one cares about because nothing he does matters.
But in the case of science fiction and fantasy, you've got to have the hero.
He doesn't always have to be nice.
There are several science fiction writers who have made their career about writing about not very nice people.
And, you know, I mentioned George Martin in Game of Thrones.
Is there a nice person in Game of Thrones?
Maybe, arguably, one.
One and a half.
But that's about it.
Everybody else does things that are just...
You just think, are you insane?
Are you evil?
And the answer often is both.
But it's still very powerful because it's very realistic.
That's the change that science fiction and fantasy have both made, is you can't just throw magic on the page and make it fantasy.
You have to make it fantasy that would pass muster with a science fiction writer, because that's who's writing fantasy now, is mostly science fiction writers.
And they got their training in the discipline of Always having to explain things so they make sense, so there's a logic, so there are rules.
And so a good fantasy will explain its magic system in such a way that stories can arise out of it, because we know that not just anything can happen.
I talked to Judson Jerome once, a poet who also wrote for Writer's Digest for many years, and I'd given him my novel Seventh Son, which is the first of my Alvin Maker fantasy series, and he handed it back to me.
He says, ah, I said, Writing's fine, but when anything can happen, it doesn't matter what happens.
And that is a true statement, but what he didn't know as a non-fantasy reader was how carefully I had set up the rules of what can and can't happen, so that by the time you're a quarter of the way into the book, the rules are there and they're set and I don't violate them through the next five volumes after that.
And so he didn't know how to read fantasy, he was not schooled in that, and fantasy readers quickly school themselves.
Nobody gives a class on how to read fantasy.
You just read fantasies until you get it.
And if the story is satisfying, great.
And if they don't read something else.
So it's a nice liberty of reading.
In just one second, I want to ask you about how detailed you get in sort of your outlining process and your prewriting process before you even sit down to write.
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So when it comes to your actual writing process, how much do you do outlining and how much of it is you sort of have a rough idea of where you're going and then you sort of let the characters of the plot take you where you're going?
I know writers who are both schools on this.
And that's, in fact, there's more than one school.
More than two schools, I mean.
But in fact, I always do some degree of outlining.
I try to think ahead.
Mostly milieu development.
What are the rules of magic?
How does the science work in this?
If I need faster than light travel, what is my justification for it?
Because, you know, we have a grab bag of stuff that all science fiction writers use.
Back in the 40s and 50s, in the Campbell era of science fiction, the writers were inventing all these things.
Now we just shop from their shelves and take what we need.
But that does involve a degree of outlining.
When I have a character and I have perhaps an antagonist or an obstacle he needs to overcome or a goal, then I'll think of obligatory scenes, things that have to happen.
And I have to then set up those scenes so they mean something, so that the reader will care.
And so there's some planning that goes into it.
I know writers who think like screenwriters, and they write out all the story.
Not actually writing the prose of the story, but note cards with every important scene, the way screenwriters often do.
And then they can shuffle these note cards around.
And paste them in different places on the wall and, you know, in other words, their thought is all on the board.
I can't do that because anything that I wrote for anything after Chapter 2 is going to be discarded as soon as I find out what's going on in Chapter 1.
And I never know.
I have a plan.
I know what's supposed to happen.
In chapter one, but what if one of my little bit characters that I use as a little placeholder just to get some exposition going turns out to be really fun?
What if my nonce character is more interesting than my main character?
I have been known to elevate nonce characters into major figures.
Sometimes they'll replace somebody who was already in the outline and do the same jobs they needed to do, but later.
Sometimes they just carve their own way in.
But the process is pretty flexible, because by the time I'm nearing the end of any novel, The outline is now a relic deserving to be covered with dust.
It has almost nothing to do with what I ended up writing.
So I have to plan in order to get the confidence to proceed, but then I don't keep looking back at the outline.
Now this is frustrating to editors who believe that they're supposed to receive the manuscript that was promised in the outline I gave them.
Which is even more sketchy, and it's never happened yet that they've gotten that particular story.
And I've seen an example, an early novel by Dean Kuntz, where it looked obvious to me that after developing a cast of amazing, wonderful characters the readers cared about, He caught up with the point in the outline where they all go into an alien spaceship together, and at that point he was just following the outline.
And it didn't matter who any of the characters were.
It's the same thing Stephen King did in The Stand.
He set up this great cast of characters, and then because of his good Calvinist upbringing, it felt right to him at the very end that after all they did, it amounted to nothing, and the finger of God comes out of the sky and destroys the missile.
And I just threw the book across the room.
I was furious.
It was a hardcover, too, so that's an expensive habit.
But it was just outrageous to me, because I am so not a Calvinist.
And so, you know, we Mormons aren't Calvinistic, and so we believe that human activity actually matters to God, and therefore, He's not going to make it so that Everything we sacrificed was meaningless.
Anyway, it was unsatisfying to me.
I think it's unsatisfying to a lot of people that it just ends with God doing what he could have done in the first place and spared them an awful lot of trouble.
But that's, you know, each author has to write from his own unconscious and from what feels right and true to him.
And so I learned very early on that while I admire Stephen King and enjoyed many of his works, especially early ones, I had no desire to write anything that he would write, because I don't like horror, and I'm not sympathetic to it.
I don't read it, if I can avoid it.
And one of his best books, Pet Sematary, as I was reading it, I realized, oh, good heavens, they keep mentioning the busy road.
Their little boy is going to get hit by some vehicle.
And then dead, he's going to be buried in the Pet Sematary, so he'll come back to life, but he'll come back to life as a monster.
So I skipped ahead to the end and realized that yes, I had nailed it.
That was exactly what happened.
And by the way, anybody who thinks I'm committing spoilers, if you haven't read these things by Stephen King by now, it's your own fault.
And so anyway, it's not like Stephen King has been a secret that I was holding close to the vest.
But I decided to write my anti-pet cemetery story where a child dies and haunts his own family as a ghost.
But is still himself.
Is still the good person that he was.
And that's my novel Lost Boys.
So it didn't sell like Pet Sematary.
I just thought I'd mention that.
If sales is your only measure, Pet Sematary is a much better book.
But then again, Pet Sematary hit the shelves marked as written by Stephen King.
And mine hit the shelves marked as written by Arson Scott Card and without Ender Wiggin in it.
So, you know, it diminished its chances greatly, but still there are people who tell me that it's my best book, including myself.
But, you know, it's one of those things where you don't get to pick what the public wants most, and you're just glad that they want anything.
Let's talk for a second about the messaging in your book.
So you mentioned that sometimes you'll read other books and you'll feel like there's a message that's being put out there that isn't good.
By the way, I had the exact same reaction to the stand the first time I read it.
I thought the first 400 pages of this are pretty breathtaking.
And by the time we hit the end and everything just explodes, which has become sort of de rigueur for all of King's novels.
It seems like the last 10 or so novels, basically a bunch of stuff happens and then just everything explodes at the end.
It's one of my big critiques of King.
But putting that aside, how do you Well, I've given up on it.
Yeah.
Every so often, I go back to read another King novel, and maybe this time they won't explode, but I'm wrong every single time.
Every single time, everything explodes at the end.
It's very disquieting, actually.
But when it comes to deciding the messages in your novels, do you sort of let the novel bring the message forward, or do you start with the message in mind, and then you say, this is sort of what I want to establish via the novel?
Well, I don't think any of my novels have anything you could call the message.
There are people who think they know what it is, and they're always ridiculously wrong.
I don't even know how they got their idea from my book, and I think, no, they just brought this idea with them and read what they wanted to read.
But there are messages, sub-messages, that I'm aware of.
For example, in science fiction, it's a requirement, really, of writing acceptable science fiction that you not have God be an actor.
in the play.
You can have people believe in God.
You can actually have God be an actor as long as you explain God as a giant computer or et cetera, et cetera.
In real science fiction, you won't find anything as ridiculous as The Force, which just destroyed Star Wars for me because it's so mystical and silly.
And so while I really loved the first movie and the second movie was pretty good, the more they get into the force, the less interested I am.
And then it's like a sort of a Pablum, a milk-soaked graham cracker of a religion.
And yet there are people for whom that has become their religion.
So they're on baby food, and that's good.
It's better to satisfy your hunger with something rather than nothing.
But I realized that science fiction had character after character that had no upbringing, no family background, nothing.
They came out of nothing.
It's just the hero is what the hero does.
Now that's romantic storytelling, capital R. That's what you find when you're reading the Middle English romances.
Characters come out of nowhere.
The hero is Arthur.
You know, later they invented, they back-storied him with stuff with... Uther.
Yeah.
Uther and Merlin and yeah.
Uther, Pendragon, and Merlin and all that stuff.
But no, they were just concatenating stories from different traditions in Brittany and then spreading them out with the troubadours.
But by and large, they have no upbringing.
And so I start my characters early.
People think that what I do is I write novels about children.
No, I don't.
I write novels about humans.
But humans begin as children.
And my model was, I want to write novels as if they were biographies.
And if they're biographies, I want to spend some time on the thing that biographies do worst.
which is deal with the childhood of the figure that they're reporting on, because with rare exceptions, like Winston Churchill's letters home, begging his parents to come visit him or let him leave his boarding school, we don't have anything from children's childhood, from famous people's childhood.
We get vague, vague intimations.
Some remark that an adult who knew him then said, you know, what a precocious brat.
Well, that described half of them.
And it's hard to put together their childhood, but when I'm just making it up, I have a completely free hand.
It's the nice thing that happened when James Cameron arranged for me to write the novelization of The Abyss.
I asked him for permission to do backstory on the lead characters, and I said, that's what I do as a novelist, so I need that in order to know who they are.
So he gave me the chance to write a couple of chapters before the beginning of the movie script.
And he gave them to the actors to read.
I think they never read them.
Why would they?
All they had to do was say the lines in the script.
And so this was all waste of time stuff for them.
But for me, it was necessary in order to turn it into a good novel.
Jim told me that was the goal, was he wanted a good novel to be made from his movie.
And there were a couple of places where what I call a good novel surprised him.
He was not always pleased along the way, but he eventually consented to what I did.
And I'm proud of the result.
I think it is a good novel.
And in some ways better than the movie because he didn't get to finish the movie the way that he wanted to.
They ran out of budget for some of the final special effects.
And so what we end up with is it looks like a fiberglass bathtub joy rising out of the ocean instead of the shimmering surface that it was supposed to have.
But when there's no money, you can't do the special effects.
And so, you know, and some things were cut out of it that I thought were important.
But he still, he kept the things that were most important to me.
He understood the story the same way I did.
And that's good, because it was a great script.
That was back when Jim Cameron still cared about the characters and cared about the story.
And so The Abyss ended up, for me, being a truer film than some of his later and bigger blockbusters where You know, come on.
If he cared about Titanic, it would have had believable dialogue.
Titanic is one of those few movies that's better if you turn the sound off, because then when you get to the sinking scene, it's magnificent.
He did such a glorious job of making that real.
You just don't want to have to hear the things people say.
It just works better that way.
The opposite movie is Twister, which was treated in Hollywood as if it were A crap fest devised by a studio executive.
We need a tornado movie.
But the writers made it better than it needed to be.
They made it wonderful.
With that one, you can turn off the visual and listen to the audio and get a great movie.
Because the dialogue is so good and the ensemble acting is so good.
So, you know, you can make You know, both movies succeeded, but Titanic was a monster hit.
And who knows, maybe audiences don't care about dialogue quality.
I want to ask you about the development of Ender's Game.
You mentioned that it started off as a short story, it had been in your head for a really long time.
Where did the idea for Ender's Game come from, and then how did you move from a short story to a novel?
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expressvpn.com slash ben that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash ben get an extra three months of expressvpn for free protect your internet today with the vpn i trust to keep my data safe that's expressvpn.com slash ben again expressvpn.com slash ben e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash ben okay so i was going to ask you a moment ago about the idea for ender's game where that came from and then how you went about moving it from a short story form to a novel form which is a pretty radical expansion uh
The idea for Ender's Game actually began on my 16th birthday.
My older brother and his soon-to-be fiancée, and now wife, gave me two books with the word foundation on the cover by Isaac Asimov.
One was Foundation and the other one was Second Foundation.
They logically assumed that that was the first and second volume of the trilogy.
But no, it's the first and third volume because of reasons that are clear when you read them.
But I read Foundation and was blown away.
It was the best science fiction I'd ever read.
I'd been reading Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein's Juveniles, and this one took me up another level, as it did a lot of science fiction readers when it first came out in the magazines in the 50s.
And after I was through reading that, I thought, I want to be able to write something like that.
I want to be able to write science fiction.
I want to try doing that.
And so I thought, what idea?
Well, my older brother was on leave from the military and was about to be stationed at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake, very close to our home in Orem.
And he had come home from basic training and from Officer's Candidate School, full of stories about good things and bad things about the way that people were trained.
And so I thought, how would you train people for war in space?
And I remembered a book by Nordhoff and Hall, and I wish I could remember the title, but it's about Americans who joined the Lafayette Escalier in France during World War One.
And one of the things that really stood out for me was that these new trainee pilots were warned that the way that most pilots died was that they didn't know to look in three dimensions.
They would only turn their heads like this, and they wouldn't see, because the enemy that's going to kill you is going to come out of the sun.
He's going to come from above and behind you.
He's going to come from below.
You have to have a three-dimensional sense.
And I thought, okay, how do you train people to think three-dimensionally?
And I invented in my mind the battle room.
Uh, an enclosed space in which there's zero gravity and you train to move against, uh, likewise wargaming enemies.
Uh, I invented a flash suit so that when your hits are recorded there can be no arguing, uh, and of course the walls around it were there so you didn't keep losing trainees as they drift off into space.
Uh, you don't have to have anybody going out shagging flying humans and so, uh, uh, the The game idea was a great idea, but I didn't know how to turn it into a novel.
How is that a novel?
What do you do with a novel?
You know, with a training ground as the basis for a novel.
So I sat on that one for years.
I worked on it a bit, inventing new stuff, thinking of new things about it while I was on my mission in Brazil.
When I came home, I was still mentally working on it now and then.
But then when I got that letter from Ben Bova telling me that Analog publishes science fiction, and I was sending him fantasy, because there were trees in it, and I thought, okay, I know a sci-fi idea.
It's this battle room.
And so I started writing it with no real plan.
Except that I had decided that the soldiers who were being trained were children, because children are still young enough that they can really absorb the reorientation of three-dimensional space in a way that adults just can't.
Too many bad habits.
And so starting with children, 9, 10, 11, pre-puberty, I came up with a short story version of Ender's Game.
But then when it was time to write the novel, what it is is that I had sold to Tor Books, who was a new startup fantasy science fiction line at that time.
There were no new startups.
Everybody knew that it would fail, but it was Tom Doherty.
Who was the publisher, so he knew how to make it work.
And one of the things he did was he got a book from me that we were calling Speaker for the Dead.
But it dawned on me that Speaker for the Dead would work only if Andrew Wiggin from that short story was the protagonist.
But then I had to somehow explain how we got from one to the other.
So I asked him, I was at an ABA in Dallas, and I asked him, Tom, I need to do a novel version of Ender's Game first.
And he said, sure, same terms as Speaker for the Dead.
I said, absolutely.
And on a handshake, we did it.
I went home, and here's the thing that I had already learned from taking a short story called Michael Songbird and turning it into a novel Songmaster.
You don't have the short story be the first chapter of your book.
In fact, you leave the book so that the climax of the short story is the climax of the book.
You just go back earlier and you provide a better and different and richer and deeper lead up.
to that climax, which is what Ender's Game is.
Still leads to the same climax, except that after the climax, there's a long chapter in which we see what happens to Ender afterward, and it's the reason why he becomes the Speaker for the Dead.
And it seems to work pretty well.
Both novels won Hugos and Nebulas.
So at least at the time, certain people approved of it, at least slightly more than one-fifth of each voting group.
And they both still work.
And so that technique of taking a short story and turning it into a novel by starting earlier, it's now kind of my hallmark.
I've done that with other novellas, novelettes, and short stories, and it's the only way to go.
I've watched the results when other people take their prize-winning short story and have it be chapter one, and usually the stuff they think of after suffers from bad sequelitis.
Uh, the story really ended where they ended it in the first place.
Their instincts were right.
That was the ending.
So leave it as the ending.
And that's what I tell myself.
So, but you know, one of the things you asked me earlier, uh, about, uh, my message, uh, one of the most important ones for me was this.
There was no religion in science fiction.
The characters could, you know, God couldn't be a character.
But I realized there is no such thing as a human being without a religion.
I've learned this with many atheists over the years.
I've learned it.
I learned it at Notre Dame with with good Catholic grad students along with me who nevertheless didn't act as if their religion mattered.
But I found that if you keep questioning things and start casting doubt on things that they did not believe could be doubted, You find people's religion because they get angry.
You find the thing that they believe that they don't realize might not be believed by other people, by intelligent people.
And so everybody has religion.
Everybody has the beliefs that they don't realize they believe because that's just how things are, they think.
And as soon as you question those things, there's a little panic, a little sense of assault on their basic core nature.
So once I understood that everybody has a religion, I decided, why don't I have my characters openly have religions?
They don't have to be mine.
In fact, they usually aren't.
And even when they are, it's not necessarily the version of my religion that I believe in.
You know, if I were Jewish, and I were, let's say, conservative, And I made somebody Hasidic or I made somebody Reform, then it wouldn't necessarily be following my belief set, yet I would know something about the culture, at least what it is that I do that makes them both yell at me.
And so, you know, if you're going to create a character, you need who has an existing religion.
You have a responsibility to make it plausible.
So in Speaker for the Dead, I made it a Catholic-centered colony, Brazilian.
But in Brazil, you find that only a certain Not tiny, but a minority of the population is believing, practicing Catholic.
A lot of people who are nominally Catholic are following, I can never remember the name right, Makumba is what comes to mind, but it's one where African gods have been assigned the names of saints.
And it's essentially the African religion in disguise as Catholicism.
The priests are aware of it, there's nothing they can do about it, so they just let those people come and take communion with the strict Catholics.
But Brazil, while it takes pride in being the world's largest Catholic country, is not all that Catholic, except that this colony was founded with the idea of Catholicism at its core.
If you come to this colony to live, you care about Catholicism.
You're a believer and a practicer.
So I had to know enough about Catholicism to not make idiotic mistakes.
Now, fortunately in America, we have two generic religions.
If you need a hierarchical religion, you use Catholic.
If you need a congregational religion, you use generic Protestant, but really Baptist.
And that is what works.
So you can have stories where somebody's a minister, as soon as they say minister, you know, not Catholic.
Have a story where somebody's a priest, as soon as the robes are on or whatever, then, you know, you got Catholic.
Every now and then, you know, with the bishop's wife, you have the Anglican idea, and so, you know, it varies.
But those religions are available, and we all have some experience of them by watching movies.
Jewish, not so much.
I would feel a great deal of trepidation.
making a character of mine Jewish, especially Orthodox, because I've known enough Orthodox Jews to know how rigorous the demands are, what has to be kept in your head all the time.
And I do that as a Mormon.
You know, I know all of our rules by heart.
I don't even have to think about them anymore.
But whenever I watch somebody's fictional treatment of Mormonism, I just, no one ever gets it right.
No one even comes close.
A very famous rock musician whose work I enjoy wrote a novel that had Mormons in it, and he wanted me to read it to maybe get a quote for the cover.
And I started reading it, and within the first two chapters I thought, none of this could possibly happen.
This is not the way Mormonism ever, ever, ever works.
And so my best response was just silence because he couldn't revise the novel yet.
Now it was too late.
But getting somebody else's religion wrong is a terrible faux pas.
But showing characters who have a religion that they take seriously is, I think, a really good and useful thing.
To a degree, Anne Tyler has tried to do that, Saint Maybe, and other books have people who are believers in a religion.
The trouble is, when she wants us to take a religion seriously, she makes it more of mere Christianity than of any particular denomination.
And that's fine.
I mean, that's C.S.
Lewis's influence, too.
But it also strips the religion of its demands.
The religions that are prospering right now in America are the high-demand religions.
Orthodox Jews are not shrinking.
Reform is.
The mainline Christian churches, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, they are, what can I say, losing members, shedding members.
But the high-demand Protestant religions, the ones that actually expect you to live by rules, those are growing.
And so, you know, it's just one of those things that when you belong to a religious culture that expects you to behave in certain ways in order to be a full-fledged member, it changes your life, it focuses your life.
And so, you know, I've toyed with using Mormonism, but then I know no matter what I do, it's going to make Mormons mad.
And I need to be able to go home from time to time and visit family.
So it's just easier for me to use other people's religion.
The one time I did use my own religion was the novel Lost Boys and a story collection called Folk at the Fringe.
And in both of those, And there are Mormons who just hate them.
You know, who's gonna write about a Mormon?
Why couldn't he write about a good one?
And I'm going, wow, all the things you hate are stuff that I actually did.
So it's me you hate!
But anyway, that's that's one of my minor messages.
People have religion and the fiction writer who retreats from that is cheating himself and his readers.
So let's talk for a second about your your experiences in the industry, because obviously you are religious.
You are also politically conservative.
You've written before about how bad a president you think President Obama was.
I'm not sure exactly where you stand on President Trump, per se, but There obviously has been a long-time blacklist in Hollywood for people who are conservative.
I'm well aware of it.
I wrote an entire book about the blacklist in the TV industry.
My business partner, Jeremy Boring, ran Friends of Abe, which was the underground Hollywood organization for conservatives.
So, how has your career been affected?
Obviously, I know that you were, at one point, asked pretty publicly to do some comic books for DC, and then thanks to the outrage mob, that was cancelled.
And, you know, that wasn't a big deal.
The money was pathetic, but it was just fun, and I was collaborating with a very good writer, and we were going to have a good artist.
So, you know, that's fine.
Blacklists only work when people are afraid.
Because the blacklist, you know, I am blacklisted, not just in Hollywood, but in fact, there's constant harping and sniping.
There's no forgiveness ever, even when you already say, look, the issue's moot.
I lost.
Let's move on.
They don't want to move on.
Once they have a stick to beat you with, the beatings continue.
But in Hollywood, it makes no difference.
I was never going to make a career there anyway.
I was already too old.
They want young writers.
And I didn't like the idea that I had other people who had the right to give me notes and make me follow them.
Because I only a couple of times got good notes from smart people.
There are smart people in Hollywood.
There are good people in Hollywood.
They just don't have the power to green light a film.
Because you get to that place in a Hollywood bureaucracy by avoiding trouble, by not sticking your neck out, and then you're given authority and power because they're running in terror.
They are all afraid that they'll be like Mike Ovitz and find out when they leave their job they're nobody.
They cease to exist.
And that's the most frightening thing in the world to them.
So nobody's going to stick their neck out for me.
And I don't care.
I make so much more money from books than anybody makes as a Hollywood screenwriter.
That sounds awful, but if you're out to make a living, screenwriters can make money just by getting hired for a job and then their script never gets used.
So you can write your brains out for an entire career and never have a movie produced.
Or, if it is produced, it bears no resemblance to the script you wrote.
Why would I want that?
That's what I tell my writing students.
If you want to write a movie, do what Ira Levin did with Rosemary's Baby, what Eric Siegel did with Love Story.
They sent around their scripts.
Nothing happened.
Nobody was interested.
So they wrote them as short novels, and they are short novels.
Screenplays make really a novella, not a novel.
And they became monster bestsellers.
And then, when they went to Hollywood, and Hollywood, well, actually, when Hollywood came to them, they said, there's this script.
If you shoot this script, Then you have a chance at getting the rights.
But if you don't shoot my script, you're not getting the rights.
And I said, that's how you sell a screenplay, is write the novel, have it sell a billion copies, and then you are in the catbird seat.
But most people can't do that or don't do that.
And you're, you know, only J.K.
Rowling in living memory.
Has had the power as a novelist to insist that she gets the final say on casting and scripts and etc.
And even then her power was limited, but at least she had the sense to know that.
To know that there were things she just could not affect because they were the requirements of film.
But so I'm not troubled by what's happened in filmdom or television land to my work.
We did get a TV series put on by BYU Television, but then they had a management change and the series was dropped, even though it was getting really good responses.
It's one of those things where if it didn't grow in their garden, they're not interested.
And so, you know, those things happen.
But I once had a TV series that was going to pilot and The guy who was the showrunner to me, basically he had made a demand.
And this is what came back to me.
My lawyer calls me and he says, well, Scott, here's the good news.
They're going to take your script to pilot.
So it has a chance to go on air, but you're fired.
They don't want you to show up on set.
And I just laughed.
I wasn't heartbroken because I didn't count on anything.
No matter how real it looks, it's not real until you see it on the screen.
And so they really can't hurt me by depriving me of a Hollywood career that I don't actually want.
Now, if somebody really wants to make something and then fights for it and makes it happen, great.
But right now in this climate, they don't censor you for what's in the script.
They censor you for your life.
And I was already running into resistance before I ever made any political statements just because I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and CESO served a mission for the Mormon Church.
It gave me fluency in Portuguese, which has been useful, but it is not a credential that anybody is impressed with in the world of literature either.
I run into people who assume, even within the Mormon Church, who assume that in order to become a writer, I must have lost my faith.
You know, so I've gotten letters like this, your book Saints gave me a picture of Joseph Smith, so believable, so real, it was so wonderful, it increased my belief in him.
When did you leave the church?
And I'm going, what?
I haven't left the church!
But they assume that.
It's just taken for granted in our culture that if you're an intellectual, and especially if you make a living doing intellectual stuff, you can't possibly be a believer, because if you're an educated person, you must have left faith behind long ago.
But that's not true.
I'm a very well-educated person, and it only brought me closer to my faith by rational means as well as by felt spirituality.
So in a second, I want to ask you, About the movement in sci-fi away from, I would say, interesting things and toward a very specific brand of politics, which is pretty obvious to anybody who follows the sci-fi genre, particularly if you look at the books that actually end up with reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So let's talk for a second about what feels increasingly like the decline of the sci-fi genre as it is taken over by social justice warriors.
So I'm a big fan of sci-fi.
I've been reading sci-fi literally all my life.
If a good new sci-fi novel comes out, I'm the first to get it.
I'm, I would say, fairly well read in the genre at this point, having read maybe a thousand different books.
But it seems like everything that gets reviewed now Is something that is rooted fundamentally not in interesting plots or interesting premises or interesting worlds, but in a brand of politics that is radical.
And so if you write a character who is transgender that is much more important than actually writing a story that is worth reading.
Or if you write an entire book that is rooted in a specific type of gender politics, in which men are evil and women are good, then that is likely to receive a rave review from the New York Times, even if it doesn't actually have anything particularly interesting to say.
What do you make of the attempt to take over the sci-fi genre, fancy genre too, by the political left?
Because it's pretty obvious that that's happening.
Yeah, it is.
Science fiction is more vulnerable to it because science fiction is, in some senses, culturally irrelevant now.
You can find so many mainstream books that use sci-fi themes.
Almost every thriller is actually science fiction.
You don't have to write in science fiction to write science fiction.
You can write all kinds of things.
Now, Kurt Vonnegut did a kind of semi-arty writing along with plenty of sci-fi in all of his work while denying he was a science fiction writer and refusing to have it labeled with the genre on the covers of the books.
That was fine.
He paved the way for a lot of people.
But right now, if you want to write science fiction, you can just write a mainstream thriller or a spy novel or pretty much anything you want to write.
And a lot of the people, you know, David Foster Wallace definitely was writing a lot of stuff that had to be classed as sci-fi or would have been in the 1950s.
And then look at Margaret Atwood, who simply is bad, bad, bad at science fiction.
She uses science fiction motifs in all the ignorance of her arrogance.
I mean, I've met her personally and therefore my detestation is far beyond what I would do for literary reasons.
But she writes bad science fiction.
But it gets taken seriously by the literary mainstream because it's not published as science fiction.
So, in a way, you know, I watched this begin, I watched it with people that I like, who were simply writing their conscience.
But their conscience was ill-informed.
And when I complained about it in reviews, I was pounced on.
Unbelievably so.
Usually reviewers get a pass.
They're just writing their opinion.
But I was savaged for writing a review that was negative about a Hate all men.
All men are evil.
All men want women to scream with pain when they have sex with them.
Story from, I think, in the 80s.
Might have been the 90s.
And so I was prepared for the fact that that was taking over.
I walked out of the Science Fiction Writers of America without a scene.
Usually you're supposed to write a A flaming letter to one of the science fiction writers of America publications.
That's the tradition.
All I did was stop paying my dues.
And you know, that works really well.
And it doesn't make a scene.
But I haven't been a member of that community for a long time.
Because when you look in science fiction in the bookstore, the few bookstores we have left, you'll find that most of the books in the science fiction fantasy area are fantasy.
And fantasy is not getting taken over.
Because that's where the science fiction writers who were fed up went.
And that's where George Martin, who may very well be, hold social justice warrior beliefs.
I have no idea.
We've never had a discussion about that.
But you won't find them in his very realistic, socially and even historically, even though it's a made up history, in his Game of Thrones books, because he's writing about people who were not politically correct.
They didn't have any idea like that.
He's writing about barbarians.
And so he writes them as barbarians and he does it honestly and nobody complains about it.
And so, and even, you know, J.K.
Rowling, now she pretends that Dumbledore is gay.
But that's crap.
That came after the fact.
There is not a single hint anywhere in the books that she had any such idea.
It's just after the fact, trying to explain herself to arty friends.
And she should realize that her career would have been impossible if she'd been listening to them before.
She just wrote a story and Dumbledore is just a guy and his sexuality does not matter.
In the books, she proved that by the way she wrote it.
She wrote it, wrote him well.
And the aftermath stuff is just garbage.
We just don't need it.
But that's what happens is people try to justify themselves so they won't be called this or that ugly name.
But we're coming to a point where those ugly names are losing power radically.
When every white person in America knows that they're labeled as racist, then that means why keep trying?
Because no matter what you do, you're going to be labeled with white privilege and racism.
And so, you know, we raised our kids east of the Mississippi.
Precisely so.
Explicitly.
We talked about it.
We had lived in Utah.
We had lived in parts of California.
And we wanted our kids to grow up in a place where they would actually meet black people at school.
And then we found out that South Bend, Indiana was not that place because the segregation was almost total just by neighborhoods.
But when we moved to Greensboro, our first visit there when I was applying for a job at the time, we went to a near downtown restaurant and two waiters approached us, one white, one black.
The white guy says, Hi, I'm your white waiter for the evening.
And this is, said his name, your black waiter for the evening.
Then they both broke up laughing because they knew it was ridiculous.
And they were both serving.
One was the back server, one was the waiter.
But they just thought it was hilarious.
And we realized you go into McDonald's in Greensboro, North Carolina, black and white people come in together, sit down together, eat lunch together.
They're on the job together.
And even though Greensboro is famous as a town where segregation was challenged at the Woolworth's lunch counter, nevertheless, in the South, black people and white people talk to each other.
Sometimes they're yelling, but they can get along.
They know each other.
They live cheek by jowl.
And so while there's still race prejudice here, let's not pretend that there's not.
We find that in Greensboro, our kids grew up having black friends and white friends, and that was all we could ask for, was that they got that multiracial view.
But now, black kids are being taught that all white people are privileged, which is just not true, and that all white people hate them, which is also not true.
But I know now that all white people are getting more and more nervous that no matter what they say, it's going to be turned on them and used to call them the ugly name, racist.
And that is pretty much the ugliest name that we have in our vocabulary right now.
If you're looking for your Tourette's list of words that you should not speak, words that will wound, the F word is now way, way low on the list compared to, because we hear it all the time, compared to racist.
Wow.
That's, that's savage.
And so, you know, we live in in troublous times, but I, I'm not a conservative, and I'm really not.
I am from 1976, a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal.
And I have not had to change any of my fundamental ideas since then.
But somehow believing the same stuff has turned me into a conservative.
So when I was writing my column for a while, I would get letters from people saying, why don't you become a Republican?
Why are you still registered as a Democrat?
And I said, Republicans don't want me either.
With the things I believe, if I became a Republican and somehow came to prominence, Then I would just find out on Fox that Hannity would label me as a rhino, or a Republican in name only, because I believe in very liberal immigration laws, and I believe in gun control, and all kinds of other... and I don't like the death penalty at all.
As long as it's administered by humans, it's going to end up executing innocent people.
And so I have my beliefs that just don't square with the right-wing mantras, the shibboleths of conservatism.
Now, most of those are not things that I would have thought of as conservative in the 1960s.
The conservative party has moved to some weird radical position that includes issues that I think are just, why should this be a barrier to becoming a Republican?
Why should you have to believe these mutually exclusive things?
But both parties have those, and both parties are very mean to their People who look toward the middle of the road.
You know, every time someone says something bad about Mitt Romney, I think, you had a Republican who ran as a Republican, won in Massachusetts, and governed successfully.
How did he do that?
By getting along with Democrats.
In Massachusetts, that's the only way you can do it.
So why are they surprised that he has moderate policies and positions?
Why do they treat that as if, you know, it were some horrible birth defect that disqualified him for high office?
Because, well, Mitt Romney was never my candidate, mostly because he adopted the, you know, be mean to immigrants thing, which is not my feeling at all.
Nevertheless, he was a better candidate than the man who became president.
Uh, or was reelected as president.
And so, you know, I, I just don't understand the Republican party.
The big tent position is available to them and they aren't taking it.
They're narrowing and restricting, which just guarantees an eventual democratic victory.
If not in 2020, then the next time around.
Because even though the Democrats are even more rigidly and savagely against anybody who takes a moderate line, for some reason they are the default party of an awful lot of people in America.
And the Republicans aren't.
And so if they're both being restrictive, Democrats win.
But the Republicans could become the big tent party.
They nominated Trump instead.
And that's where I am.
I'm afraid that in 2016, I felt that both parties had nominated the worst candidate they had ever nominated in the history of the party.
But it turned out that I could live with Trump better than I could live with an obvious criminal and liar and etc.
And so I voted for Trump.
You know, I had a friend who's had a hashtag on Twitter that hold nose vote Trump.
And that's the category I was in.
I was certainly not a never Trumper.
And I have admired the fact that even though I hate a lot of the promises he made, he's actually kept them.
More than any other politician I've ever seen in American history, Trump has kept promises.
And you have to give a guy credit for that, because Democrats elect candidates who make promises that the Democrats are counting on them not to keep.
Clinton ran as a moderate, but his voters, his party, assumed that he wouldn't keep those promises and that he'd govern from the left, which he did for the first few years, until Newt Gingrich gave him a lovely wake-up call.
With his contract with America.
And Obama, of course, the leftmost senator in the U.S.
Senate, was elected, but hope and change sounded open and all-embracing instead of rigid left-wing policies, which is where he went.
And so, you know, as long as the Democrats are willing to pretend to be middle of the road and Republicans are not willing to nominate a candidate who actually is middle of the road, We're in trouble.
I want to ask you about your book recommendations in movie and TV.
So, obviously, you're incredibly well-versed in all of this stuff.
Who are your favorite sci-fi authors and what are some of your favorite sci-fi movies and TV series?
Well, here's the problem.
I'm an old man, but I never had a memory for lists.
I can't go through a list.
I could walk through my bookshelves and point them out and say, this one, this one, this one.
But I also don't read science fiction now.
I know science fiction too well.
In the 70s and 80s, I reviewed every short story published, and I burned out.
So now I'm three pages into a science fiction novel to go, he's doing one of these, he's doing that, oh, such a mistake.
Is he going to compensate for it?
No.
So, you know, I just know too much.
But I don't understand how mysteries work yet.
I mean, I do on a superficial level, but I can read good mysteries.
So, you know, a new Michael Connolly comes out, or a new Robert Kreis, or there are some new writers whose names I will not be able to bring to mind that I'm really enjoying.
A new Grey Man novel comes out, and it's fine, you know, not the greatest writing in the world.
I'm reading one right now that has the horrible mistake of first-person present tense whenever he's following the main character, the Grey Man.
I just think, why?
Why does he have to adopt that asinine thing from creative writing programs in American universities?
But that's, you know, he's free to do whatever he wants and it's working pretty well because most of it's in third-person past tense like a real American novelist.
And so there are, you know, there are wonderful writers in Mystery.
Sue Grafton's dead.
I'm deeply disappointed.
I'm also thrilled that she's not allowing anybody to continue her series.
That was a good will, she wrote.
And I also read a few mainstream things, but I mostly read non-fiction.
Right now I'm listening on Audible to one of the great book series that fortunately, not great books, great courses, that the great courses people have made available on Audible.
So I'm listening to one that's pretty current with the science on great moments or great turning points in evolution.
Which is really well done and has actually taught me stuff that with my constant reading in the field I still didn't know about and so you know good job them, but I'm also reading a book on walking And that one's on Kindle, so I'm not listening to it and etc etc I'm constantly listening to an audiobook this earphone that I have in my ear for this discussion is my normal position in life because I have my
A little audible player on a lanyard around my neck.
It's also a full smartphone.
It's the Unihertz Atom telephone, which is my audiobook reader, my audible reader.
And I always have this left ear with an earphone in it.
So grocery shopping, driving, whatever, I've got a book going.
So I read so much more now because of that.
It's a little more expensive, but It's fine.
You know, they offer a decent price.
So, you know, you asked to recommend movies.
Just before coming up here, I was flipping around channels and do what I always do if there's one of the great movies that I love.
I stop on it and start recording it, middle is whatever, and watch it to the end.
So I'm in the middle of Die Hard right now.
1988, I believe.
And that's still a great movie.
So many imitations, including its own pathetic sequels.
But the original is fine, just like Rocky.
The original Rocky is a wonderful independent film.
The formulaic sequels came later, and that's fine.
If people enjoyed them, I'm happy.
I'm glad that they made a lot of money.
I felt like Bob Chartoff, one of the producers of that, was a friend of mine in the later years of his life when he worked with me on Ender's Game, back before a studio took over.
I think he could be proud of his work on Rocky.
The sequels, I've never watched one of them, so I have no opinion except that I never watched them, which is a choice.
Greatest movies.
My list of greatest movies.
You've Got Mail.
Shop Around the Corner, the original.
You can watch them both back-to-back and they're still wonderful.
Love Actually.
He's Just Not That Into You.
What is it, Something Love?
Oh, it's, yeah, I think the thing is called About Time with, yeah, whatever his name is, Dunnal.
And so, you know, again, if I had a list of movies up, I have one on my website at hatrack.com, but it's way out of date.
There have been some good movies since then.
Darkest Hour was the best film treatment of Churchill I've ever seen.
Usually they just have somebody do a voice imitation and say a couple of lines from the famous speeches.
But we have to know that Churchill was a pompous ass and a brilliant pompous ass.
That he had lots and lots of powerful ideas and he made them happen.
And some of them were good.
Which meant that his proportion of good ideas compared to other people in any of the other governments during the war was ridiculously high.
But, of course, he had all the failures.
And failures that weren't his failures that were blamed on him.
But, in Darkest Hour, they did a brilliant job of making him seem like a real person.
It helps that they cast one of our finest living actors.
Uh, in the part and uh, you know, he it's just he's an actor who can never do a part badly Even if it's in a dumb movie, he's good.
Uh, what was it called?
The one where they were extracting them from the beach at Dunkirk.
Was it called Dunkirk?
Yes.
I can't remember.
Anyway, it was so bad.
I just hated it.
Because what they did was they took any anecdote that fit the description, the prescription of film teachers, screenwriting teachers.
What they were told makes a good movie.
And they put all of those together with just a handful of characters and made, to my mind, an incredibly boring and offensively unreal treatment of Dunkirk.
It was as bad as saving Private Ryan.
Now, William Goldman gave a brilliant critique of Saving Private Ryan and explained why, even by the rules of screenwriting, it was crap.
But it was sentimental twaddle and well-made.
There were great scenes in it.
They cast Tom Hanks, which is like casting Tom Cruise.
It's something that is never a mistake.
And, you know, people complain about Tom Cruise because he's small and he keeps getting cast as big men.
But I'm sorry, on the screen, Tom Cruise is always 10 feet tall.
And that's just a fact about the actor.
He is owed so many Oscars that went to other people because they had to, quote, lead role, unquote.
I think of Rain Man.
You know, Dustin Hoffman found one thing to do and just kept doing it with every line.
But the movie depended on Tom Cruise being a sympathetic character who stood in place of the audience and learned what he needed to learn.
He was the character who transformed.
He was the character who changed.
And actors in the Academy are just, you know, mostly the voters are actors and they never understand what good acting is.
They always give sentimental responses.
And so it went to Dustin Hoffman, instead of going to Tom Cruise, who carried that movie on his shoulders.
And so that kind of thing happens.
As you can see, I'm kind of an opinionated guy.
These are the kinds of opinions that would get me in trouble if I mattered in Hollywood, but I don't.
And so I have the freedom to say whatever I like.
But, you know, there are TV shows that my wife and I watch together.
Some recent ones, we're enjoying The Rookie.
I think it's the best work of, what's his name, the actor who, Nathan Fillion.
See, I'm so bad with names.
And so, you know, we love that.
It's got terrific writing.
And I'm just catching up now on the series of Chicago PD, Chicago whatever, Chicago Fire and so on, because I didn't realize they were done by the same people who produced Law & Order.
And so I'm getting the same fix I used to get from them.
Good writing, good acting, powerful stories.
And the episode is always about the episode, not about the soap opera between the characters.
That stuff goes on and it helps add to the interest, but it never takes over.
That's what killed Moonlighting years ago when it was the best thing on TV.
And by their third season, it was not good even.
Writers had lost their way completely, and you often would tune in and there was no story to carry you except the soap opera.
And I didn't care about the soap opera part.
So, you know, writers can kill their own series.
Lost was killed by its writers.
But that's okay.
Lost was begun by writers who had no idea, except an executive had said, airplane gets stranded on this island where weird things happen.
And that was it, you know.
And so they had weird things happen, and it worked.
And maybe he even specified some of them, but they were never able to make it all come together.
And they ended with not even a whimper.
They ended with a whine.
And yet, at least it ended.
And so, you know, we had our era of about three years where lost was all you could talk about.
And then no one had anything to say about it because they stopped caring.
So when you look for movies and you look for television, almost always the thing that makes something have lasting value is the writing.
And everybody in Hollywood knows this.
They know that if you don't have a script, you've got nothing.
No amount of directing can compensate for a bad script.
They know it.
They say it constantly.
But they still treat writers like little bags of dirt.
And that's, you know, they'll try to put a seed in about five at once, hope some of them grow, and as soon as they can get the fruit off the thing that grew, then they just kick that bag of dirt out of the way.
Because somehow directors got supreme power.
It's not that way on Broadway.
It's not that way in theater.
The writer is everything.
The director serves at his pleasure.
But in Hollywood, writers are treated like nothing.
And the result is, writers' lives there are filled with the agony and frustration of watching bad movies get made from their best work.
Uh, and so there's so many bad movies.
People, people say, why are there so many bad movies?
And the answer is because decisions about which movie to make are made by people who have no idea what a good movie is.
They have no idea what a movie will be from reading the script.
Plus they don't even read the script.
They hire some flunky to do it.
And then the flunky tells them about it or writes coverage on it.
And they make their decisions based on that.
Plus the filmography of the people attached.
And they figure if you've got the same guy who was involved with The Exorcist, then it's got to be a great hit.
Even though it's not horror, doesn't have anything to do with anything that made The Exorcist a hit, nevertheless, they think that that magic will then work.
And it doesn't.
It never does.
So, we're in a world where no one knows what's good.
No one knows what will work when it's published.
But everybody thinks they know.
Including me.
But I'm no better at picking winners than anybody else.
And there'll be movies that I absolutely adore.
Mrs. What's-Her-Name Lives for a Day.
Pettigrew.
Miss Pettigrew or Mrs. Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
I adored that movie.
I couldn't understand why it was dumped in January, the most horrible slot for a movie to be released.
And it was completely ignored at Oscar time.
The performances were absolutely brilliant.
The writing was sharp and wonderful and ironic and sweet.
And yet, disappeared.
So I can't call it.
I have no idea.
And then there are movies that I think, well, I could smell this movie on the way into the theater.
I didn't realize the stink was coming from this particular theater in the complex, but Yep, this is the one that gave the odor to the whole place, and it goes ahead and wins an Oscar.
So what can I do?
My opinion on things, I find it fascinating, but I can't think that anybody else would.
So in just a moment, Scott and I are going to be talking about Western imperialism, Western cruelty.
There are some folks on the left, critics, who suggest that Ender's Game is rife with these sort of thematics.
I'm going to ask Scott about that coming up.
If you want to hear his answers, head on over to dailywire.com and hit that subscribe button, become a member.
So be sure to check out Orson Scott Card's work, all of it.
It really is great.
Ender's Game, of course, is a classic.
You should go check it out.
Scott, thanks so much for stopping by.
My pleasure.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Host production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Toromino.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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