Revisionist History - The Variable Man with Gary Goldman and Angus Fletcher | Development Hell

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Gary Goldman was a writer on “Total Recall”, a Philip K. Dick adaptation directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzeneger. It was a big hit. So why do Gary and his writing partner, Angus Fletcher, have so much trouble selling another Philip K. Dick adaptation? They tell Malcolm that it all came down to a roller coaster ride of plot twists that even A-List action actors couldn’t stomach, and an early attempt at AI that was too dumb to pick a smart script.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Episode 2 of Development Hell, our revisionist history series based on the radical notion that the best Hollywood stories are the ones that never got made into movies. Last time, we kicked off the series with a story of how my book Blink failed to make it onto the big screen. If you haven't heard that one yet, you really, really should. Because it explains why failed stories have such meaning for me. Anyway, this episode is a wildly convoluted tale full of big plot twists and huge moral questions. A story so much about right now that it's going to get a little uncomfortable.

Allow me to introduce guest number one, Angus Fletcher. He's a screenwriter. I'm not a screenwriter and have never really wanted to be guest number one, Angus Fletcher. He's a screenwriter. I'm not a screenwriter and have never really wanted to be a screenwriter, have no aptitude in screenwriting. Don't listen to Angus. Angus is, in fact, a screenwriter, as you'll hear. He's also an author, researcher, and professor of story science at Ohio State and a longtime friend of Revisionist history. Some of you will remember him as the person who provided the intellectual scaffolding for our memorable revision of The Little Mermaid. Remember this?

So you think we should be able to, we should fix Ursula? Well, I think we should just stop her from doing whatever she's doing. We should have a conversation with her about maybe why this isn't helpful. Do you, Prince Eric, take Ursula to have and to hold in sickness and in health for as long as you both shall live? Eric looks deep into Ursula's eyes, hypnotized.

I do. If you haven't heard that Little Mermaid series, listen to it. Anyway, back to today's story i'm just fascinated by this problem that hollywood has that it keeps telling the same story over and over and over again and uh so you know back when i was actually a shakespeare professor up at stanford i placed this phone call to pixar and i was basically like how is it you guys are able to make stuff that's like better? This is when they're making movies like Up,

which had just these totally berserk narrative structures. And so anyway, they let me inside. I learned all this stuff. I thought it was totally fascinating.

I realized that they were making stories in a totally different way than Hollywood was. So I went down to Hollywood to advise Hollywood. And that led to me basically trying to convince

Hollywood by writing a series of screenplays the Pixar way because I thought that they would then allow me to consult on movies. Instead, no, that led to me basically trying to convince Hollywood by writing a series of screenplays, the Pixar way, uh, because I thought that they would then allow me to consult on movies instead. No, they just hired me to write screenplays. And, uh, that's how I got an agent. And then one day my agent called me up and cause he knew I'm just obsessed with the original total recall, which had destroyed my mind when I was young.

And he was like, how would you like to work with the, uh, writer of total recall, Gary Goldman? And so that's how we got together. Wait, Gary, you wrote Total Recall? Meet guest number two, Gary Goldman. He's also a screenwriter, but unlike Angus, has no trouble admitting it. Yes, I was the last writer on Total Recall, on the first Total Recall. Total Recall, amazing movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger,

Sharon Stone. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Yeah, so it was about a milquetoast character who finds out that he's not who he thinks he is. Which is that he's a kind of a super spy. But how real does it seem? As real as any memory in your head. Come on, don't

bullshit me. No, I'm telling you, Doug, your brain will not know the difference. And that's guaranteed, or your money back. What about the guy you lobotomized? Did he get a refund? Came out in 1990. Blockbuster. Tons of awards. Total Recall has a number of, I mean, it has a genealogy. It's not

just me. I mean, it has a short story. The source material is from Philip K. Dick. And then there was a fantastic original screenplay by Dan O'Bannon and Ron Chousette that everybody loved from the beginning. And this launched the project. In fact, this is sort of the prime example

of this idea of development hell, which is that you sell something for a lot of money and everybody's very excited about it. And they tell you it's going to be a movie right away. And then it goes into a process of development where everybody has a hand in revising it and reconceptualizing it and making it in their image. And in the middle, depending on your involvement,

you can be in development hell along with the project, or you can be a bystander pushed to the outside watching it go through the process of development hell with lots of other people, not including yourself. I mean, if you're lucky, it gets made at all. The project had been in development for almost eight or nine years when I got involved. Yeah. Eight or nine years.

Yes. So if you go back to the original screenplay, do you think that's a better movie than the final screenplay? No, not in my case. So you're saying development hell is a bad thing, except in the case where I'm involved in convicts things, which by the way, a legitimate position that I would... case where I'm involved in convicts things. Which, by the way, a legitimate position that I would... Right.

I'm totally open to agreeing with that. When I was starting out, I read the original Total Recall screenplay as a junior executive for a producer who was considering making it and acquiring it. And basically the problem that most people felt was that it fell apart in the third

act. So, and this, apparently it fell apart so disastrously that even though it had many different stars and directors attached and people always wanted to make it, it was eight or nine years later, it had been in pre-production with Bruce Beresford and Patrick Swayze and the producer Dino De Laurentiis in Australia. And in fact, Bruce Beresford asked me to come over and do a rewrite on it. And I said I couldn't because I was working with Paul Verhoeven on another project. But Dino went bankrupt. Arnold Schwarzenegger had always loved the project and had been watching it. He went to the owners of the Coralco studio that had done the Rambo movies. And he said, you know, I want to do this. And they bought it from Dino De Laurentiis out of bankruptcy for a humongous amount of money.

And with the idea that Arnold was attached, Arnold wanted to work with Paul Verhoeven because Paul had just done Robocop. I was working with Paul Verhoeven on a movie called Out of Body Travel. And Paul said he didn't think it was ready to shoot and that he was going to leave our project and go do another project, and he was apologizing to me for that.

I said, what's the other project? And he said, Total Recall. I said, well, that's really funny, Paul, because I turned down the chance to rewrite Total Recall because I was working with you. And he said, well, what did you think about it? And I told him my take. And he said, well, you know,

that's pretty much how I see it too. Let me see if I can get you the job to rewrite it. Gary, Gary, Gary, I'm worried. We want to talk about this other project, but now I'm thinking we can come back to Total Recall, or is this all leading up to the other project? Well, they're connected. Yeah. So what's the connection?

The connection is, I would say, Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick, sci-fi master. To name just a few other Philip K. Dick film adaptations, Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick is probably the most important sci-fi writer ever, or at least of the last hundred years. After working on Minority Report, Gary was becoming a bit of a Philip K. Dick specialist,

which is not a bad thing to be in a town that loves sci-fi adaptations. When we get back, Gary and Angus go to work on adapting another of his stories. We're back with Angus Fletcher and Gary Goldman, who've just been set up to work together on an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story. I've done four projects based on Philip K. Dick material. This has become my calling card in Hollywood, was that I did Philip K. Dick adaptations. So, Angus, wait. Did you have a particular I did Philip K. Dick adaptations. So, Angus, wait.

Did you have a particular affection for Philip K. Dick prior to this project? Well, I mean, I loved the movie Total Recall, and I'm going to acknowledge that I was such a Philistine that I had no idea that it came from Philip K. Dick. And what happened was the moment I got the call from my agent, I then went and read all of Philip K. Dick, and it's surreal. I mean, he sort of went from science fiction into religion and I called Gary up and I was like, well, Gary, I was like, what do you think? You know, I'd love to work with you. And the main reason I wanted to work with Gary is because I believe that screenwriters have the

ability to see the future because I think this is a common power of story. I think that science fiction is always about intuiting what's going to happen next. And so I said to Gary, I said, Gary, what do you think the future is? And he said, Angus, read this story, Variable Man. And the premise of Variable Man is very simple. It's basically just about a future in which there are these computers who use statistics to predict everything that's going to happen.

And I said, you know, Gary, this seems weirdly like the world we're accelerating into now. And he said, yeah. He said, it is. And he said, and I have a premise for a story that I'd like to pitch to you that I think will kind of be as big, if not bigger than Total Recall. And that's where we got started,

was with his pitch to me. And is the... So the Variable Man story was written when? Oh, I don't know, about 1950, probably. Oh, I see. Oh, it really... So imagining in 1950, a world in which computers predict everything

is kind of great, if you're in the 20s. When did you guys work together on this project? Early 2000s. Early 2000s. So were you being faithful to the Philip K. Dick short story or were you changing it in useful ways? We were changing it in useful ways. And there are a couple of big things. So first of all, Gary's pitch to me was he was like, imagine a future in which computers don't just predict things like they do in the Philip K. he said, and then imagine that they're able to predict a gift that you can give to your best friend for their birthday. And that gift is so good that your friend not only loves it, but it seems perfectly like it came from you.

And then he said, imagine the computers can pick your soulmate. Imagine the computers can pick the person that you love so totally and so absolutely that you know that this computer knows you better than yourself. And I said, all right. And then he said, and now imagine after you've given yourself up totally to these computers, you wake up one morning and they say to you, in 24 hours, the world is going to end because humanity is going to destroy itself. And I've crunched all the variables and there's no opportunity for you to do anything. That's the starting point for the story. Oh my God.

So wait, how far have we traveled? We've traveled quite significantly from Philip K. Dick at this point. He was just imagining a world where there were these computers that were predicting the outcome of a war and the computers run across a problem. That's basically the plot, right? The title, Variable Man, because the other thing that Philip K. Dick did, which he intuited, I think, at a moment of genius, was what would happen if you put a person who the computers

had no information on into the middle of the statistical world. So these are all these computers that are able to see the future because they have all the data, but there's one person who they have no data on. And so the starting point for the screenplay that Gary and I did was humanity goes, oh my goodness, we're going to die tomorrow.

Our only option is to bring in someone who the computer has no data on, the variable man, the person who is to bring in someone who the computer has no data on, the variable man, the person who is unpredictable, unknown. And so just like in the original Philip K. Dick story, we reach back into time, back into history, before the computers, and pluck this person into the present. And that's basically the beginning of the screenplay, is when the variable man arrives in this world where everything has been planned, everything has been predetermined, the computers know everything, we're all going to die. Yeah. Now, the, wait, wait, there's so many, so many wonderful, Gary, tell me a little bit about your thought process in moving from the original Philip K. Dick notion to the one that Angus just described. Tell me about the leaps that you made there

and why you made them. All right. So I suppose I was very interested in AI. You know, everyone's thinking about it now, but it wasn't brand new. And I saw this idea of the computer that can predict everything and that you have to give up idea of the computer that can predict everything and that you have to give up control to the computer

because it's working so fast. And I wanted to sort of imagine this sort of trajectory of going from where we are now to the point where the computer is in total control. And I was really, and I remain concerned about this question of decision-making. And how do we make decisions? And if the computer can make better decisions than we do,

then what is the role of free will? And if you spend a whole life just simply doing what the computer tells you to do, what is identity? So I wanted to put this hero who comes from the past and who still is accustomed to having free will and his power is to have free will,

and to put him in the situation where whenever he listens to the computer, everything goes right. And whenever he trusts his own judgment, it's wrong. Oh, wait, wait, wait. So the AI, the AI is smart enough to realize that the only way to save the world is to bring someone in from outside AI. Yeah.

Oh, the AI has a little bit of self-knowledge and humility in your world. Oh, yeah. That was one of our best thing I think we created this wonderful AI, a wonderful character called... We named him Plato. And he's, you know, he's sort of somewhere between a butler and God. Yeah.

Oh, that's... This is getting better and better. I was going to chime in there and just say that basically in this society, there are a few people that have tuned out. And they're like, I'm not going to listen to this computer. Where does this computer know?

And their lives are horrible. And all their decisions are bad. And they decide to choose their own soulmates. And they have horrible marriages. And then everyone who listens to exactly what the computer says has this Instagram life where they are actually so happy. And their kids are so perfect perfect and everything is so amazing. And so, you know, Cole comes into this world, our hero comes into this world,

and he, of course, finds it appalling. And as appalling as we would find it, and he's determined to ignore Plato. He's determined to ignore the AI that has brought him into the future to save humanity from itself. So this is another kind of unfolding paradox, is humanity doesn't want to save itself if it means listening to the computers on save humanity from itself. So this is another kind of unfolding paradox, is humanity doesn't want to save itself

if it means listening to the computers on how to save itself. Wait, wait, I have so many questions. First of all, tell me a little bit about, so our variable man is called, as in the Philip K. Dick story, your variable man is called Cole. Tell me about your Cole,

and where does he come from? What's his personality like? Why is he so capable of standing up to American trust in our guts. And so the opening sequence he sent in to stop this hacker, this hacker who's been creating chaos across the world, who's been sort of, you know, getting into all these top secret facilities and creating chaos. We think he's going to launch World War III, whatever. And so Cole goes in and he's being sort of instructed what to do. And we already had these computers at this time that are sort of running the percentages and telling him, do this, do this, do this, do this other thing. And he's listening to computers. He's breaking in. He finally gets to the heart of the lair where this hacker is. And he kicks down the door and he points his gun and then the hacker turns around and it's a child

and cole realizes oh my goodness this is the hacker this is the person who's been creating all this chaos and he gets this word on his earpiece kill the hacker and he says i can't kill the hacker this is a child and there's this long pause and they say, look, we've run all the numbers. If you don't kill the kid, this is going to happen again. Pull the trigger. And he stands there in the moment. Can I pull the trigger? Can I pull the trigger? And then he doesn't do it. He doesn't pull the trigger. He drops the gun. He grabs the kid. And what essentially happens is he dies saving the kid's life. There's a fireball that blows him up, but the kid goes on and the kid lives. And because that fireball incinerates him, he can be brought into the future without changing time because he was essentially

eliminated from the timeline. So if you reach into the exact moment just before he dies and pull him into the future, time isn't changed. And so he's the perfect person to bring back because he has demonstrated the ability to say no to the computers and also because taking him doesn't change time. Oh, I see. So when we meet Cole, he's part of the present. He's just a guy who's standing up to the tyranny of AI. He's an action hero whose AI has been corrupted by this hacker.

He's brought in to solve the problem. He fails as an incident. How much time passes between that initial encounter with the hacker and then when our story is taking place? Well, this is part of the twist. Because when you get into the future, you think that an enormous amount of time has passed. Because the future is radically different from when Cole disappeared. And it's so different that he can't believe it. But we start to learn that actually a very small amount of time, much more less time than you might suspect has passed between when he died and when he was brought back.

Because these computers, as Gary was saying, have accelerated human decision-making to the points that our society has started to run on this utopia cycle. And everything is just going much faster and much better than anyone could have imagined in our time. And it's because of this great genius who was the kid. The kid is the thing that made the difference. Because he didn't kill him, because Cole didn't kill him, he survived and he became the great genius

that ushered us into this accelerated utopia. Now, why, one thing I don't understand, if we are in accelerated utopia, why do we need saving? Why would utopia have a kind of expiry date? Isn't the definition of utopia that it keeps going in perpetuity? Well, I mean, so this is part

of the great riddle at the beginning of the story is why is it exactly that we're going to die? What could possibly go wrong? Everything seems like it's perfect. What is going to destroy the world? Well, nobody is able to identify exactly at the beginning of the movie what's going to go on. All they know is that the computers are quite insistent that it's going to happen in the next 24 hours. And what happens over the middle parts of the screenplay is various different alternatives start to emerge. We start to see all of these different moving pieces and we start to realize, oh, sure, you know, it's a utopia, but there's still humans in it and there's still other things going on. And I don't know how many of the twists you want me to ruin, Malcolm, but one of the things that starts to become a question that haunts the hero is, is he the one who's going to

destroy the world? Is what the computers saw that he would get brought back and that by not listening to the computers, he was going to be the one that blows everything up. You know what this is, if I might reduce your whole premise to an axiom? This is the cinematic version of the famous adage in The Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king, right?

Yeah. Cole is your one-eyed man who is asked to be king, right? And what you're describing just there is he knows he only has one eye, right? He's wrestling with the fact that he can't see it all. It's sort of beautiful. Let me give you a little recap of where we are. There's a perfect utopia where AI runs everything. People do what computers tell them to do and are better for it.

For reasons we don't quite understand yet, this utopia is in danger. In order to save it, the AI named Plato, no less, brings back to life a guy who defied its commands in the past. After the break, Gary and Angus try to get the movie made. Wait, so tell me more about your call. So who would you imagine playing your call? So we actually had quite a lot of interest. We had interest from Bradley Cooper's people.

We had interest from Mark Wahlberg's people. But the one thing that was always common was that people became increasingly disturbed about the paradox at the center of whole psyche. Because if you're going to play this part, you have to wrestle with all of these sort of profound questions. And one of the most profound questions is that what the computers are doing is they're saying, trust us. And the reason they get us to trust them is by being able to predict our most intimate choice. They're able to predict our heart. They're able to know our heart better than we know our heart. They're able to say, you're going to love this person. And when you meet this person, your entire life is going to be changed. And the computer does this

to Cole when he gets into the future. He picks the perfect person for Cole and they fall in love immediately. In fact, they fall in love so fast, they don't even know that they were set up by the computer. They only figure it out after the fact. So now, Cole knows that the computer has told him, this is who you're going to love. This is your soulmate. And the computer has also told him, the world is going to end. And so essentially the existential choice facing Cole is, is my heart wrong and I don't love this woman and the world is going to be fine or by following my heart and accepting

that I love this woman, is everyone going to die? And that he has to listen to the computer when the computer gives him a mission. And the computer's mission for him is to kill someone, is to kill the person who's going to trigger the singularity. Same mission as was given him before he was incinerated. That's right, but on a much bigger and more advanced scale. And the twist is that the person

who he has to kill is, of course, the person that he saved when he was a child. And the further twist is that that person is the father of the girl he's been kill is, of course, the person that he saved when he was a child. And the further twist is that that person is the father of the girl he's been matched with, who he's fallen in love with, and that he's been set up to be with this girl because she's going to bring him home to daddy. And that's the only way to get through daddy's security. Oh, my God. So good. It's so good. Why? Let's go back. So you had interest from these actors in playing Cole, but why did they have, when you said they had trouble with that twist, it sounds to me like this is an extraordinary opportunity for a skilled actor. What do you mean they had trouble with it? Well, so I think that when you think about why Total Recall got made, Arnold Schwarzenegger has the capacity to be himself and also be meta Arnold at the same time. So he has the capacity to kind of laugh at himself

at the same time he's being himself. This part requires that ability to be yourself and be outside yourself at the same time. And it forces you also to go against the kind of core fantasy of Hollywood, which is that love saves the world. If you listen to yourself, that saves the world. And so this caused a lot of cognitive dissonance in actors. And the same reason that Gary was talking about that the sort of AI billionaire's daughter was caused cognitive dissonance. And so that was a real emotional sticking point for a lot of actors. And I think they were concerned about this story.

Yeah, I think you're right, Angus. Ultimately, we didn't want to say, oh, yeah, trust your heart and it's all going to work out. A lot of Hollywood endings manufacture that ending. ultimately, we didn't want to say, oh, yeah, trust your heart, and it's all going to work out. A lot of Hollywood endings manufacture that ending, and the Hollywood answer is trust your heart. And society is producing a new answer, which is trust the AI. Can you think of a Hollywood movie previous to this

where, not the narrow question of don't trust your heart, but the kind of broader question of that love and the fulfillment of a real emotional need would have catastrophic consequences outside of it?

Is this virgin territory is what I'm asking for a Hollywood film? One example springs to mind, Casablanca. For Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman to get together would harm the world. And so Humphrey Bogart makes the, Rick makes the decision not to follow his heart. I think you're right. But you will, there's a crucial difference though, and that is, do we ever really believe that Rick is madly in love with Ingrid Bergman? Not in the sense, what you've described is a situation where the two parties are genuinely and have powerful reason to believe that they are genuinely in love.

They are soulmates. Was Ingrid Bergman Humphrey Bogart's soulmate in Casablanca? Or was it, was like, his heart is so kind of hardened and covered in scar tissue, we kind of accept him walking away because that's what he does, he walks away, right? But you're describing something, a very different dynamic. You're talking about two people who are soulmates having to walk away.

Yeah. And I will say, Malcolm, by the way, that's a very iconoclastic reading that you've just delivered of Casablanca, but also- Wait, wait, wait, wait, what? Wait, but they do- You don't think Humphrey Bogart's heart is covered in scar tissue? I think the point is that even though it is, he realizes that the romantic thing to do is to leave. And so that's the ultimate tragedy of that movie, Malcolm, which you've just desecrated, is that he's a man who has reconnected with his heart and in doing so walked away from it. Anyway, I think that's the Hollywood schlock reading of it. But the point is, in that movie, he walks away. He does the heroic thing.

And, you know, you're asking, is there a movie where someone has basically willingly destroyed the world for their own love? Has someone willingly made that choice, you know? That one did happen in The English Patient. Oh, tell me. My memory of that film is not strong enough. Tell me how that happens in The English Patient. Oh, tell me, tell me. My memory of that film is not strong enough. Tell me how that happens in The English Patient. Well, in the end, the hero

basically is a traitor to the allies out of love for a woman. Okay. And usually Hollywood doesn't put the hero in that position. They don't decide to,

I mean, what they will either do is say, there's a greater good here. I mean, in a lot of English movies, even Brief Encounter, people say, I'm in love, but I'm going to do this, I'm going to stay with my wife and kids. Yeah. Well, there is this English,

annoying kind of aristocratic English notion of, remember in Tale of Two Cities, at the end, it's a far, far better thing than I've ever done. Blah, blah, blah, blah. They love playing that role. They never play it in real life, but they love playing it in literature. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're like, are you kidding me? In real life? No, he's not doing that. But wait, I'm still, I'm not satisfied. So it doesn't, why am I wrong? Why does it seem to me like you have described in this movie a much more complicated and interesting and sort of problematic narrative scenario

that exists in, say, Casablanca? Bradley Cooper's not having a problem doing a remake of Casablanca. He's fine with that. But he clearly had a problem with this. So you describe to me in your words, I can see how they're analogous, but they're not, it's not

perfect. Why is it not perfect? I don't think it's perfect at all. By the way, I do want to get on record as saying that you've also desecrated Charles Dickens, who's another totemic figure of English literature. No, I mean, it's, the reason that it's different is, I mean, imagine if the character chose his heart

and the Nazis won. Yeah. You choose, I mean, imagine the sound of music, right? In which he marries Julie Andrews and the result of that is the Second World War is lost. I mean, that's the kind of crisis you're setting up. And so in order to establish free will, he has to reject Julie Andrews. He has to reject his heart to save the world, except we haven't even told you the ending of the movie. So you don't even know what's going to happen, right? And when actors got to the end of the movie,

the dissonance became so intense for them that, you know, I think that they started to say, how can I in good conscience play this part? Because I myself don't even understand exactly the part that I'm playing. So you're, in telling the story of why this movie doesn't get made,

you're, we're listing, we're going to go through the list of culprits, but is culprit number one that the actors themselves couldn't handle it? I think that's part of it,

but I mean, I think the, the core of it is, is, is, is, do we trust ourselves? Yeah.

And, that's a hard place to go in the movies because at the end of the day, the movies basically know comedy and they know tragedy. And

in a comedy, you give yourself over to a fantasy and in tragedy, you're like, it's all over from the beginning. And it's a chance for you

to kind of wallow. So another way to say this is when we're born in our brain, there's a kind of primordial story. And that story is that I am good and that life is good. And that primordial story is so powerful that it allows us to be open to the world and to explore the world. And then what happens over time is that story runs up against our experiences of life, many of which are negative. And this other story starts to occur in our brain, which is actually life is not so good. And I'm also not so good. And we start to believe that story more. And that story starts to become more primordial for us. And the good story starts to become more superficial and fantasy for us.

And we get into kind of a dissociated place. And in that dissociated place, which I think most humans exist most of the time, they really believe that life is pretty bad and that they're pretty terrible. But they're always trying to actively convince themselves that life is good and that they're a nice person. And this is a product of, you know, mindfulness, positive thinking, all of these things which kind of infest our society now. And when people go to the movies, they want to indulge

either the fantasy life of, no, I'm a good person and everything works out, or they want to wallow in this negative space of, no, you know what? This is a safe space for me to admit that everything's terrible

and I'm a horrible human being. And that's why we have, like, the Dark Knights and, you know, Christopher Nolan and all this space for me to admit that everything's terrible and I'm a horrible human being. And that's why we have like the Dark Knights and, you know, Christopher Nolan and all this kind of stuff, you know, kind of like the dark, sludgy stuff. And this movie is constantly forcing you back and forth across the threshold. This movie is not allowing you to say,

you know what? Yes, everything is bad. Life is bad. Life is awful. Nor is it saying, there's a kind of simple easy answer here it's pushing you back and forth to kind of reconfront and can you keep going and at the bottom of the movie is this idea that only intelligence is going to solve things not emotion not wishing not

wanting but being smart and are you the, smart enough to solve this problem? Because if you, the audience, are not smart enough to solve this problem, the computers are going to solve it for you. And so the existential challenge for the movie essentially is, are you smart enough to keep ahead of the movie? In which case, you know what? You're smart enough to live into the future. Or are you going to submit and become passive

and be drawn into the engine of the story? And then that's the future? Or are you going to submit and become passive and be drawn into the engine of the story? And then that's the future of AI in which you no longer have any autonomy and you've given up your will to the plot and the machinery. So I think that's why people find the movie unnerving because it really does put you in that existential place that you feel that your autonomy is being stripped. But I mean, there's also a lot of sort of funny and sort of dire studio stories that are involved. So I think ultimately the studios were also alarmed by this story. I mean, this is a big budget movie.

And the thing is, if you're going to do a big budget movie like Total Recall, like this, you need to get that actor on board to try and secure the money. And then do you want to put $120 million into something that has this premise? I think it was too demanding. But I think that our main problem here was really that we didn't get a director.

We didn't get a strong director. A project like this requires a director who has a very strong vision and who the people with the money trust. And I suppose I had the hubris to think that after doing these three Philip K. Dick movies, they would trust me. But actually, that wasn't enough.

The movie's fate in the real world precisely parallels its narrative on the page, in other words. That actually happened. So one of the things that happened is after we went out to all of these actors, I then was on another screenplay project, which was going well. And it was produced by Bob Shea, who did Lord of the Rings, all these big kind of movies.

And so I showed the script to Bob. And Bob was like, oh, the script is amazing. I love the script. We got to get the script produced. and Bob was like, oh, the script is amazing. I love the script. We got to get the script produced. And so I said, okay, great. But it all culminated in Bob calling me up one day and saying, Angus, we've got financing for this movie. I'm almost entirely convinced

we've got financing for this movie. I said, oh, okay. I said, what's going on? He said, well, there's this company in town. They have a computer that they feed all of the scripts into. And the algorithm tells them how much money the script is going to make. And we've already given the script to the executives there.

And they love this. And they're going to give it to the algorithm. And I just know that this is going to work out. So I said, okay, Bob, this sounds great. And this company, I should say, they very wealthy, very successful. They invested all these movies. They had themselves the sort of top floor of the biggest luxury car dealership in town. So you like walked in through all these luxury cars to get in their offices. I mean, sort of like typical Hollywood stuff, right? So I get a call a week or two later from Bob. He's like, Andy, he's like, unfortunately, I've got bad news for you. And I was like,

oh my God. I was like, did the computers read our script and not like it? He goes, no, no. He's like, that's not the problem. He's like, the problem is the company just went bankrupt. And they went bankrupt because the last script their computers picked was a bomb. And so now they have no money. And so we were unable to make our scripts about the infinitely intelligent computer because a stupid computer was unable to pick the right scripts to make. A stupid computer.

Is it any wonder Angus has gone on to become a pioneer in story science? In fact, Angus has gone on to become a pioneer in story science. In fact, Angus has gone on to become a leading critic of AI. He thinks only humans will ever be able to tell good stories. One of the papers he's published is called Why Computer AI Will Never Do What We Imagine It Can. I'm reading now from the abstract. Computers contain a hardware limit that renders them permanently incapable

of reading or writing narrative. This article draws upon the author's work with deep neural networks, Judea Pearl's Duke Calculus, GPT-3, and other current generation AI to logically demonstrate that no computer AI, quantum or otherwise, has ever learned or will ever learn to produce or process novels or any other kind of narrative, including scripts, short fiction, political speeches, business plans, scientific hypotheses, technology proposals, military strategies, and plots to take over the world. So what do we have here? We have a script about AI killed by an AI company that went bankrupt,

whose co-author goes on to write the definitive debunking of AI. Who's writing that screenplay? Guys, this has been fantastic. If I, my vote is in to all moguls out there in our listening audience. It's clearly what the people want. The people want, did you call this movie

The Variable Man? Yeah. The people want The Variable Man. They do. Fingers crossed. Next week, we'll be back with another story from the depths of development hell. was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Vitaly Emlin, and Ben-Nadav Haffrey. Editing by Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Echo Mountain.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.