Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash: Behind the Beanie Bubble

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the FoST Podcast. Today I get to sit down with two very dear friends, Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash. These two are the definition of a dynamic duo. Kristin is a New York Times bestselling novelist, as well as an Emmy nominated TV writer and an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter. And Damian is the Grammy winning lead singer of OK GO, who directed the band’s incredibly creative music videos that have been viewed by millions online. Personally, I like to think of them as one of the greatest success stories to ever come out of the future of storytelling, but not necessarily for the reason you think more on that later. Most recently, Kristin and Damian have combined their sizable talents as co-directors on their first feature film, The Beanie Bubble, with the screenplay written by Kristin. The film follows the rise and fall of the Beanie Babies craze and their inventor, Ty Warner, all told through the perspective of three women who were instrumental to his success. Starring Zach Galifinakis, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, and Geraldine Viswanathan, it released in select cinemas in July and is now streaming on Apple TV+. Having had the great pleasure to know Kristin and Damian for many years, I’m excited to get to have a deep and honest conversation about their creative process, the themes of the film and what it’s like to collaborate creatively as a married couple. Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash.

 

Kristin, Damian, it is such a pleasure to have you two here on the FoST podcast. Welcome!

Damian Kulash:

It’s such an honor. Thank you.

Kristin Gore:

Thank you so much. We’re very happy to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

I want to just start by saying congratulations on how amazing Beanie Bubble is as a movie. I’m so relieved and excited that I loved it. It would’ve made me very awkward podcast if I had to say it was interesting. It was fabulous.

Damian Kulash:

What an achievement.

Charlie Melcher:

It certainly is something. No, it was amazing and just– congratulations. It’s a beautiful film.

Damian Kulash:

Thank you so much.

Kristin Gore:

Thank you. That means a lot that you love it.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, it was really fun and complex and well crafted and a fun ride too. So bravo.

Damian Kulash:

Thank you. Fun ride is actually a really big deal to us. I mean, not that that’s a surprise, but making things that you actually want to consume, not just want to have consumed and not just feel the intelligence and wonder in, but actually just even when you’re tired and have been dealing with your young children and just need to tune out from the world and also want to have something smart that’s a pretty small bullseye.

Charlie Melcher:

So before we jump into the movie, I thought it’d be nice to start a little bit with your backgrounds, just sort of quickly: Kristin, you’re a writer, three novels, wrote for comedies, SNL, Futurama, screenplays, worked with Spike Jones on HER– great, great film– but you really come to this from a background as a writer with words and experience in movies. Damian, musician, artist, lead, singer of OK GO, that little band that we all fell in love with because of the extraordinary music videos that you crafted, those went incredibly viral. Talk about joyful rides, those were incredible joyful rides for so many millions and millions of people. The skill sets seem to me very different, but really complimentary. Is that true?

Kristin Gore:

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we found it to be true. We found it to be true. We discovered early on to our delight that our instincts are very aligned and our taste is very aligned, and so we pretty thoroughly agree on what we like and what is good and what we’re trying to get out of any kind of piece of art.

Damian Kulash:

We should also mention that we’re married.

Kristin Gore:

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh, that.

Damian Kulash:

I’m just realizing I’m doing that in–going over that in my head and going, these are all very nice things to say. And then I was realizing if you don’t realize that the two of us are married, that’s a really weird way…

Kristin Gore:

It sounds like we should get married. But we already are.

[laughter]

Charlie Melcher:

How’d you meet?

Kristin Gore:

That’s such a good question. We first met in high school, we had art class and government club together. We were in different grades and–

Damian Kulash:

In the 1990s.

Kristin Gore:

In the nineties, exactly. And we were friendly with each other. We liked each other. We actually recently found a notebook of Damian’s from Government club, and he’s an incredible artist, as you mentioned. And in there was a full sketch portrait of me at age 16.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh, that early infatuation.

Kristin Gore:

Well, portraits of everyone else in government club too. It wasn’t special, but it was exciting to come across me and then we didn’t stay in touch at all for 18 years. Then there was this thing called the Future of Storytelling.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh really?

Kristin Gore:

Yeah!

Damian Kulash:

You’ve probably heard of it.

Charlie Melcher:

I’ve heard of it.

Damian Kulash:

It’s an amazing conference that happens that brings together just the most wonderful people in the world to do just the most wonderful things in the world to learn about just the most wonderful ideas in the world. Yes. You should at some point–

Kristin Gore:

Look it, look into it. The very first one on Staten Island in 2014–

Damian Kulash:

Where all great love stories begin.

[laughter]

Kristin Gore:

Damian was speaking at the conference. I was happily attending. It looked so fascinating.

Damian Kulash:

She was stalking me.

Kristin Gore:

I did not even know he was speaking, because as you may know, there are different paths through the conference. You can choose different things and I had chosen different speakers to go to, so I didn’t even know.

Damian Kulash:

And in the same way that for instance, I would draw a picture of her but then do lots of other pictures to cover for it, she’s like showed up at the conference, but I’m not going to go to the talk.

Charlie Melcher:

I see.

Kristin Gore:

So I had no idea until the goodbye drinks in the garden and I was actually on my way out and someone grabbed my arm and said, “Kristin,” and I turned and it was Damian and it was the first time we were seeing each other in 18 years and we just were very fast friends. We talked for, I dunno, six hours that night and we were friends for a year and then got together and got married and had twins. So thank you Charlie, for changing our lives for the better and countless ways

Charlie Melcher:

All sorts of magic happened at FoST.

Kristin Gore:

It’s true.

Charlie Melcher:

This perhaps is the best example, but–

Damian Kulash:

I’m sorry to have derailed your otherwise very factual answer.

Kristin Gore:

Yeah, well, factual and romantic, I mean it really worked out for us. FoST has an incredibly special place in our hearts forever. So that’s how we got together. And then we realized quickly after that we kind of thoroughly agreed on so much about the world and on about what we wanted to make and–

Damian Kulash:

–and yet got there, arrived at those conclusions almost opposite ways. Our brains really are sort of puzzle pieces that fit together because I mostly work from the back. If we want to make a splash of this size, what type of cliff do we have to jump off of and what does that cliff look like and what are the last few steps before you jump?

Kristin Gore:

And I start at the beginning where I’m like, who wants to go to a cliff? What does the cliff represent to them? What’s their drive? What does cliff mean? And the layer forward. And so we kind of put those two things together and we end up in a better place than either of us would’ve gotten individually, which is a really special and inspiring process and feeling.

Charlie Melcher:

Is there a simple way you describe your creative approaches?

Damian Kulash:

Mostly I think of it as, I’m not sure what it’s deductive and inductive or it’s reverse and forward. We should actually come figure out what those words are, but it’s easy to mistake that for being like one is narrative and the other is structural or something, but it’s not really true because we’ve found that the way we think, those same two modes of thinking sort of going, wait, how are we going to get to this end point versus wait, what’s the natural next step from the starting point? You’re always trying to connect a starting point and an ending point, and I just happen to always think from the ending point first and she happens to think from the starting point first. I mean, I shouldn’t say always, but that is usually how we find it. And most problems don’t fall right in the middle either. So it’s sort of the overall thing we’re working on has a pretty even distribution curve of where the problems are. But any given problem is it’s more something you should just reverse engineer or it’s more something that you just need to organically grow. We don’t always know what it is going into it, but one of us comes up with the answer much faster than the other one usually, depending on which way the thinking sort of works.

Kristin Gore:

Yeah, I think I always have a sort of visual in my head about it of Damian up above in the sky looking down.

Damian Kulash:

Me too. Yeah. Yes, yes. That’s what I think.

Kristin Gore:

And me, with the roots of a plant growing up and it’s sort of meeting there.

Damian Kulash:

Yeah, that’s really nice. I never knew about that visual.

Kristin Gore:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s beautiful.

Damian Kulash:

Another way is I run a spreadsheet in my head and she runs a Word document.

Kristin Gore:

Yes, that is true.

Charlie Melcher:

There. That’s a good summary also. So let’s start with the origins of this movie: a book, a serious nonfiction book called The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zach Bissonnette. How did you come to that book and how from that book did you decide to make a movie about it?

Kristin Gore:

Yeah, the book was sent to me as a possible adaptation for me to write, and I was surprised when I devoured it, how much was in this story because I wasn’t interested in Beanie Babies. I sort of missed the craze when it happened. Didn’t care.

Charlie Melcher:

You don’t have a lot of your attic?

Kristin Gore:

I don’t. We were both the exact wrong age for it. We were in college and we just kind of skipped it. We were aware of it but weren’t participants and that’s not the kind of thing I would think I would be drawn to, but…

Damian Kulash:

That is an understatement.

Kristin Gore:

I would– not big on kind of consumerist fads. But anyway, what was– these women’s stories that were in the book and documented these journeys of these three women who contributed so much to the phenomenon and didn’t get any of the credit or the money were incredibly fascinating to me. And so that’s what I really wanted to dive into. I shared it with Damian who completely loved it too. And we also really were fascinated by the fact that one of the most absurd speculative craze in history came about because of the advent of eBay and the rise of the internet and this incredibly specific exciting time in the mid nineties where there were these bubbles of hope and optimism and all these seeds of now were being planted and we thought it was all going to go great, and then the bubble pops in more ways than one. And so we very quickly realized this is something we want to direct together. And we went from there.

Damian Kulash:

I actually think it’s a little bit like taking a painting and trying to generate a photograph, a realistic photograph from it. Because what I found very interesting and inspiring in how you approached it was that there’s this incredible wealth of information in the book about this specific episode, but what we were seeing in it was how telling it was about humanity and about America and about consumerism, about all these things that are underlying the whole thing, underpinning the whole thing, but aren’t the story of the book. The story of the book is basically about economics and about these individual people, but sort of just little bits of it. And you have to take all those sort of brush strokes and try to get it to become a much more linear story. And when I was doing spreadsheet, I was like, I was going through it going all these amazing facts and blah blah and sort of how do you make out of this and Kristin’s way of thinking, obviously much more suited to that process and you did make a photograph out of it. It’s like it becomes this very, very, very real people in a very real world.

Kristin Gore:

And the women, they’re in– Zach Bissonnette’s book is great and chock full of incredibly fascinating stuff and all the raw material is there, but the women don’t have the sort of focus in the book and that’s what compelled us the most. So we sort of pulled those journeys out and made them the organizing principle of our film while we’re also, because we didn’t want to just tell the story of Ty Warner or a product becoming super popular and making someone a billionaire that’s in the movie, but that’s not the point of our movie at all.

Damian Kulash:

Our movie is really something of a bait and switch, especially in this time when there’s, we didn’t know this as we were making it because we didn’t know they were in production, but there were so many other product films right now, air and Flaming Hot Cheetos and Tetris–

Kristin Gore:

Tetris and Blackberry and Barbie.

Charlie Melcher:

Barbie.

Damian Kulash:

And we haven’t seen most of them. We assume they’re great. This is nothing against any of them, but we did not at all think of ourselves as making a product movie. It really is more like you think you’re going to learn about Beanie Babies and actually you don’t, you learn about humanity hopefully.

Kristin Gore:

Because we really wanted– for us, it was about taking a really interesting, for us, look at assigning value to things like who we value, what we value culturally, why we value who and what we do, and really looking at the female relationship to the American dream, looking at these systems and cycles of inequality and marginalization, but with this fun colorful backdrop of an absurd graze where people lost their minds over tiny stuffed beanbag animals. So we wanted to get it all of that in this joyful colorful way. And the thing about us collaborating that made it really fresh and special is instead of telling the story in a linear way, which there was a linear version of the script, but our movie for anyone who goes and see it, and I hope everyone does, you’ll see it has a very unconventional structure. And that was completely Damian and me ripping apart the story and rewriting it all to be this to us felt like a really fresh original structure and that was a really challenging and really fun.

Charlie Melcher:

And you did that so that you could run through the emotional arc of these three stories in parallel instead of chronologically in sequence where you feel repetitive.

Damian Kulash:

What we noticed was this same pattern keeps happening in little factoids in this book in little pieces of information. And that was the thing that made this not the interesting story behind a sort of trivial pursuit answer. That this isn’t just “how crazy, how did we get to this crazy point?” It’s, “These are the crazy that we do every day.” I’m not sure if my grammar even works here, but the mundane daily life, crazy, if you add it all together in certain circumstances, it just makes Beanie Babies, it makes this insane speculative craze out of mass produced tchotchkes. The most crazy stuff can come from the most everyday mistakes. I would say the basic premise of the American dream is somewhere out there’re too good to be True is possible that you’re the one who’s going to crack that code and–

Charlie Melcher:

Your $5 purchase is going to be worth $200,000.

Damian Kulash:

Exactly. Right. And that is when you step back from it and go, how did all of America think that these mass produced things were somehow scarce and valuable and going to put their kids through college? The internet appeared to be making it possible for us to sort of skip around just a little too good to be true.

Charlie Melcher:

And in fact, to some degree your success is part of that is attributable to that the viral nature of your videos made you famous.

Damian Kulash:

Yeah, I mean we actually had this discussion the other day is sort of like, how does one feel about social media today or about virality and all that kind of stuff. And I remember in 2006 or 07 being interviewed about the power of YouTube and thinking and being able to say with no irony that this is just going to democratize the way that we all make things and now a good idea. There’s no gatekeepers and a good idea, a hat in your backyard can vault your band from–

Charlie Melcher:

I remember saying that a bunch too.

Damian Kulash:

And it wasn’t wrong. It failed to– that democratizing power doesn’t mean it’s going to become more sane or more fair. That’s an amazing thing to tell a story about. If you could only think of the one little moment where you could actually put that all, if you could see all of that at once and then to read this book and realize, oh my God, all of that is the Beanie Baby thing that Beanie Babies wouldn’t have happened at all if it hadn’t been for the advent of eBay and all that happened really was that the type of investing mistakes that people normally need $500,000 or a ranch somewhere

Charlie Melcher:

Everybody could do now.

Damian Kulash:

Now anybody with a phone line and $5 could be part of, and so everybody could see everybody else’s transactions or at least a huge number of other people. And it moved that type that sort of like, it’s too good to be true thinking into a new class of people. That was going to happen to some small weird product. It had to have a little bit of false scarcity to it and it had to be less than $10, but it didn’t have to be soft animals.

Charlie Melcher:

You remind me of one of my favorite moments in the movie. It was just so funny and it’s that moment when the young 19-year-old is showing Ty eBay and we’re waiting for the photos to load. It’s an early version and it is taking forever, and it finally comes up and he says, “wow, so fast.” Everybody dies laughing. It was just to recapture the innocence of the internet at that moment in time or the excitement for it. The movie watches really smoothly, but there’s a lot of complexity. You have three voiceovers, you have these three main characters we’re jumping back and forth in time throughout. On top of that, there’s also really complex color strategy going on there, right? Because you establish colors for each character and you intentionally built each frame. I mean, I guess where I’m going is some of this feels like the kind of meticulous craftsmanship that you brought to your music videos where they were truly Goldberg esque produced works of art where everything was just perfect and had to be thought through or I guess really worked backwards through. How much of that craft from music videos were you bringing to this? Was that, I’m looking at you Damian as I’m saying this, but maybe this was just as much Kristin–

Damian Kulash:

We wanted there to be this very, very specific color scheme for the film. If you ever noticed it aggressively, if it ever became a thing that takes you out of the film, it has now failed. So it’s sort of like you’re trying to write a code underneath the whole rest of the thing that you feel but you don’t see. And so there’s this real back and forth between our two ways of thinking in terms of how far you can go with that because you want it to be enough that you can never lose it and you want it to be little enough that it never pokes through the surface and you’re going, is this a Crayola commercial?

Kristin Gore:

And then it ends up being in service of what we’re trying to communicate, which is a kind of fable or fairytale. Having that slightly heightened but not distracting feeling helps spring you into that world.

Charlie Melcher:

I appreciate you’re describing it a little bit as a fable, it does have that kind of morality tale to it. But then you also put all of this real footage from the time like news reports and footage where we see the factual reality of the Beanie bubble craze, Beanie Baby bubble. So in a way, there’s also a documentary film cut in because you are still telling the story of the Beanie Baby craze with that kind of footage as well as some of the story of those years in American history. So I did have this moment of thinking, wow, there’s this kind of like a documentary cut into a fictional fable. Was that intentional? There’s a lot of that footage there.

Kristin Gore:

Yeah, no, it was intentional because we wanted to honor what the anchor craze was for the stories we were telling, and we also wanted to contextualize it in the cultural and political companion pieces that were happening and unfurling at the same time. And so for us that was really important to make sense of it all in our brains and souls as we were exploring these stories. And they ended up being helpful signposts too, because of how we have this time shifted narratives and this unconventional non-linear structure, then it is helpful to see some of that documentary footage of the actual craze. It’s also helpful to see some of the political things going on at the same time to orient the audience in time as we’re switching around. So for us it was just a way of telling the story in the most thorough and complete and interesting mode possible in our opinion. And it was fun to have that kind of stylistic variety really, but well hopefully it feels of a piece.

Damian Kulash:

I’m very glad to hear you ask about that documentary footage, 70 or 80% of that we filmed ourselves. Really all of the events that are depicted are real in terms of the news stories, but most of those news anchors are actors that we had to hire.

Kristin Gore:

A lot of it, we were recreating actual archival footage and we show that the scene of the couple divorcing in a court in Las Vegas and having to split up their Beanie Baby collection. And there’s a real photo of that couple.

Damian Kulash:

There’s a very famous real photograph.

Kristin Gore:

And we did not use that real photo, but we recreated that real photo, so we did that.

Damian Kulash:

The inset photograph in that looks very, very similar to the real one, but is that we had to shoot ourselves.

Charlie Melcher:

Okay. But there’s another set of documentary footage which has to do with what’s happening politically.

Kristin Gore:

And that’s what I was talking about. That is all real.

Charlie Melcher:

That shot where over the shoulder we see on the television Clinton impeached, which to me was a tell because I realized that there’s another story going on here. We talked about how the internet was an important part of your personal backstory, Damian. Kristin, there’s a story here about Bill Clinton as president and his impeachment, and some people have said that actually it was his infidelity and impeachment that led to your father, Al Gore, not becoming the president, the next president. And I wondered if you saw some parallel there between Ty’s story and Bill Clinton’s story. Feel free to tell me, I’m overstepping my bounds as a friend, but–

Kristin Gore:

The Beanie Baby craze, that bubble happened in the exact years of the Clinton administration.

Damian Kulash:

92 to 2000. Exactly. I mean it’s creepy.

Kristin Gore:

It’s uncanny.

Charlie Melcher:

Right on the money.

Kristin Gore:

And we talked about bubbles of hope and optimism and feeling like, okay, things are going to turn around, the boomers are coming in, they’re going to fix everything and–

Charlie Melcher:

Vote Clinton / Gore. Right?

Kristin Gore:

Exactly. And there was a lot of hope and excitement and a lot of progress and change and then things didn’t completely turn out the way that everyone hoped. And so there were bubbles that popped in both cases and the 2000 election was a big bubble pop and a big, big disillusionment, a big let down for democracy to have the Supreme Court intervene in the way that they did. And so part of what we wanted to explore with our movie, the larger themes are also just, we talked about assigning value and bubbles and what you believe in and what you do with disillusionment too and all of that. We’re telling this particular story, but it resonates culturally in a much larger space. And that was something that we wanted to contextualize.

Damian Kulash:

When you start thinking, when you pull at the thread of where does this value come from and why did we think it was valuable and whose collective delusion is this, it doesn’t just stop at Beanie Babies. And so I think that bubble of hope starts pointing at a whole lot of other things too. You’re sort of like, is democracy a bubble or is America a bubble? Is capitalism a bubble? All these things that feels are fundamental to our society at least if not something larger than just ours are all just as arbitrary as the system that we are talking about here. They’re just a lot bigger and a lot more weighty. And so having that historical alignment really helped bring that into focus is sort of like now that we see how dark technology is 20 years out, look at the presidency.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s bring it back from the myth of the whole country down to your own personal experiences. I mean, the opportunity to make a major feature film. I mean, you’ve been probably both dreaming about this to some degree for your whole lives, right? That’s making it, right? You finally got the opportunity. I mean, can you say how big a budget, how many people, this is a big scale production?

Damian Kulash:

I will say that on our big day our crew was about 500 people. It was easily the largest thing that either of us have ever been involved in, and we’re still sort of pinching ourselves every day going, I can’t believe we got to do this.

Charlie Melcher:

And what was it like for the two of you to work together? It’s not that common to have directing teams.

Damian Kulash:

Perfect in every way.

Charlie Melcher:

And we’ll leave it at that.

Damian Kulash:

No, I mean obviously we don’t agree on everything, but luckily I’m always right.

Charlie Melcher:

[laughter] Yeah.

Kristin Gore:

It’s good for him to always think that and then to just make it happen the other way. But no, as we said earlier, we do agree on 95% of things and that’s super helpful. And having someone beside you who you trust so completely and is so smart and so artistic and so authentic and good to help. You’re together trying to get this to a place that will be meaningful and joyful, that there’s nothing like that. I can’t imagine a better scenario than to have a partner you trust completely because you make things better together. So that was an inspiring feeling throughout.

Charlie Melcher:

Was there something that you learned about each other through this process that you didn’t know beforehand?

Damian Kulash:

You learn a lot about someone from parenting with them, and this has a ton of overlap with that. It’s sort of like, problems thrown at you all day long–joyous, wonderful problems thrown at you all day long that you have slightly different instincts about that mostly overlap, but where they don’t, there’s sort of a like, wait, how could you pull that rug out from underneath me? This is not what life is. That’s not what, and that trying to find in those moments a way to make it all better because of that. To go like, oh, maybe I was, if we don’t agree on this, I guess it’s not so obvious, or if we don’t agree on this, maybe we need to keep working on it. And that is much more approachable when it’s a project that is involving a whole bunch of other adults and an actual end product and a bunch of processes that you can talk about as opposed to just have to sort of dance around the way you do with little children. Some of it was very similar, but in the way that you learn a million things about someone from co-parenting with them, this is the same. It’s like I can’t figure out where the end of that list is because it’s sort of like we know each other so much better than we ever did before.

Kristin Gore:

Yeah, that’s very true. We definitely really deepened and strengthened our relationship in a lot of ways because we just went through so much every day in all these different ways.

Damian Kulash:

And for her to learn how right I was about everything really. That’s for both of us.

Kristin Gore:

I learned that he repeats unfunny jokes over and over.

Damian Kulash:

That was not, that– I was doing that well before the movie.

Kristin Gore:

Well, that’s good. That’s true. It just– yeah. Really became clear.

Damian Kulash:

Sometimes I have to remind her how funny I am, but it’s cool. She always gets it.

Charlie Melcher:

Would you do it again together?

Kristin Gore:

I think so. We really are–I mean, you should answer too. We really, it was so exhausting and so depleting that we were just enormously burned out at the end and needed a really big break. We’re still in that that, but we’re also really happy and proud of what we made and are excited to share it with the world, and it feels the fact that we were able to make something together that really delivered on the vision, that feels like such a coup, and so we don’t take that lightly. We know that’s a special feeling for us to have, and we’d like to repeat it, I’m sure, but it’s also such a huge undertaking taking with small children that we are not going to rush into it again, because you have to be very thoughtful about how we do it. It’s a huge commitment. Should we be lucky enough to have the opportunity to do it again? Of course. But does that sound accurate to you, Damian?

Damian Kulash:

Whatever you say, boss. [laughter] I’m taking a moment to think if I can, what the most honest answer I really have is because I think that I was realizing it matters to me how this plays in the world, and I was going, do I really care about–? Like, don’t I know already what we made it or we didn’t? Like, the work is–

Charlie Melcher:

Meaning, the response to the film and its success would influence your answer? Like, if it’s really successful, sure, you’d do it again?

Damian Kulash:

No– Well, that’s what I was worried. I was thinking, I was like, why does it matter? Obviously everybody wants the world to like the things they do, and whether or not we have the opportunity again has everything to do with that, but I’d like to believe that that having made the piece, I now know what I feel about it and it doesn’t really matter what the world thinks like that one would like to believe that. And so as I plumb that answer in my mind, I’m realizing, I think really what it is, is that when I look back at the things I’ve done earlier in life and how I feel about them now, it’s not necessarily their level of success or recognition or anything that makes them good or bad, but there is something that settles within you about whether or not it was worth it that right now we are at the finish line of something that was really, really difficult, really, really gratifying, really, really intense, and I’m really proud of what we made.

 

I don’t yet know if it was worth it or not because I’m still in it, and yes, the world’s reaction to it in whether success, not success will help balance that, but probably more just because it will amplify my own feelings about it. If this goes out with a whimper right now, then we have this really intense moment and I will always have this film, but if it becomes the thing that we wind up talking about at dinner and parties for the rest of our lives, then it’s going to be much bigger part of us, regardless of whether or not it made anyone any money, it’s going to take a while to know how we feel about what, it was just too intensive an experience to know if these are sunny memories or dark ones yet.

Charlie Melcher:

I wonder too, particularly given the conversation we had a few minutes ago about the change in making things on the internet, the download speeds and the ability to add images and all of that, how technology is going to transform the craft of filmmaking over the next few years, the 500 people and three months, and giant sets and big budgets, and all of that might be, we are maybe just a few years away from it being you two and an AI sitting down and making this movie.

Kristin Gore:

I mean, let’s hope not and we have several strikes going on right now about a lot of those issues, and we’re in full solidarity with the writer’s guild and with the actors, so there’s a lot of exploration and resolution that needs to happen before anyone gets back to work making anything, because right now it’s an unequal and really immoral situation that is in search of resolution.

Damian Kulash:

Resourcefulness is sort of at the heart of creativity. There’s no question that technology does change what resourcefulness means, and that has been, for me personally, a big, big part of being creative over my whole life is sort of like, what is this tool and how do I play with it? The incredible speed which technology is changing will change what it means to be resourceful. On the other side of that, there’s this sort of like our current understanding of AI is that it aggregates and finds patterns in existing human work that suggests a very depressing future of non-growth. That basically you can have as many poems as you want for all of the rest of time, and all of them will be identical to the poems we’ve already had.

Kristin Gore:

It would be as if a major studio just kept remaking the same movies over and over. Can you imagine any studio that wouldn’t do that?

Charlie Melcher:

How strange that things would change to that state of affairs?

Kristin Gore:

Yeah, that would be bizarre.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. I mean, isn’t that to some degree, what we’ve always done, right? The great stories we retell in different forms over and over again. The optimistic view, of course, is that it’s just another very superpowered tool and that we, humans will still keep control of it and it’ll help us continue to tell stories that are human and emotional and resonant,.

Damian Kulash:

Like the way we control social media, right? How great it is for us.

Kristin Gore:

Techno optimism was so nineties.

Charlie Melcher:

If you believe that, I’ve got some Beanie Babies for you. Well, I can’t wait for the next story that you two decide to collaborate on and tell, because I so enjoyed this one, and thank you for spending the time with me today. It’s just always such a pleasure to hang out with you two. Thank you.

Damian Kulash:

It’s been so fun, Charlie. Thank you.

Kristin Gore:

We love you, Charlie.

Charlie Melcher:

Aw, love you too.

 

I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been the FoST Podcast. Thank you for listening. If you are passionate about making and sharing stories in any form, the future of storytelling is the community for you. In addition to this show, we have a free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought, and an annual membership called the FoST Explorers Club, which you can learn more about online at fost.org. Who knows, maybe you’ll even meet your future spouse.

 

The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our friends and production partner Charts & Leisure. Hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.