John and Craig explore the counterfactuals of Hollywood history — the relatively small moments that, if the coin toss had gone the other way, would have massive ramifications on the world as we know it.

What if Edison was allowed to keep his monopoly on motion pictures? What does our industry look like without the Paramount Consent Decree? What if George Lucas died in his car accident? Would superhero movies have dominated our culture if Iron Man had bombed? What studios would have gone down if Titanic had sunk? And what if Netflix had stayed with its DVD-only model?

In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig talk capitalism and solve its problems once and for all.

Links:

• What If? by Robert Cowley
• Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
• United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. on Wikipedia
• George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’ by Tim Ott for Biography
• When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
• ‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped by Richard Newby for THR
• Financial Interest and Syndication Rules
• Post-Quantum Cryptography
• S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them. by Adam Rogers
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• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Zach Lo (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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You can download the episode here.