Interview with Kurt Sutter

EXCLUSIVE: To say that Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter was upset and felt disrespected after being fired from Mayans MC last week is to understate it. After a few days to contemplate his ouster, Sutter spoke to Deadline about how Disney ownership factored into his exit, what his next move will be, and what all this means for his planned Sons Of Anarchy prequel. Buckle up.

DEADLINE: Is your long run at Fox over? You re-upped as Fox was in the process of being taken over by Disney. For your part, do you want to continue creating and running shows there?

SUTTER: There’s irony in that I was the first deal they made under the Disney banner, but right now, we’re trying to figure out how to handle the deal. Contractually, they have me for another year. In an ideal situation, they would honor that, and cut me loose. Meaning, pay me out and let me go somewhere else so that we all can heal and move on. It was more bad timing than a bad fit. Creatively and emotionally, I was burned out. The result was my frustration level was higher and my patience thinner and my spirit of collaboration had diminished. In this transitional phase, from one regime to the next, stability is key. You want to try and make it as smooth as possible. You have brands combining here, and so everybody is upside down and worried anyway. So you really need a lot of stability.

Then you plug my personality into those two circumstances? That’s what didn’t hold together. Had this gone down two or three years from now, when the transition was over and people were more settled, there may have been a different response to it.

DEADLINE: And your nearly 20 year run at Fox, writing and producing The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, The Bastard Executioner, and Mayans MC?

SUTTER: I would say that in the near future, my creative relationship at Fox Disney is done. Look, as time moves on and egos –meaning mine – are soothed, I’m sure whatever animosity is in the air will settle in. Right now…I had a conversation with Elgin where I apologized and said, this is not how I wanted it to go down. Elgin said he felt bad, like it was his fault. But he just did what he was supposed to be doing and this thing just took its own course. Elgin is more of a fucking outlaw than I am and I said, you can’t go SFU on these guys, you can’t fuck shit up. You have to find the key personnel to help you succeed. I’m not saying to kowtow and bend over, but you do need to be able to compromise and bend, and you need to get one or two solid seasons under your belt. And when things have calmed down and you’ve proven yourself, if pushback is needed, then you have something to stand on to do that. But his main job now is really to stabilize the show. The cast and crew, make sure everyone feels safe, feel heard, and confident so the show can succeed.

DEADLINE: You’ve had a week to think about this, after you followed your firing by sending what became a widely publicized letter to your cast, and the letter to your inner circle Deadline published that further outlined your ire. What are your thoughts on why this went south and led to your firing from the show?

SUTTER: Bottom line, I created the circumstances that led to my being forced out. I overestimated my value and underestimated the unfuckability of the mouse. I feel the way they expedited and qualified the move, was unfair, but the truth is, it was not a good fit and I had to go. I also don’t want to get into all the specifics of that lawyer dance, because to do that, I’d have make assumptions that might unfairly slander John and Dana. I don’t want to do that. Especially John.

Landgraf just wants to work with talented artists and create great TV. He’s just a really smart executive, a rare gem in this town. And it’s moved him up the food chain. But I know being in that corporate inner circle of either Fox or Disney was not his career ambition. The conversations I would have with John…I had coffee with him six or seven weeks ago and at the time none of this was really spinning. I would sit down with John and say, hey, I’m thinking about this, this, and this. What makes the most sense for you guys? At the time, they were setting things with Hulu, and their docs, and he would say, that’s a really cool idea and I know where I can put that. It wasn’t like he was green lighting shit, but rather saying, put your time there, and there. That is the kind of relationship I had with John and in those conversations you can see it in his eyes. John loves to work with artists, loves to work with writers, loves making great TV. He really is a smart fucking cat, and nobody analyzes data like John does. I always gave him shit for that; we’d get into conversations and he would start spewing statistics and analysis, and I’d be like, John, you’re here to give me script notes.

Because of that and because he’s not the most demonstrative cat, he’s calm and his demeanor is approachable, he has climbed that corporate ladder and become even more valuable even when it was just in the Fox world. In the transition with Disney, I think there’s a part of him that wants to protect what he established and he wants to assert himself. Now, it’s not that I think they’ve crushed the humanity in him, but he’s being so distracted with growing the brand and growing his end of what will ultimately become the downloadable content, that he just hasn’t had the time to do what he loves to do. Not that he’s not satisfied or feels fulfilled doing real world things, but I know what the dude really loves to do and why he got in the business. And it wasn’t to be sitting in the boardroom.

DEADLINE: You made it seem like the new ingredient that soured your long relationship at Fox and FX, and with Dana Walden and John Landgraf, was the influence of new Disney ownership. Was there a specific thing that left you on the outs with Disney?

SUTTER: Here’s what I did wrong on the studio network side, the reason why I had to go away. It all started with a joke. And not a very good one. There was a line in the Season 2 premiere. EZ [JD Pardo] and Coco [Richard Cabral] were getting off the bus at the school where the drugs were being processed. There was supposed to be a really gnarly playground out front. Filled with debris, dangerous looking swings, sharp objects, rusty jungle gym, etc. As they exited, Coco sees EZ’s distracted and says: Lighten up Boy Scout, and gesturing to the playground, says, We’re going to Disneyland. EZ replies: Yeah? Guess this is where Walt buried all the Jews he had killed. Coco comments: That’s dark man… And exits.

Although the joke came out of character and in any other environment, would have been typical of my brand of dark humor, I’m not an idiot. I knew it would ring some bells. Whether real or imagined, I was already experiencing the tightening of the noose. It was manifesting in production issues, creating more hurdles, etc. I’ve learned over the years through trial and error – a lot of error – how to push back to protect story from corporate conformity. I discovered that when the restraints are tightening, to acquiesce and cave does not buy you trust and goodwill. It only clears the path for forward momentum. So when dealing with new restrictions often implemented by a change in personnel, it’s best to respond by lobbing a grenade. Yes, it stuns people, challenges their authority, often involves a call from a lawyer. But the result is usually a slowing down of the restrictive thrust. Breathing room. It forces people to really think about the demand they are making and why they are making it. Is it really necessary? It at least stops the most inane notes from reaching my desk.

So when I was informed that the Walt, Jew killing line had to go, I agreed and changed it to…We’re going to Disneyland. And now EZ says, Yeah… if Mickey and Pluto were pedophiles.

DEADLINE: Too much to imagine that didn’t make it any better?

SUTTER: Clearly, the change was a “fuck you” on my part. And with every request to remove it, I left it in every subsequent pre-production draft. Knowing that I’d change it in the production pages after I saw the location. But a couple days before we started prep, I got a call from a very tired and beleaguered Dana Walden, asking me to please take it out. I felt bad that with all the shit she already had on her plate, she was tasked to handle this. I took it out. I’d had dinner around that time with someone in a position to know who was describing how things were changing and they said it was like The Hunger Games. The people way up top have a sense where they are going; the people towards the bottom know they’re going to be needed. But everybody in between doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. Who their colleagues are, their bosses. It’s just insane. When I got the call from Dana, she just seemed so tired and burned out. I felt badly. In hindsight, I realized for her to get that call, the problem was being dealt with on a whole different level. In hindsight, I realize that dialog grenade was the beginning of my exit.

DEADLINE: Why specifically did you press that button, making comments about the corporation’s creator and two signature Disney characters? Was it a test?

SUTTER: Yes, I think so. What happened was, I put the line in about Walt. Even though there were no creative notes going on yet because I hadn’t turned in a script, there were red flags on the production end, in terms of restraints, hurdles we had never had before. Myself and my production team were just started and the people we had dealt with previously at 20th, who I had worked with at Sons, even though they were corporate I’d had a really good relationship with Jim Sharp one of them. If there was an issue, with new personnel, I knew who to pick up the phone and call and say here’s what we’re doing. We’re not trying to sidestep protocol, but…And the problem was, I didn’t have access to those people anymore. There were new people and though we tried with them, besides there being no relationship, we were just shut down. We were starting to feel that boundary. Some of it I knew was a new regime and new corporate rules. And I wasn’t naïve there wouldn’t be issues.

The very first draft, the writer’s draft, didn’t have any joke whatsoever, about Walt or anybody. I forget exactly, but I got notes back on things that wouldn’t even have gotten flagged the previous season. There was this new legal department where they didn’t want me to mention the name of the county. They didn’t want any reference to anything that made it authentic. How I work, from The Shield all the way through Bastard, we created fictitious characters, there was a fictitious town in Sons, a fictitious precinct in The Shield. But the thing that makes it real is, we reference everything around it as being real. So even though characters in town are not real, but the world around it is relateable and recognizable. We had done that in Season One, and suddenly they didn’t want us to do any of that in Season Two. We were getting these ‘what the fuck’ restraints, and I think at that point is when I threw the grenade.

DEADLINE: The joke about Walt Disney…

SUTTER: So the next draft, the producer’s draft, contained the Walt joke. There were these increasing levels of restraints that were not even creative as much as they were legal, that clearly if I paid attention to them, not only would they have reduced the authenticity, there would have been a lack of continuity from the first season. I saw all that building up and it got to the point where I realized I needed some breathing room. The stuff about the grenade, as bombastic as it seems, that is really what I’d learned, and not in an asshole kind of way. I learned that I have to wake people up and have them take a step back and go, what? It rattles cages and often ends up with a conversation. It makes people think, instead of this anonymous application of a rule without knowing who I am, what the show is, what the need or purpose of what we’re doing is. We’ll just get slapped with a blanket generalized restriction. It just makes people say, do we really need to do this? It allows a conversation to happen and kind of forces them to do their jobs. It’s not that I don’t get restrictions, but this at least filters out the most inane notes. The studio and the network will have that conversation where they would say, do we really want to tell him this? And if they realize it’s not worth it, they don’t tell me. I believe, in the long run, the helps everybody and it moves story along in a better way and helps the artistic vision of it all.

DEADLINE: Did you actually believe you’d be able to slide one of those Disney jokes through to broadcast?

SUTTER: No. I knew the Walt joke was like, okay, you want something to complain about? Here you go. I knew that would at least force a few people to call their supervisors. One of the executives on the show was like, ‘you can’t say that.’ But I didn’t really want to back off, I wanted to continue this notion of drawing that line in the sand. That’s a harsh assumption about the founder of the institution I worked for. So I changed the joke. In any other environment, that joke would have lasted. Two years ago, before all this, there would have been no question about me saying that. Creatively, it was okay. That was my argument. I was like, what are you talking about? This was my brand of humor.

When you are doing a premiere episode, there are more drafts than any other scripts. I left it in the subsequent pre-production drafts, knowing that after I saw the location I would come up with a different line, and at the very least, have an alternative. At the end of the day, what happened was there was no joke, because of the location. We didn’t have time or the ability to create that gnarly-looking playground to make the joke work. I love writing humor and what I end up doing in any script, I insert five or six comedic beats. Maybe two of them will work. So I knew there was the option of not putting it in and that it was the most likely outcome, but I left it in as a statement. As a line in the sand. We were in pre-production, getting shots of locations, because we shot all that in Mexico. And that’s when I got the call from Dana, when we were about to shoot the next day or the day after that. Asking me to take the line out. At that point, I thought I was just dealing with Standards & Practices, and creative executives. I didn’t know it had worked its way up the food chain, to business affairs and the protection of the brand.

DEADLINE: What happened after you agreed to drop the line?

SUTTER: My pushback continued all season. Although dealing with most of the same personnel from Season 1, there was a new layer of… anxiety I guess. Executives second guessing story in a way they didn’t on Season 1 and SOA. Whether the heightened creative scrutiny was real, or me projecting my own fear – probably a mix of both – my patience grew thinner and thinner. And by the end of the season, I went rogue. Turning in scripts too late to allow notes to be addressed.

DEADLINE: You told me when Mayans launched that you were mindful things could be different under Disney, which then had declared its intention to acquire Fox. You said you were working on the coarse language you sometimes used to address people…

SUTTER: Over the years my push back has gotten smarter. I no longer respond with overly aggressive correspondence. The “C-word” is no longer in my quiver. My replies were usually brutal in their terse simplicity. But, I believe that decision to un-tether myself from corporate process is what led to my dismissal. In their eyes I was a loose cannon, who could ultimately besmirch the family friendly brand. And they were right. It was best for all parties to part ways.

DEADLINE: In last week’s letters, you felt betrayed by Dana Walden and John Landgraf, execs you go back almost 20 years with. How do you feel now about them?

SUTTER: The day they called me in there…I’m not a naïve cat and I usually don’t get blindsided very often. I got called in and I thought it was going to be, hey, lighten up on people, let’s continue to make this transition happen. And I really thought I was going to get a pickup for Season Three. I went in and the vibe was so fucking heavy. I felt like I was at a wake. I looked at Dana and she looked so tired and so sad. And I thought, oh, this is bad. And Dana said, ‘I never wanted to have this conversation with you.’ The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘Oh my God, are you fucking kidding me?’ As they were explaining it, I thought, if they had said, look dude, clearly you’re burnt out. You’re pushing back too hard. You’re making this transition harder than it has to be, on everybody, and you’ve got to take a step back. We’ve got to put you in the shadows. Had they said that to me? I would have said…I’m sorry. As frustrating and difficult as it might have been, I would have been like, fuck, I know. There would have been this sense of collaboration. But maybe as I said, my pushback has gotten smarter and I don’t open myself up to obvious legal issues. Whatever my pushback was, the joke, I don’t know if technically that would have been something they could have grabbed onto to dismiss me. The energy they used…they had to find something with legal teeth and the business affairs thing happened. As it was being explained to me, I thought, this was all bullshit. This was not why I was being let go. I think that’s what hurt. I don’t want to make assumptions about whether Dana and John knew that it was bullshit. I don’t know, man. They may have been given that information and maybe believed it. That’s the part where I felt, this is not true. I didn’t really stick around very long. I was like ‘Whatever. Do whatever you want with Mayans.’ I felt like, if I had stayed in that room, it just would have gotten worse.

The email I sent to cast and crew, I sent because I know how information is disseminated. I didn’t want them to find out bits and pieces, which would have been more destructive and undermined and created more fear if people didn’t hear it from me. My naivete was thinking if I sent that email to cast and crew that somehow it wouldn’t find its way to the press. That was me being naïve, and clouded by emotion. I didn’t want this to hit the papers and I wanted to protect my cast and crew. After that email hit, I felt I needed to be clear about what happened, and the letter to my inner circle and friends I worked with, I wanted to be clear what happened.
I want this to be clear. I take responsibility for the things I did wrong. I solely am responsible for me being removed. To expedite that, the corporate process they used to do that, wasn’t necessarily true. That frustrates me, but in the big picture it doesn’t matter because the fact is, I should be moving on. I know the stress both of those two people are under and I’ve had a friendship with them for a long time. Does it sting? Yeah. Do I feel my loyalty should have bought me a heads up? When I sat down to have coffee with John, and if he had said, ‘what the fuck are you doing? The place is upside down and people are complaining…’ But none of that happened. I just felt like they got that information and thought the worst of me.

DEADLINE: Was there anything you are aware of from the investigation by HR and business affairs that constituted a smoking gun?

SUTTER: No. In fact, as far as the dismissal goes, HR had nothing to do with it. It was all business affairs. What I realize if that it was HR, that’s a process and I would have to have been made aware of that complaint. Over the years, I’ve been involved with HR claims on Sons. It always involves you coming in, they ask you questions and you answer them. It’s a legal process.

HR had nothing to do with any of this. If there were complaints about my behavior, or people feeling unsafe, I would legally have had to sit down with someone from legal, a lawyer, someone from human resources to give my side of it. Nobody picked up the phone and said, ‘Daddy’s scaring me, or ‘I don’t want to come to work.’ The bullet points were gathered by someone from business affairs where they either called or talked to actors and crew and gathered information. Look, I’m not saying everything was bullshit. I did what I did and behaved the way I did and made those decisions. But let’s face it. I’m a really big personality. You can ask questions about me and from that information you can spin a narrative any way you want. All those things I said I did wrong on the production end, not being around, not noticing growing attention, actors feeling abandoned? All that is true. That information was gathered up and presented in a way that gave them teeth legally for pushing me off the show. I want to be clear about this. I was dismissed for being an abrasive dick. But there was no improper behavior and no one picked up the phone and complained about me. I didn’t realize the tension that was happening and the vibe developing on set as a result was as damaging as it was. JP [Jon Pare], I’d worked with forever, he’s a friend. Elgin was trying to take on as much responsibility and they both tried to protect me by managing it themselves so I could focus on what I was doing. Until it got to the point where it got out of control. Unfortunately because I was checked out, I didn’t find that out until way down the road, when we were filming Episodes 6 or 7. At that point, the damage had been done. I had reached out to the network, said this was going down, what do I do? I guess that was me, admitting I wasn’t paying attention. I had to bring it to their attention, in case bigger claims happened, like being filed to the DGA or anything like that.

DEADLINE: Back to the Mayans, heading into Season Two.

SUTTER: So here’s what I did wrong. And why I did it. But first, a little back story. I went from SOA right into The Bastard Executioner. I started the room for Bastard while I was still finishing Sons. TBX was an amazing experience. I’d never taken on a project of that magnitude before. As a writer or producer. Creating a medieval world. Using history and etymology to determine the vernacular. Not only were set pieces, costumes and props researched for authenticity, but every line of dialog was researched to make sure it didn’t cross the line into modernity. It was wholly satisfying.

But it took a toll on me. Not only was I acting in it, but we shot in Wales, I was living and doing post in London and my writers were in LA. Throw into the mix that Kate and I would travel back home every couple of weeks to see the kids. It was physically and emotionally draining. When TBX was canceled, I was burnt out. Bad. Not taking any down time was a mistake. I should have listened to my wife and my friend Paris Barclay, who advised me to take a season off. I think a part of me was afraid of losing the momentum of Sons. But mainly, I don’t like down time. I don’t relax, I just obsess. And when we didn’t get picked up for Season 2, I saw it as a failure. So fear and ego kicked in again. I felt I needed a win. So again, no down time.

DEADLINE: It sounds like you were a bit insecure. Is that why you came back with the spinoff of your long running hit like Sons of Anarchy instead of another new creation like TBX?

SUTTER: I did not want to come back and do another MC show. Besides seeming like an admission of only possessing a single creative skill set, I felt like I’d told all the stories I had in that world. But FX was eager to capitalize on the IP and I had an interesting way into the world, so before I knew it, we were moving forward. I knew that a white guy shouldn’t be the voice of a Latin culture drama. So I brought on Elgin and saw my primary creative responsibility as handling the transition from the SOA mythology to the Mayans mythology. Season 1 had the usual freshman bumps and setbacks, but all in all, a solid season. And cast and crew were tight and optimistic.
Here’s what I did wrong on the production end in Season 2, the first season under the Disney regime. My plan was to hand off the day-to-day to Elgin by Season 3, and drop back into a hands-off producorial role. That’s what I announced at the premier, before I knew about any of this stuff. It was becoming more and more difficult for me to run this show. I was burned out, uninspired, I feared every idea was derivative. For better or for worse, I do a significant rewrite on every script. Always have. That process got slower and slower on Mayans. I was spending way too much time second-guessing story and reworking scripts. In the process, I put a greater burden on Elgin and my line producer, Jon Pare. Consciously or unconsciously, it allowed me to stick my head in the sand.

DEADLINE: Did that reflect on the quality of the show, or simply on the organizational process of executing it?

SUTTER: The result of that distraction was ignorance about a surmounting tension between a new producer and most of my department heads. I had no idea how badly the family bond we created in Season 1 was coming apart. That is a rookie mistake. And so, my bad. The other blowback it caused was with the cast. I’ve never been a showrunner who spends a lot of time on set. I’ve learned when I’m around, shit just slows down. I say hello, watch a rehearsal and leave. I let my directors and writers run the set. But this season, my presence was so greatly reduced, that some of my cast really felt my absence and understandably interpreted it as abandonment.
As misguided as those decisions were, none of those mistakes are that unusual and certainly not grounds for dismissal. I just want to be clear, I’ve learned that there were no HR claims regarding bad behavior of any kind. No one ever picked up the phone and said, “Daddy scares me.”

DEADLINE: A general question about the TV series business in this moment when major studios are leaning in heavily to streaming launches. Show runners and creators are making mammoth money deals to create shows for buttoned down publicly traded conglomerates. What about the current boom market for TV creator/writers is good and bad for the medium of series storytelling?

SUTTER: The good thing is obvious, the need for more content. More opportunity, bigger appetite. At some point it will glut out. But now you have Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes making these big deals. I’ve tried to expand my brand and produce a bit, but it’s really difficult for me. I’ve never been able to do more than one or two things at a time. I’ve had conversations with Landgraf about it.

For me, as an artist, a writer, I’m not a guy who can churn out pages. I have to be inspired, driven to do what I do. Because when I do it, I put all of myself into something, commit wholly. To do that I have to be inspired and driven. I’m successful and my inspiration was always driven by this fear of not being significant, not being noticed as an artist. A desperate need to be respected. In some ways, I had to burn it all down here to recreate those circumstances.

Now, again, I have this fear. Am I significant? Am I a good writer? After what went down, I have this need to feel respected by my peers, the industry. All that stuff. I almost had to recreate that passion, fear, to move me forward because I couldn’t get out of that cycle. I know writers will relate to that, or any creatives. Actors, anyone. When you are in this thing that is successful but not inspiring to you, that is not really what you want to be doing…but you’ve worked so hard to get there that you’re afraid to step away from it.

DEADLINE: A golden cage?

SUTTER: Exactly that. And I had to blow it all up to get to a place where I could be excited, inspired and driven again. I think that for me is the big realization. In hindsight, I can say the signs were all there. But it wasn’t until after it happened that I looked back and said, oh…

DEADLINE: So are the creative juices now flowing again?

SUTTER: Yeah. There are a couple projects I wanted to produce with people I want to work with. Those I can still move forward on, but creatively what this has done is give me a level of freedom. I want to learn from my mistakes. There’s part of me that wants to make a big deal someplace else and say, fuck you, I’ll prove you wrong. That would be a mistake. What I want to do is, do what I do. I’m a writer, not a deal maker. Whatever comes next, I want it to come from what is on the page. I want to write something that I’m excited about, that I love, and then take it somewhere.

If someone wants to do it, they’re not hiring me for who I am, but rather what I’ve written. That was a lesson for me in all this. Go back and do what you love to do, find that again and let it be the thing that pulls you forward. It has never been about money for me. I love money, but money was just the equivalent of respect. For me to have gone and made a big deal someplace else, that would have been ego. That’s the trap. That’s the mistake I made jumping right onto Bastard, and the mistake I made jumping into Mayans. Losing sight of why I do this and what truly inspires me.

DEADLINE: Every fan of Sons of Anarchy drooled over the prospect of you making a straight prequel involving Jax Teller’s father. How far did you get and what is the prospect for that show after what happened here?

SUTTER: As of now, the possibility of doing that doesn’t look that hopeful. It’s their property. They’re not going to let me take it somewhere else. Right now, that relationship is in flux. With time and a shift in attitude, will we be able to do it? I don’t know. Hopefully. Maybe. As for how far it got, here’s what I knew I wanted to do. I knew it wasn’t a long series, that I wanted to do a limited series. Ideally, it was nine of ten episodes. The model I love is the Sherlock model. I love the idea of doing four two-hour episodes. The way I write, the episodes are way longer than they are supposed to be anyway. So that to me would have been ideal.

To do four movies basically and tell a story that starts in Vietnam with John Teller and Piney and taking it through the last of the first nine members of the club to show up. Which was Clay. And then ending it there. I didn’t want to fuck with the mythology that we had laid down. I just wanted to tell the story with the loose pieces we already had. I wanted the tone to be different, because it’s period. We are in a pretty rugged time right now, but it takes place in probably one of the most tumultuous periods, politically and socially, in the 60s with the Vietnam War. I wanted to really let the time and place and politics influence story. Tonally, I think it would have been a little different than Sons. But that’s as far as I got. I never sat down and started breaking story. I just knew, that’s where I wanted to begin, that’s where I wanted it to end and I knew it was a one-off. Right now, the possibility of that is not going to happen. Over time, who knows?

DEADLINE: Where does all this leave Mayans MC as it awaits renewal for Season 3? What has your exit dialogue been with Elgin James?

SUTTER: I had a chat with Elgin the other day. I apologized for how the transfer of power ultimately went down. Not the way we planned, but you know… pretty fucking outlaw. Moving forward, I asked him to please not channel me. To work with the studio and network to find the key talent he needs to succeed. To bend but not to break. His main job now is to stabilize the show. Create an environment where cast and crew feel safe, supported and confident about the work. I truly believe that Mayans MC will be a better show without me. I have a financial stake so obviously I am rooting for it, but I think it can be a hit, because of the cultural elements and where it takes place and what is going on in the world. It has the potential to be a more significant show than Sons ever was, no disrespect to that mythology. But it’s just a different world right now, and I think those stories can be important to tell.