Horror Show: Trump, George and Kellyanne Conway, Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart. Illustration by Patrick Leger.

There’s a moment in the screenplay Drudge, written by Cody Brotter, a young up-and-coming actor and writer, that has been permanently seared into my mind. It takes place on page 63 of the script, where we find ourselves in the late 90s as a young Matt Drudge—the eponymous creator of the Drudge Report—is lying in bed listening to a police scanner; his cat, creatively called “Cat,” lounges nearby. To put into perspective who Drudge was at that point in history, there’s a pretty good chance that if we transported him to today, Drudge wouldn’t have a Web site that gets almost a billion-and-a-half page views a month, but would rather be posting cat memes and conspiracy theories on 8chan. In other words, he’s a loser. Back to page 63: Poor Drudge looks like he’s been crying after a falling-out with his only friend and only employee, an equally young and pathetic Andrew Breitbart. But that’s not the part of the screenplay that has been scorched into my cerebrum. It’s the next scene, where we cut to George Conway’s town house (yes, that George Conway) in Washington, D.C., as he’s fucking Kellyanne Fitzpatrick (yes, that one too, they just weren’t married yet).

Kellyanne and George have been introduced earlier in the script by a mutual friend, a largely unknown Republican pundit and muckraker, Ann Coulter, with this memorable prolegomenon: “George, you’ll love Kellyanne because she’s a leggy blonde lawyer and Republican pundit who’s dangerously thin. Kellyanne, you’ll love George because he’s got a degree from Harvard and he makes over a million dollars a year as a lawyer for Big Tobacco.” Now, back in that town house, they’ve clearly hit it off, and as they go at it like a couple of Republican rabbits, the phone rings. The two lovebirds giggle as they ignore the call, and then, in a very 90s-era way, the answering machine picks up, there’s a little leave-a-message jingle followed by a beep, and a woman on the end of the phone line says, “I have a client who works at the Pentagon and she wants to write a book about a Clinton sex scandal. Problem is nobody knows about the scandal yet.” A few pages later, CUT TO: Drudge in his apartment getting the tip about Monica Lewinsky from Conway, and history is changed forever.

The current national unpleasantness requires origin stories, and so the content machine is churning them out. Drudge is just one of the scripts that includes the Conways and Coulter, Drudge and Breitbart, and has been hopping from desk to desk of producers and agents in town. There is a comparable scene that takes place in the script Linda and Monica, written by Flint Wainess, which tells the same story from a different perspective but with a similar set of characters. (Sadly, Cat doesn’t make the cut in this one. Spoiler alert: Cat does die at the end of Drudge.) Conway (now married) makes another debut in a different script called Analytica, written by Scott Conroy, which features the villains behind Cambridge Analytica and the role the evil genius Mark Zuckerberg played in helping get Donald J. Trump elected president. There are so many stories and screenplays in Hollywood about how Trump got to where he is that it can feel as though every single breath taken on earth for the past 70-plus years somehow led to November 8, 2016. (And I’m not even including the numerous screenplays being written about Trump himself, like the one based on Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.) Magazine features and blog posts and podcasts and tweets are all inspiring 120-page screenplays in Courier type, which are quickly papering the desks of agents and executives all over the city.

Such is the purposeful dream life of Hollywood. The movie business is desperately trying to write itself out of the mess we find ourselves in, with a dangerously out-of-control president, a country divided, and a Democratic playing field that looks like the opening scene in the battle of Winterfell. There’s no shortage of material. And while the goal of mostly liberal writers is to paint a picture of narcissists and monsters, the dramatic and commercial imperatives require that reality be transformed, and that can be problematic. Read any of these scripts and you will notice that the characters surrounding Trump have been given the good old studio note to make our protagonists (or antagonists) “likable” so that the audience can identify with them. Reading about poor little Drudge, whose parents didn’t love him (literally, according to the script), and Breitbart taking hits from a bong alone on Christmas, you can’t help but feel sorry for these guys. They don’t come across as villains, but rather as the most pathetic people on earth who just so happened to have a Packard Bell 486 with an 850-megabyte hard drive. And yet they both went on to become villains, changing the shape of America by peddling divisive content, probably because their parents didn’t love them (literally) enough. CUT TO: Trump being elected.

“They are evil and deserve to be painted as such, or not painted at all.”

You can sit at lunch at Cecconi’s, Soho House, The Tower Bar (definitely on the left, not the right), or the new I-must-be-seen-here San Vicente Bungalows, a former gay bathhouse turned private members club, and overhear a conversation that begins with a lamentation on the current state of affairs in this country and ends with a deal being made for a new film or television show that explores the current state of affairs in this country. “If no one else wants it, we’ll just sell it to Netflix,” someone said to me recently about a series that would examine the current inhabitants of the White House.