Screenplay Archaeology Podcast · Fandom Limb Media

Episode 120: Crusade

March 15, 2025·1 hr 25 min·5 clips

The episode opens with Kermit Head back after a self-imposed hiatus. He and Chloe immediately acknowledge the messy pause and the aborted Prisoner plan, then settle in to revisit Crusade. After the housekeeping, they dive into the script as the story moves toward the Holy Land, with a hooded Emick, now sporting a gruesomely stitched-up face, meeting the Genoese merchant Vermi and paying him 500 denarii to make sure Hagen ends up aboard a specific ship. That setup matters. Hagen wakes aboard a ship with Ari, Vault, and a whole bunch of monks, far from the rest of the fleet, and the hosts lean hard into how the script lays out the geography and the tension before the attack even starts. A Muslim Corsair ship appears from behind a nearby island. The crew has sold them out to Muslim slavers, so the plan turns into a desperate fight for the ship, with the hosts repeatedly stopping to say the action writing is genuinely good and not something to flatten into a one-line summary. They also admit that this is the kind of sequence they would hate to have to write themselves. The action keeps moving. Hagen and company are captured, and Ari talks his way free by pretending to be Muslim, describing Mecca and using his circumcised penis as proof. It is, as the episode makes very clear, one of those insane script beats that lands somewhere between gross, ridiculous, and impossible to ignore. From there, the slave ship reaches Jaffa. The conversation then pivots into production-history chatter, including Joost as Verhoeven's first choice for cinematographer and a quick detour into Neverending Story and Hollow Man. That detour is very much the show. Kermit and Chloe sound like people working through a stack of scripts in real time, correcting themselves, joking around, and following the evidence wherever it goes. The episode never smooths out into a polished essay, and that's part of why it works. It feels like a lived-in argument between two people who know exactly where the weird seams are. By the end, the hosts are glad they came back to it. They close on the usual relieved note: the episode was fun, even if getting the rhythm going took a minute.

As heard by us

A medieval action script becomes a sharp, digressive screenwriting discussion built around its action writing.

Crusade gets treated as a screenwriting dig, with Kermit Head and Chloe returning after a long break to pull apart a medieval action script and what makes the fight scenes work on the page.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a crusade script autopsy with action-scene breakdowns and podcast banter, press play now.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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