Welcome to Amicus. Slates incredibly high-minded Supreme Court podcast. I am Dahlia Lithwick.

Slates desperately low-brow Supreme Court correspondent. And so this week and off week at the court,

we thought we would talk about movies and plays and how Supreme Court justices are suddenly

the subject weirdly of both. Big news this week on the Supreme Court Circuit is that Natalie

Portman has just been tapped to play Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an upcoming film by director

Mary L. Heller called on the basis of sex, apparently about Ginsburg's early battles for gender

equality in the law. Just a couple of weeks ago, HBO announced that Wendell Pierce will play Justice

Clarence Thomas in confirmation a TV movie about his explosive 1991 confirmation battle,

Carrie Washington of Skandal will play Anita Hill. Meanwhile in Washington DC, a new play by John

Strand called The Originalist is dramatizing an imagined relationship between Justice Anjana

and Liberal Law Clerk. And this summer we'll see the premiere of Scalia slash Ginsburg, a comic

opera inspired by the complicated relationship between the court's two most famous frenemies,

Ginsburg and Scalia. The Natalie Portman film is huge news in Scotus Land. The last time a sitting

justice was the subject of a big slashing movie or play was, first Monday in October, about a

fictionalized first woman on the Supreme Court. That came out in 1981, the year real life

Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman on the Supreme Court. But in 2015, with a full third

of the court being suddenly depicted in movies or plays, can a biopic on Stephen Breyer be far behind?

So today on the podcast, we are going to try to figure out what to make of this sudden

explosion of Supreme Court dramatization. And we have two terrific guests to help guide the way.

The first is John Collins. He's founder and director of the Elevator Repair Service Theatre.

One of New York's most highly acclaimed experimental theater companies. Last year, John won

rave reviews for his production of Arguendo, the script of which reproduced the entirety of an

...