A Mystery Mashup of 'Friends' and 'Only Murders in the Building'
➕ The true story of DC's "heavyweight of courtesans" is ready for its close-up
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
The last few weeks have me wondering what happened to the so-called “dog days of summer”? After all, things have been anything but slow and lazy. We’ve had an assassination attempt, a last-minute candidate swap in the race for the White House, the biggest Comic-Con since before Covid (but don’t get me started on what a terrible idea it is casting Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, maybe my all-time favorite villain), and finally, a fantastic first week at the Olympics thanks to a batch of new heroes (the Pommel Horse King!), veterans rising to the challenge (LeBron James, Katie Ledecky) and one great social-media diss courtesy of the Queen of Gymnastics, Simone Biles.
Speaking of the Olympics, I spent the dog days working on a fun story for The Ankler about a piece of Olympic history that has fascinated me ever since I first learned about it: The Universal Studios company basketball team represented the U.S. at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and won the first gold medal in that sport. You may be asking yourself how the heck did a Hollywood studio end up competing in the Olympics? Well, that was something I was wondering about as well.
This story has a little bit of everything, including Nazis (of course Nazis), the only Jewish-American athlete to win gold in Berlin, a brief history of early basketball and a cameo from Frankenstein. But what I learned about the tragic life of Carl Laemmle, Jr. really gripped me. I didn’t know really anything about him before, but he’s the one who had the vision that a studio team could make the Olympics. Outside of that, he went from the youngest Oscar-winning producer ever and the heir apparent at Universal to a virtual recluse whose career was basically over at 28, even though he lived another 43 years. You can read the whole piece here. (You might even find a movie in it.)
Enough about me. There’s some great picks this week, including a biopic about an amazing 20th century woman, a true-life jungle hostage rescue adventure and a pair of wild romps about friends cheating on friends with friends. Let’s dig in . . .
The full lineup:
A biopic about a woman who is sometimes referred to as “the most powerful courtesan in history”
A true-life thriller about a former Green Beret who rescues a family friend who’s been kidnapped by terrorists in Malaysia
Another true-life thriller, this one about a young Jew who manages to survive in Nazi Berlin and then makes a daring escape to freedom on a bicycle
A mystery-comedy that’s Only Murders in the Building meets Friends
A relationship comedy about two couples, four authors, a cheating scandal and how they all took swipes at one another in their novels
