IP Picks🔎: When 'Date Night' Goes Very Wrong
âž• A look inside the back catalog of one of the best-selling authors of the last 50 years
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
We've got a fab lineup this week, including a deep dive into the back catalog of a huge best-selling author who, in my opinion, has been overlooked by Hollywood. But first, I want to share something I've been wrestling with.
We're less than one week away from the most consequential election of our lifetimes, maybe even since Abraham Lincoln beat three challengers to become the 16th president in 1860. Don't worry, I'm not about to get political. What I'm curious about is this: How do you think the U.S. election is going to affect the kind of stories audiences want to watch?
For the 100-plus years that there’s been a motion picture business, the movies have been a reflection of when they were made. The Great Depression led to both realism (The Grapes of Wrath) and escapism (Busby Berkeley musicals). The early days of the nuclear age in the '50s resulted in a wave of horror and monster-movie allegories that warned us of the very real possibility of annihilation. The '80s took the Cold War threat a step further with the right-wing jingoism of Rocky IV and Red Dawn. And the '90s and early 2000s saw the villain torch passed from the Russkies to Middle Eastern terrorists.
So what are the stories that will resonate in the Trump or Harris era? I've been trying to grapple with this question lately, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Personally, I think political stories are out, certainly ones set in the present day. But I'm not convinced that that means people want purely escapist fare. There's definitely a hunger out there to hold the wealthy accountable (which helps explain the success of WeCrashed and Dopesick).
Does the recent spate of domestic dramas like Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber’s The Perfect Couple suggest an inward turn to the family as an antidote to our divided nation? Or is America simply too big and the viewing public so splintered that it’s a fool's errand to divine a single theme? One thing is for sure, the days of three major networks and one big theatrical movie per week dominating the cultural discourse are long gone.
I don’t have the answers. At least, not yet. But, like I said, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Of course, the question of where the culture is going is a huge and almost unanswerable one, but I'm curious what your takes on this are. Let me know. And If I can, I'll share some of them (anonymously, natch) in a future newsletter.
One good reading rec: Simon van Zuylen-Wood's profile of Ben Mezrich for Vulture just dropped. Come for the fun skewering of the author ("a gleefully unscrupulous hitmaker"); stay for the smart look at the state of the non-fiction options market.
Now, on to this week’s picks, which include an excellent new piece of longform journalism from an author whose story on a fake Sherlock Holmes, which we featured last year, has been optioned for development.
The full lineup:
An action-comedy about an ordinary married couple caught up in a hostage crisis
An evocative family drama about an itinerant family of surfers and the famous photo that haunts them
A business story centered on the lucrative world of cheerleading and the ruthless moneyman behind it
A heist caper about the brazen theft of 22 tons of cheese. That’s right, cheese
A rundown of the back catalog of one of the best-selling authors of the last 50 years
