How to Bring a True Tale to the Screen
The Epic team break down the full process of how 'Breaking' went from story to John Boyega-starrer
Welcome to The Optionist. I hope everyone had a fun Halloween and unlike me, you’re not fighting the urge to snack on leftover candy all day.
As readers of the newsletter know, I've been fascinated with innovations in narrative storytelling. I talked recently to Adam Gomolin at Inkshares and the guys at Truly Adventurous. Another really early innovator thinking about new ways to tell long-form narrative non-fiction stories also is the team at Epic, which has had more than 50 pieces optioned since its 2014 founding (Vox Media acquired them in 2019). In addition to Breaking, a movie released earlier in the fall that was developed from a magazine article, Epic has a second season of Little America dropping on Apple on Dec. 9. On top of that, their next Apple show, Big Cigar, the wild, true story of how Black Panther Huey Newton escaped to Cuba on a boat with the help of producer Bert Schneider, just wrapped production.
One of the things I like about our talk below is what it reveals about how curiosity and serendipitous connections can fuel creativity and illuminates the creative process around how a story goes from print to screen. Also, the Epic team are letting me drop a cool new (optionable!) story exclusive to Optionist subscribers that you can find at the end of this interview.
A former reporter, Josh Bearman is a founder of Epic, along with fellow journalism alum Josh Davis. Arthur Spector heads film and TV development at the company and both he and Mackenzie Fargo, the VP of development, were also producers on Breaking. Bearman and Davis both had success seeing their writing turned into movies — Bearman most famously when his 2007 Wired article became the Oscar-winning Argo, and Davis with his 2005 Wired story becoming 2015's Spare Parts. They parlayed the knowledge they gleaned from their experiences into Epic, which produces long-form journalism stories with an eye to seeing them adapted on screen.
Most of their material is from stories they commission, but one of the rare stories they optioned was the John Bodega-starrer Breaking (released on Labor Day). It’s about a marine vet who robs a bank for $892.34 — the amount he believes the Veterans Affairs is wrongly shorting his disability check. I spoke with Bearman, Spector and Fargo about how they discovered the article, and took it from page to screen. These excerpts from our conversation shed light on the mysterious alchemy of inspiration and creativity from a team with a terrific track record in selling stories.
Optionist: How did you discover the story which Breaking is based on?
Bearman: I was reading a magazine, a sort of bloggish magazine about veterans affairs called Task and Purpose. I don't actually recall why I was reading it. I'm kind of omnivorous and find my tabs opening to all different kinds of things. Often we find stories embedded in another story or in unusual places. I came across this piece that was about this bank robbery where this veteran who had mental health issues tried to rob this bank, and his motivation was trying to get his disability check was just sort of [him] trying to make himself whole after having gotten lost in the cracks of the VA. It all was very compelling and it automatically reminded me of Dog Day Afternoon, which itself is a true story based on a New York magazine article. So I just sent the link to Arthur [Spector] and MacKenzie — we share a lot of links around Epic — saying, ‘This seems like there's something here.’
Optionist: You’ll option material like this that you don't originate?
Spector: We have so much of our own stuff that we don't feel it's necessary. There have been a couple cases where journalists come to us about their frustrations — an article that they thought should have been optioned that maybe didn't get seen by people for various reasons. But we’re a very small team. We can't take on an infinite number of projects. And this is not to talk about Bearman's batting average, but he sends a lot of really interesting articles to the whole group, to the point that there's an employee who made an Excel spreadsheet of all of them. When he has the foresight for something like this, where you can sort of see the movie, we pay extra attention to it because obviously, with his track record of all the things that have been an option from him, he knows it when he sees it.
Optionist: Inspiration remains somewhat mysterious to me, how a random mention can spark a great idea.
Spector: The Joshes like to throw out a prompt at a staff meeting — “tell me a story about a bone that you broke” — and then everybody on the staff just shares and you get incredible stories that way. At our company retreat, we all sat around in a circle and the prompt was, “Tell me a time that you smuggled something.” (laughs) And the stories were just wild. Everybody was excited to talk and then it just leads into this spider web of other stories.
Optionist: When I was a high-school junior, I tried to smuggle an antique samovar out of the Soviet Union during a school trip. I got caught and almost got arrested. I actually bought a new samovar, took it out of the box, left it in the hotel room, and put the antique samovar in the new box to disguise it. I’m lucky I’m still not in a Soviet prison. So I have a great smuggling story.
Spector: You’d have fit right into our retreat.
Fargo: The way that we work as a company — we are half journalists, half producers essentially — so we have producer meetings where we talk about these ideas and stories. We could clearly see the adaptation for this one, so we went out and created a relationship with Aaron Gell, the writer. We try to really work with the journalist in a transparent way and let them know what our strategy is for packaging and telling their story. Creating that relationship with Aaron was a key step because he allowed us to have a shopping agreement and a trust to build and package his story.
Optionist: Do you ever find yourself coming back to something that's been in the back of your mind?
Bearman: We always have this whole big cluster of ideas in the back of our head, so the conversations with creative people then will lead off into a story idea that has been sitting on the list for five years for whatever it is. And that's actually what happened with Breaking.
Spector: I’m always squirreling away nuggets. I read in The Hollywood Reporter of an actor who wanted to do a Dog Day Afternoon-type of movie, so I just connected those two. I think that my responsibility as a producer is to try to make magic out of two random events. (Note: That actor was Jonathan Majors, who had to drop out because of a production conflict with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and was replaced by John Boyega.)
Fargo: And thank goodness he did it because that is what ended up hooking a lot of fire into the package. But even before that Arthur was talking to a manager, Max Goldfarb, and he represented Abby Demaris Corbin (the eventual director of Breaking) and shared her short film The Suitcase. When we met with her, she told us her father had served and she had watched him navigate the VA and had seen what it had done to him, so she also had this incredible personal connection. Max was also like, I think I have a writer that….
Spector: …could be good for this. I came into his office and talked about a couple things that I was excited about. When we got to Aaron's article, he was like, “I have two people for you. This up-and-coming director, and I’ve also got a guy who’s a playwright, somebody in the U.K. who I'm trying to break into Hollywood.” I tell Max every single time I talk to him that he solved the movie in that room. He had the idea of Abby and Kwame [Kwei-Armah, the British playwright who co-wrote the screenplay] doing it together, even though they did not even know each other yet.
Fargo: By early 2021, we had a very strong script and we were starting to go out and Arthur read that line about an actor being interested in Dog Day. We got the script to him. He basically got the movie fast tracking and then schedules didn't work out.
Spector: This movie has a lot of happy accidents. The luckiest thing that happened to us was John becoming available. Kwame had a relationship with John — he had written the play that was John's first play in London. Even when Abby and Kwame were writing they always had this sort of vision of Boyega in their head. But again, like there's a million Hollywood stories of what-if casting, right?
Fargo: He helped get to Michael K. Williams, which was extremely lucky and an honor, and at this point, Nicole Behari (as the bank manager) and Selenis Leyva (as the teller).
Spector: And then Connie [Britton playing a news producer whom Boyega’s character calls] coming in, too. She'd be the lead in something, so for her to play this in an indie movie? We were lucky.
Optionist: How much does it matter to you if there’s material below the iceberg so to speak — stuff that wasn't necessarily in the article, but that you see the writer has?
Spector: We were lucky that the company was founded by two journalists who know that there’s stuff on the cutting-room floor. Maybe it doesn't make it into the first time, but in an adaptation, all that stuff is gold. We lean heavily on the journalists and try to involve them as early in the process as possible with the screenwriters to have a free-flowing conversation.
Bearman: I’ll say I knew the movie was there from the first reading of the article.
Optionist: If I were the screenwriter with access to the journalist, that could really help develop the character in a way that you might not fully see on the page.
Fargo: Often times we're also working with people who are actually in these stories. We try to handle that with a lot of care and communication. In this situation, Aaron was able to connect us with Jessica Easley, who was Brian's widow (Brian Easley, the bank robber) and also Sergeant Bates, who was the negotiator that Michael K. Williams plays in the film. We partnered with a financier named Samira Productions and one of the things they did is send Abby and Kwame to Atlanta, where Sergeant Bates walked them through the actual events of the day on the ground.
Optionist: Because you're adapting true stories, the question always comes up: Do you need the participants involved?
Spector: I started my career on the agency side doing life rights. I think we, as a company, have advocated a lot for the subjects to get better terms, more participation. That's a big thing for us. Especially on a show like Little America where we're doing eight different people's stories. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that everybody is fairly compensated for the work that they put in and for their story. “Life rights” is a bad term because it makes it sound like this is what you're getting paid for your life, but there are consulting deals and the story deals. We take that on as a big responsibility as producers to protect the people and the story.
Fargo: In regards to Breaking, we would only wanna do it from the get-go with Jessica’s support because it's something that is so close to her and her family. We’re really grateful that she trusted us to tell the story. In my conversations with her every single time, she said, “I want this story out. Nobody really knows this.” And I feel like we have changed the narrative from the way that he was portrayed by the news initially, which was very different from Aaron's article.
Bearman: Shooting happened in the middle of Covid. Right as the businesses starts actively changing, what wound up is like a really traditional indie model, right? We found this piece of material, found a director and a writer, got funding to develop a script, then with the cast you go get the budget, and get the movie made under harrowing circumstances. Then we went to Sundance, got a distributor (Bleeker Street) that put it out countrywide. This just never happens anymore. It was kind of exciting to see that the whole thing worked from sending an email saying “this could be a cool movie” to here you go, a cool movie. And in that traditional way, it's very exciting to be able to say this movie's actually coming to a theater near you.
Here’s Epic’s newest piece, Swamp Boy. Yes, rights are available (and they've already begun to field some calls about it. If you’re interested, contact Arthur Spector at Epic).
Swamp Boy by Kris Newby (Epic x Now This, Oct.) This is the kind of real-life horror story/medical thriller that will unnerve any parent. In 2015, Judy and Scott Campbell's 14-year-old son suddenly became delusional, believing voices were telling him things and that the family cat was possessed. Soon he declared he had become the Swamp Thing, the green plant-like comic book hero/monster that was a favorite of his. Psychiatrists diagnosed him as schizophrenic but none of the drugs they prescribed helped. Over the course of 18 months and about $400,000 in medical bills, nothing seemed to work. Scott became an amateur medical detective, convinced that the cause was biological, caused by a bacterial infection, and not mental. It turns out that he might've been right and the treatment for a rare infection returned Michael to normal. This is a great thriller that has an Exorcist-meets-Lorenzo’s Oil medical mystery vibe, but at its core, the story is a very relatable one about the parental fear of a child getting sick and being helpless to fix it. Newby, the author, is a science writer who wrote a book about her own quest to deal with Lyme disease, making her an ideal person to tackle this story. REPS: Epic
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Goosebumps is 30. Aside: R.L. Stine is one of the nicest and most charming authors I’ve ever interviewed.
Buzzfeed asked readers what books they wished would show up on screen. Here’s 19 books they picked (p.s. almost all of have been optioned but are in turnaround).
A new report from NPR and Edison Research says spoken word audio consumption is up, especially among Gen Z, up 214 percent since 2014 per the report. The highlights and if you're geeky enough, the full report here.
The celebrity memoir is alive and well. We count 4 of the top 5 and 5 of the top 11 on the NYT non-fiction bestseller list (The NYT doesn’t rank on straight sales but bases its list on a survey of select booksellers).
But nothing beats Colleen Hoover, who sold almost 9x as many books as John Grisham, whose new book was the No. 2 title of the week in overall sales, as reported by Bookscan in Publisher’s Weekly).