IP Picks🔎: A Dad-Turned-Hitman Thriller

➕ Sally Rooney steps away from TV, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't think much of creatives and did a Tony-winning play crib too much from a memoir?

Back in the Saddle Keanu Reeves as the titular hitman hero in 2014’s John Wick. (Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate)

Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along. Before we get to the main course today, I’ve got a bunch of interesting appetizers I’d like to bring to your attention.

First, I want to flag a scary quote from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (h/t to Sean McNulty over at The Wakeup for catching it). It concerns the buzz topic of the moment: AI. Namely, the legality of dredging the internet to help train the new technology. I think it says a lot about the current attitudes of Silicon Valley:

“When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get litigated and rediscussed in the AI era.”

Let that soak in for a minute. The contempt for the value that creatives bring to the table is breathtaking. Tech guys like Zuckerberg honestly seem to believe that the delivery system is more important than what is being delivered — the app over the content. It’s as if paper manufacturers were like, “Hey, those words? Just stuff. The real value is in the paper! So in addition to selling it to you we should get a cut of book sales.”

There’s an ongoing effort to commodify and then devalue creativity. All-you-can-eat streaming services in music, books and video can be great, but they also tend to undermine the value of an artist’s work and obscure the cost of making it.

While there are real differences between management and creatives in Hollywood on some of these issues, Zuckerberg’s quote underscores that there are common interests that should bring unite people. In the short run, writers, actors, below-the-line crew members and others might be the hardest hit. But if the studios allow creativity to be devalued, if they let Silicon Valley cheapen their most valuable resource — intellectual capital – then eventually that will damage their own worth. IP and the people who make it create way more value than those in Silicon Valley are willing to acknowledge or pay for. At every opportunity, we need to remind people of that fact.

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Speaking of stealing content . . . The question of whether David Adjmi's Tony-winning play Stereophonic, about an early ‘70s rock band fighting and fucking while making a classic album à la Fleetwood Mac, “borrowed” too heavily from sound engineer/producer Ken Caillat’s memoir, Making Rumours, is really fascinating to me. I read about it in a Vulture piece and then followed it up by reading this more in-depth article in The New Yorker.

I’m no lawyer, but I think Caillat’s got a pretty strong case here. While facts themselves aren’t protected by copyright, the expression of those facts is. There are way too many instances where the language in Adjmi’s play mirrors Caillat’s (e.g., the sound engineer saying “wheel’s up” to start a recording session). It doesn’t help that Adjmi told The New Yorker that he “drew from multiple sources — including autobiographical details from my own life — to create a deeply personal work of fiction. Any similarities to Ken Caillat’s excellent book are unintentional.” He also admits that he got the idea for the play in 2013, which just happens to be the year after Caillat’s book was published.

It’s still not clear whether Caillat is planning to pursue legal action (though he did tell the magazine that he felt “ripped off”) or that he’d win, but the story is a useful cautionary tale about the need to be careful when creating fictional stories that hew too closely to real-life ones. Not to mention the value of acquiring underlying IP — even loosely connected IP — as an insurance policy against controversy and/or lawsuits.

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Sally Rooney, the celebrated author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends, said something interesting about the future of her work with regard to TV in a recent NYT interview to promote her latest novel, Intermezzo. It’s fascinating to see the 33-year-old Irish writer grapple with early success, her unease at being a public figure and trying to decide what kind of career she wants for herself.

It’s that last part I want to focus on. Having allowed two of her novels to be adapted for the small screen (one of which she worked on), she’s realized that TV and movies are not her forte. “Okay, now I know that my books are where I belong, and that’s all that I want to be doing,” Rooney said, adding that’s she not accepting offers to adapt her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (and presumably Intermezzo as well), in order to “let the book be its own thing for a while.”

You don’t see a lot of big-time authors — especially ones with a couple of successful adaptations already under their belt — simply opt out like this. The temptations (of both money and fame) and the sense of responsibility a writer can feel to the people involved in their work (agents, producers, screenwriters, etc.) are strong. They can make it hard for an author to just walk away.

Rooney’s decision is something a lot of other writers should at least consider. I know that many authors want to work on the adaptations of their books, thinking it would be fun and remunerative. But it is a completely different skill set. The kind of creativity that’s required for a screenplay versus a book is like the difference between being a sprinter and a marathon runner. Yes, it’s all technically running, but it isn’t close to the same thing. Unless you really intend to make the leap to working solely in TV/movies, I think it’s enough for novelists to be novelists.

As for her point about allowing Beautiful World to “be its own thing,” it’s important for writers to separate a book from its adaptation in their heads and understand that they’re two completely different things. Judging an adaptation on its fidelity to their novel can drive any writer around the bend. The best way to stay grounded is to understand that a book is — and will always be — “its own thing.”

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Perhaps you caught The Cut’s fascinating story about the guru/grifter couple who got Malibu ophthalmologist Mark Sawusch hooked on ketamine and other drugs, bilked him out of millions and then essentially left him to die. If you did, you weren’t alone. It was The Cut’s most-read story for most of the week. It’s also happens to be a story that I featured in this column 18 months ago.

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Related:

IP Picks🔎: Malibu Murder, Gothic Horror, and Hemp

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The subject is currently getting a wave of new attention because final sentencing for the couple is coming up in a month. Meanwhile, the story that I highlighted, which began as a book proposal by Luke Alpert, a reporter who covered the case, is now fielding new offers. It’s a wild tale that could easily become a compelling true-crime adaptation.

Either story could work as IP, but there’s a lot to recommend in the version that I highlighted (Rep: Elizabeth Newman/Literate Mgmt). It’s a good reminder that there’s often more than one way into a true-crime story.

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Now, on to this week’s picks. We’ve got two great thrillers, one aimed at adults and the other at YA fans, plus a historical drama and a wacky story about a treasure hunt.

The full lineup:

• A thriller about a down-on-his-luck dad who becomes a hitman and soon finds himself being used as a pawn in a bigger conspiracy

• A YA mystery about twins trying to find their parents, who may or may not be caught up in an international art theft ring

• A thriller about a wife who was planning to kill her husband only to have someone beat her to it, leaving her to figure out who before she’s convicted of a crime she didn’t commit

• A historical drama about the affair between the 60-something British Prime Minister and his 20-something paramour, set during the early days of WWI

• A drama or comedy about an eccentric game designer, his real-life treasure hunt and the people chasing after the prize