IP Picks🔎: A Hollywood Satire That Stings

➕ A hippie mystery in Vermont and a horror movie gone very, very wrong

META SCARES: Ghostface, the villain in the Scream franchise. (Paramount Pictures)

Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.

Let’s start off by talking about Michael Crichton. But before I dive in, let me say that I debated whether to weigh in on this subject for three reasons: I'm a big Crichton fan; I’m very fond of James Patterson; and I (mostly) admire screenwriter and Story Factory CEO Shane Salerno's hustle. But the reporting that’s been coming out about the screen-rights auction for Eruption, the unfinished Crichton manuscript that was completed by Patterson and is publishing on June 3, has been so over the top and silly that I had to say something.

What's going on here reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. It comes from a 1961 Time profile of original Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison Jr., in which he repeated advice his Texas oil baron father once offered him: “Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.” (Though, in investigating the quote, I learned that some version of this has been around since the 1600s. You learn something new every day.) Either way, when it comes to the hype surrounding Eruption, the bullshit is piled so high someone needs to open the windows and air things out a bit.

It all started with a Deadline story announcing the book and promising an eventual screen-rights auction back in October. In puffing up the book — about a once-in-a-lifetime eruption of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano that could set off a secret cache of weapons and destroy the world in the process — the article linked the property to Jurassic Park, because, I guess, one is set in Hawaii and the other used it as a filming location. It also likened the Crichton/Patterson pairing to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas teaming up to make Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Deadline piece made the tenuous leap of calling Crichton’s long-unfinished manuscript — he worked on it on and off for two decades — a "passion project," describing it and the other unfinished books in the author’s archive as all things he was "secretly working on prior to his death." It also made a big deal about this being the first project that had been announced since CrichtonSun (the production company and archive for all things Crichton) engaged Salerno's Story Factory to help it resurrect the author's available IP. (An interesting nugget that’s not in the story: Story Factory is at least the fourth set of reps that CrichtonSun has had since the author died in 2008 — the others being ICM, WME and Range Media Partners. In his ‘90s heyday, Crichton was repped by Michael Ovitz and CAA.)

With publication less than a month away, it seems that the town's interest may not be quite as high as the sellers would like. Because last week brought yet another press release article, this one in Variety, talking up the sale in even more exaggerated terms, kicking off with an opening sentence promising that a "bidding war is about to erupt." Full of blind sourcing, it claimed that "most major studios, streamers and networks" were interested, as were "several A-list actors" and "high-profile directors who have shared that they’d leap at the chance" to get the project. To further goose the FOMO, it rattled off Crichton film grosses and Patterson and Crichton book sales numbers. It also called Eruption a "franchise starter," with ideas for sequel books and films already in the planning stages. Finally, one blind source predicted that the auction would "snowball into a monumental bidding war."

I guess Hollywood still didn't get the message. Because a few days later, Deadline followed that story with yet another piece on the upcoming auction, this time sharing the manuscript’s cover letter from his widow Sherri Crichton (who runs CrichtonSun), as if it was something privileged and special and not the pro forma marketing document that it actually is.

Clearly, color me skeptical about all of this. The track record for unfinished posthumous manuscripts isn't exactly great. They usually weren't finished for a reason. Plus, nothing that Crichton wrote after 2003's Timeline has made it to the screen. Add to that Patterson's spotty record in Hollywood (despite the fact that he is an undeniable sales juggernaut in print). Mostly, though, I'm amazed at just how thirsty the hype is here. My general rule of thumb is: the bigger the pre-sale buzz from sellers, the more desperate they are. Look, Salerno has attracted big money for book options over the last few years and by all accounts his clients love him. But this is ridiculous.

Still, I think I'm most offended by the trades spinning what is essentially marketing as news. (I know, I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in this joint). As I write this on May 10, we still don't have news of a sale. Who knows what it will go for in the end — or if it will eventually becomes a hit movie.

But if you gave me the choice of going all-in on Eruption or spreading that dough around on a bunch of smaller purchases in the hope that one or two might break out, I'd go with Clint Murchison’s timeless advice.

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A quick palate cleanser: I wanted to flag two articles for you. They’re not optionable (though one relates to a recent Optionist pick), they’re just two pieces of journalism that I found really moving. First, this essay from a prisoner serving life without parole about how his ability to stream movies has helped him in prison. It’s actually an inspirational story about the power of film to change lives. If all of the news about the studios and layoffs has you down, this will renew your faith. (The usurious fees that prisons charge inmates should also make you angry. I’m not saying that prison should be a vacation, but overcharging convicts for everything from toiletries to digital books and movies is cruel.)

Second, related to my recent pick of the new book about the Kent State massacre is this piece about the life of Mary Ann Vecchio, the 14-year-old girl crying over the dead student in the most iconic photo of that 1970 tragedy (we used it to art my coverage of the Kent State book). It’s fascinating to learn how that one moment defined her life for better or worse (mostly for worse). The story first appeared in 2021, but it resurfaced because of the current campus protests. I loved this story when it first came out, and I still love it. It’s worth your time.

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Onto this week’s picks, which include a ‘60s procedural and a very funny satire of race and Hollywood. But first we’ll take a look at last week’s Edgar Award winners and which have been optioned and which are available. The full lineup:

• A period procedural set in 1960s rural Vermont

• An ‘80s-set horror story (with some comedy and a meta twist) about a director with artistic ambitions, a driven actress and a cursed camera

• A satirical comedy about a writing professor trying her hand at TV on a comedy with biracial characters and predictably bad results

• A true-crime story about a teen tech bro who turned to scamming companies to bankroll his high-flying lifestyle

And the Edgar Goes to…