IP Picks🔎: A Mars Mission Goes Haywire; College Secrets Comeuppance
➕ A ‘Shameless’-meets-‘Sopranos’ family drama, a real-life heroic female seafarer
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I’m a big fan of our sister newsletter Series Business. And I’m an especially big fan of Elaine’s semi-annual look at what the studios and streamers are buying — who’s looking for procedurals, who’s on the hunt for “manly” entertainment, which streamers are jumping on YA, and which aren’t. Each one of these pieces helps me do my job, giving me confidence by confirming things I already know and revealing things I don’t. Over the past couple of weeks, she’s given rundowns of what's going on at Apple, Amazon and HBO and HBO Max, with more deep dives to come. These pieces are really required reading for anyone who develops material for a living.
Meanwhile, I love a good scandal, especially one that highlights larger issues beneath the fun and salacious details on the surface. This one ticks that box while exposing the inherent dangers in optioning true stories. It’s also a wild fraud.
It centers on The Salt Path, a best-selling 2018 memoir about the author Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth. The couple lost their house due to a bad investment with a friend. Then they found out that Moth had corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a terminal illness in which the brain shrinks and nerve cells break down and die. After the diagnosis, the couple decided to hike England’s rugged 630-mile South West Coast Path and, in doing so, they found not only a sense of peace but also that the journey had somehow halted the progression of Moth’s illness. It was followed by two sequels that told a similar story of physical and emotional setbacks reversed by a long hiking journey. A movie version of The Salt Path starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs was released in May and has grossed more than $16M (on an under-$10M budget) to date, primarily in the UK.
Then, in early July, The Observer dropped a bombshell, claiming that the Winns didn’t lose their home because of a bad investment after all. Instead, it was because Raynor (real name Sally Walker) allegedly embezzled thousands of dollars from the company she worked for. In an even more shocking twist, after consulting numerous CBD specialists, the article cast doubt on whether Moth (real name Tim Walker) had the disease to begin with. The doctors’ skepticism was rooted in “the length of time [Winn] had it, his lack of acute symptoms, and his apparent ability to reverse them.”
Raynor fired back, calling the story “highly misleading.” But the fallout was immediate. A CBD charity cut ties with the couple and fans of the story expressed outrage and disappointment at being duped. Number 9 Films and Shadowplay, the production companies behind the film, issued the only statement they could under the circumstances, saying the movie was “a faithful adaptation of the book that we optioned” and emphasizing that they “undertook all necessary due diligence before acquiring the book.” They called The Observer’s claims “a matter for the author.” (The book’s publisher, Penguin, also said it “undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence.”)
Despite these claims, The Salt Path scandal highlights the Achilles’ heel of nonfiction books: No one really fact-checks them. Unlike news organizations, which often have a team of editors and fact checkers poring over stories, book publishers more or less take the author’s word that what he or she has written is accurate. It has always been this way. Fact-checking an entire manuscript is time-consuming and expensive. Additionally, by relying on the author's claims of accuracy, publishers basically immunize themselves from legal action. By the time a producer options a book, they’re more or less relying on the fact that the author and publisher have signed off on its veracity. Essentially, everyone passes the buck and hopes, as in most cases, that what writers say is actually true.
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers and producers in this situation. That said, I’m curious whether anyone actually did any checking of the Winns’ story, especially the producers. The Observer’s piece highlights numerous red flags that should have given the producers pause, starting with the lack of progress in Moth’s CBD. When the book came out, his survival should have raised questions. And by the time the movie started ramping up more than half a decade later, it should’ve been a huge, blinking red light. Just a few conversations with doctors about CBD and Moth would have been enough to see that his claims probably didn’t pass a smell test.
There’s not an easy solution to this dilemma, except this: Anyone optioning a true story should regard The Salt Path as a cautionary tale to dig deeper early on. Of course, not every fraud will be exposed, but it should catch ones like this.
🔒 This Week: Come Sail Away!
On to this week’s picks! We’ve got a couple of locked-room mysteries this week and a couple of stories about people being held to account later in life for terrible things they did in college. Plus, a fantastic true-life female-led adventure tale. The full lineup:
📚 A provocative psychological thriller about a dark college secret that comes back to haunt a pair of friends, that’s poised to be the next Tell Me Lies.
⛵️A rip-roaring period adventure set at sea that features a feminist twist and a young lead.
🐥 A thriller about six friends who are held hostage and forced to play a deadly game of chicken to reveal the truth behind a fatal incident 25 years earlier.
🧑🧑🧒 A family drama primed for series adaptation that’s This Is Us by way of The Sopranos.
🪐 A locked-room space thriller set on the first Mars base that is perfectly set up to be adapted as an elevated horror movie.
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