IP Picks🔎: Two Period Thrillers Mix Procedurals with History
IP Picks🔎: Two Period Thrillers Mix Procedurals with History
âž• A snowboarding drama and a 'Justified'-like cop show.
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
In the very first edition of The Optionist exactly two years ago, I flagged the story of Ina and David Steiner, a Boston-area couple whose home-brew newsletter about eBay attracted the ire of the company's CEO who had his security team harass them and, well, things got out of hand. You gotta read the story. It's amazing. (I thought the Boston Magazine story linked here would be good underlying IP). I was reminded of it twice in recent days. First, eBay just agreed to pay the couple $3M for their trouble. Second, and more germane to us, a just-announced doc about the case will debut at SXSW. It looks like it is mainly based on cooperation from the Steiners. (I have a hunch that the timing of the two announcements wasn't a coincidence and that the doc announcement waited for the settlement.) I always thought this would make a killer doc and I still think someone should do a scripted version — in my mind, it should be a dark comedy. This is an instance to me where I think a little humor, an attempt to use laughs to show how outrageous eBay's conduct was, actually helps convey the gravity of the harm.
I wanted to quickly flag this story about a lawsuit filed by screenwriter Kurt McLeod against his managers at Zero Gravity. The crux of the lawsuit was that McLeod believed that his managers prioritized their interests as producers over his as a writer in his deal for Copshop. The agreement called for him to get 2.5 percent of the budget as a fee with a floor of $75K and a ceiling of $125K, on the assumption that the budget would be in the $3-$10M range. But when Gerard Butler signed on, the budget jumped to $40M and McLeod's fee didn't change. He argued that because Zero Gravity was also attached as a producer, it put its own interests over his. The lawsuit was thrown out, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing to me. There are, of course, legitimate concerns about conflicts of interest when managers also serve as producers, but I thought this Twitter thread from entertainment lawyer Larry Zerner highlighted some of the other issues at stake for writers, particularly over compensation. Long story short, no deal can protect writers from every unfortunate contingency, but it helps to be aware of things to look out for.
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On to this week’s picks, which include the two period thrillers from a master of the genre, a six-book series centered on the sheriff of a resort town that could be the basis for a TV procedural and a fab adventure drama. The full rundown:
A period thriller that reads like a fictional version of Rachel Maddow’s Ultra.
A procedural centered on the sheriff of a resort town.
A WWII-set procedural with resonance to today’s concerns with disinformation and immigration.
An adventure drama about a snowboarding pioneer who walked away from the commercial aspects of the sports, only to die in an avalanche.
A comedy inspired by the CIA’s creative writing group, Invisible Ink.
An inspirational doc tracing how one city went from the most murders in the U.S. to zero homicides in 2023.
