Today: Finding T. Rex + 7 Great Picks

A newsletter about available IP; I do the reading for you

Apr 15

Brown and crew (pictured) excavated an encased sacrum bone of a T. Rex in 1942 where it had lain for millions of years in Hell Creek, Montana.(Betteman/Getty Images)

Welcome to The Optionist! Thanks for reading, and if you're here because someone forwarded this, I invite you to sign up during our free beta period here about to end. And let me know at andy@theoptionist.community your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

To those that celebrate, Happy Easter and Chag Pesach Sameach. If you’re like me and still trying to figure NFTs, you’ll appreciate Entertainment Strategy Guy’s piece, “Will NFTs Save Entertainment? Of Course Not,” as much as I did. But it was Richard Rushfield’s “A Thin Line Between Netflix Love and Hate” that got me thinking this week. Once I got beyond the surprise of Richard essentially writing a love letter to Netflix, I started to think about how lucky we are to have the streaming age’s cornucopia of options. Sometimes we forget how amazing the choices we have now are. Want a romcom? There are dozens to choose from. Superheros? Same. Unscripted? Ditto. Maybe you’re an anime and animation fan. No worry, you can find tons of that too. Any itch is just an internet connection away. That’s amazing.

Instead of being stumped about what to watch right now, consider what you could be watching in the future with this week’s picks. There’s a great adventure yarn about the discovery of the first T. Rex, a disturbing story about the murder of two female hikers and the inspiring story of the CIA’s forgotten female pioneers.

BOOKS I LIKE (current)

Adventure/Western/science/Gilded Age

The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K. Randall (Norton, June) 'Science Western' isn't something that people really think of as a genre but that's what we get here in this great tale of the Gilded Age hunt for dinosaur fossils, and not just any fossil but the greatest of them all — the Tyrannosaurus Rex – that would make a great limited series. I don't think any of us ever really outgrow our childhood fascination with dinosaurs (as if the Jurassic Park franchise's $5B total gross isn't evidence enough), and this story captures some of that wow factor by taking us back to the moment when the world was just trying to wrap its brain around the idea that dinosaurs really existed. The key figures are the unlikely team of Kansas farm boy-turned-fossil hunter Barnum Brown and his patron Henry Fairfield Osborn, a boyhood friend of Teddy Roosevelt and the president of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. The core of the book is a thrilling Indiana Jones-esque adventure yarn centered on Brown, and how a nobody kid from Kansas became the greatest dinosaur hunter ever. But there's also a great story about how the T. Rex transformed public interest in dinosaurs, saved the Museum from ruin and added to the debate about the history of the world and the origins of man. Nobody wants long monologues about science in an adventure story but there's a way to sprinkle enough to raise the stakes by getting viewers to understand how big a deal the discovery was. Osborn makes a good foil here, part hero and part villain. He backs Brown but he's also a believer in all sorts of theories to justify whites as the superior race. I sort of think of this as Indiana Jones-meets-1883-meets-Julian Fellowes' Gilded Age (with Osborn as a George Russell type). REPS: ICM

Hiking victims Julie Williams (left) and Lollie Winans. (FBI)

True crime/documentary

Trailed by Kathryn Miles (Algonquin Books, May) This is the fascinating story of the unsolved murder of two female hikers in the Shenandoah National Park in 1996 and one journalist's pursuit of the truth. The two women, a couple, had met at an outdoor program called Woodswomen and started dating after that — one was a student at Unity College, a small environmental studies college in Maine, the other worked in Burlington, Vt. They were taking a short camping trip in Virginia when they were murdered. One person was arrested for the crime (in a high-profile news conference held by then AG John Ashcroft) but the suspect was eventually exonerated and the hunt for the real killer went cold. Miles became interested in the case when she started teaching at Unity in 2001. When she left in 2016, she devoted herself to solving the case, which was riddled with police errors. On top of that, Miles explores the ways in which wilderness hiking is still imagined as a straight white male domain. She presents pretty compelling evidence about who the real killer is. Structurally and narratively I'm imagining something like Netflix's Unbelievable — a procedural that hinges in part on the ways in which sometimes crimes against women feel like they get less attention, and it gives the story a provocative point of view. It needs a good writer who can make the hunt compelling and there's a good role for the female lead (Miles as the main character) trying to uncover the truth, while exposing bias in crime investigation on top of it. REPS: APA

History/women/spy/thriller/drama

Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage by Nathalia Holt (G. P. Putnam's Sons, Sept) This is a great sideways tale about spies and the Cold War. I say sideways because most Cold War spy tales mostly center on the men ("male, pale and Yale” was the joke) in the field or those that ran the CIA – I'm thinking about something like Matt Damon's The Good Shepherd or The Quiet Americans but there are other examples — instead of the Hidden Figures-esque story we get here. Wise Gals introduces us to four women crucial to the early success of the agency: Adelaide Hawkins who developed sophisticated codes to allow agents to communicate with each other; Mary Hutchinson who built spy networks in Europe and Asia; Elizabeth Sudmeier who undertook danger-filled work in the Middle East (like being in Iran during the 1958 revolution); and Eloise Page, a scientific and technical operations genius. But they also fought for more equal rights within the organization and navigated personal lives complicated by their work. The tricky thing is figuring out how to thread a narrative that has the women often spread out over the world on different missions into a coherent whole. Holt opens the book with a perfect scene-setting moment that could also work as an opening hook for a show: It's 1953 and all four women are on the newly formed Committee on Professional Women (jokingly and demeaningly called the Petticoat Panel by male officers), which was set up to rectify some of the inequality the women faced. There's so much drama and excitement in their lives. This feels more like a multi-season streaming series — i.e. short 10-episode seasons — than a movie. I think each of these women in her own way is a great character. There are so many great young actresses around today, it is easy to imagine multiple all-star teams tackling this. REPS: CAA

Crime/drama

When We Were Bright and Beautiful by Jillian Medoff (Harper, August) From Big Little Lies to Succession to The Undoing, Americans just love a rich-people-doing-awful-things-to-hide-secrets story. The fictional Quinns are a seemingly perfect Manhattan family: Rich, white, beautiful, successful. Then the youngest, Bill, a Princeton junior, gets arrested for sexually assaulting his ex-girlfriend and the family — parents Eleanor and Lawrence and big siblings Casie (the narrator) and Nate head home to rally around him. But as the media spectacle grows and reporters camp outside their Upper East Side building, the attention pulls apart the family and threatens to expose secrets, especially Cassie's, that they'd rather keep secret. As Medoff said when revealing the cover in January, "Brace yourself — all that glitters is not gold." This combo of privileged lives and hot button issues around sexual assault is catnip for lots of people. I bet you'll see a lot of copies of this book around the pool and on the beach when it comes out in August and fans will be casting it in their head (and probably on Twitter as well). REPS: Aevitas

Japanese Americans gathered round a piano in 1942 at the Manzanar internment camp, the setting for Katsu’s new horror novel. (Getty Images)

Horror/diverse/history

Fervor by Alma Katsu (G.P. Putnam's Sons, April 26) This horror story set in the horrors of a World War II Japanese internment camp has a great Jordan Peele feel in the way it uses the setting and story as a vehicle for social commentary. Here a mysterious illness sweeps through an internment camp in 1944. At first it seems like just a bad cold, but then the sick are gripped by aggressive and violent impulses and even death. White camp officials and doctors view the outbreak through a racist lens and don't take it seriously. So, a mother and daughter internees, a widowed missionary and a newspaper reporter team up to figure out what's going on and they discover it might be a mythical demon spider from Japanese folklore. This story would always be relevant, but with the uptick in violence against Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic, it is particularly timely now and I think the fresh setting could make it appealing to horror fans. This seems like the perfect story for a Japanese-American director with an interest in horror like Cary Fukunaga to tackle, but it could be cool to see how what an Asian director with an interest in social issues and horror like Bong Joon Ho would do with this shameful American story. REPS: Sugar23/UTA

YA/fantasy/LGBTQ

Youngblood by Sasha Laurens (Razorbill, July) Just because Joss Whedon and J.K. Rowling are kinda canceled doesn't mean we've given up our love for high-school-meets-the-fantastical stories like Buffy or Harry Potter, especially one with a fun tag like, "High school sucks. Especially for the undead." In this alt world where vampires exist, Kat Finn, poor and attending a regular human public school, gets accepted to Harcote, the elite Vampire-only private school, where she finds her roommate is her long ago friend-turned-enemy Taylor Sanger. Taylor is a part of elite Vampire society but she doesn't quite fit in either. She's out and proud, which clashes with the school's – and vampire society's – conservative values. Once at school, Kat discovers a secret about Hema, the fake blood that all vampires have been forced to drink because a virus has rendered human blood untouchable to them. As they race to uncover the full story, Kat also begins to discover she might have feelings for Taylor. Youngblood has great worldbuilding, the fun of a boarding school setting and a cool spin on vampires. Think Vampire Diaries meets Elite. REPS: New Leaf

JOURNALISM

Procedural

“National Security: A historian at ICE hunts Latin American war criminals in the U.S.” by Kevin Sieff and Nick Miroff (Washington Post, April 10)

This could be the premise for a really fun procedural series. Think Bones-meets-Cold Case with the moral satisfaction of Nazi-hunting stories like Munich. Ann Schneider calls herself a "forensic historian" and she works in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office for Human Rights Violators and War Crimes, the U.S. government office tasked with finding violators who have managed to sneak into the U.S. Part of her job involves proving who they are and documenting their crimes by traveling around the world to where they happened. The tools of the historian are not that different from those of a police investigator — looking for clues, interviewing people, comparing inconsistencies, maybe adding some high-tech stuff like facial reconstruction — and war crimes, immigration and human rights violations are the kind of big stories that make for the kind of high-stakes mysteries that suck in viewers. REPS: Storied Media Group

Unscripted/extreme sports/documentary

“The Gravity-Defying Ups and Downs of Extreme Pogo: A merry band of pogo tricksters are proving that their burgeoning sport is anything but child’s play,” by Andrew Fiouzi (MEL magazine, digital) Extreme pogo? Yea. Inside the wacky but daring world of extreme pogo could make a great unscripted series. There's cool gear, like the super-powerful sticks that are Ferraris compared to the dinky thing you might have tried as a kid. There are also Pogopalooza, the all-things pogo festival in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh?), quirky characters like Will Weiner, who left an IBM desk job for pogo, and super cool tricks. I mean super cool. Check out the video below. REPS: MEL magazine