Today's Picks: Cons, a Sexiest Man Alive Story, and the Men Who Built Hollywood
An Ankler newsletter about IP; I do the reading for you
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Some news. I’ve already learned of at least two deals in the works for material as a result of what people read in the two earlier installments of this newsletter. Mazel tov! (Don’t worry, what happens at The Optionist stays at The Optionist, no loose lips, but I’m glad to know). Thanks to all of you who’ve taken the time to write. I appreciate the thoughts and suggestions. Keep them coming at andy@theoptionist.community.
In today's edition, I’ve got stewardesses in revolt (yes, they are called stewardesses in the book), JFK's forgotten bad-ass great-grandmother, and an incredible true story of how William F. Buckley was conned by a murderer, and a psychic who conned pretty much everyone and then confessed it all. Also, there is a wowza of an interview with Neil Gabler, author of the epic An Empire of Their Own (you heard it here first, rights just lapsed and are available), about Hollywood’s desire to disassociate from its Jewish past and how he sees similar themes playing out with the perception of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley today.
BOOKS I LIKE (current)
Female-Centered Historical Drama
The Great Stewardess Rebellion by Nell McShane Wulfhart (Doubleday, April 19) I love how this book takes what's an often stock character — the stewardess — and shows a richer backstory. In this case, the tale of how a few flight attendants in the ‘60s and ‘70s challenged arguably the most sexist profession in America (weight and makeup rules, can't be married or pregnant, turning 30? See ya) by forming a union, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, and a feminist advocacy group, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights. And then there's (female) Sunny Pressman Fuentes, a lawyer at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, who pursued the airlines for violating the Civil Rights Act and won. She’s 93, still alive and a fierce mofo. Think Mad Men meets Norma Rae. REPS: Aevitas Creative Mgmt/Sugar23
For Mindy Kaling Fans
Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan (G.P. Putnam, June 7)
A great story that winks at the conventions of the rom com even as it uses them. Romance channel screenwriter Nora Hamilton finds her life in chaos when her husband runs out on her and their two kids but she turns her pain into the best script of her life — and films at her house with a former Sexiest Man Alive playing her husband. But when filming wraps and the ne'er do well louche sexiest man offers her seven grand to stay an extra week to sober up, things really get flipped upside down. Seven days. Enough time to fall in love and enough time to get your heart broken. This has Mindy Kaling, Kaley Cuoco, Christina Applegate or Jen Aniston written all over it. And you know what Ben Affleck needs? A nice lighthearted romp where he can poke fun at himself by playing the washed-up Sexiest Man Alive. REPS: Rusoff Agency/Lynn Pleshette Agency.
True Crime/Historical Personalities
Scoundrel by Sarah Weinman (Ecco, Feb. 22)
A wild engrossing story that taps into the same things that makes murder stories from Klaus Von Bulow to Ted Bundy to Robert Durst so compelling: The ability of charismatic killers to charm even the smartest to help them get out of punishment. Here Edgar Smith is convicted of murdering a 15-year-old and sentenced to death in 1957. But then he strikes up an unlikely correspondence and friendship with conservative lion William F. Buckley, who is charmed by the charismatic inmate. He pushes for Smith's release in the National Review, recruited friends to the cause and even paid for new lawyers for Smith. Not only does he get Smith off death row, but helps win Smith a new trial that leads to his release in 1971. Smith is famous, a bestselling author and a go-to expert on prison reform until ... he stabs another woman and ends up in jail for the rest of his life. There was the great doc (and now a play) on Buckley and Gore Vidal — The Best of Enemies — but this is a whole different perspective. REPS: Stuart Krichevsky Agency/CAA
Historical Drama, Hidden Female Heroine
The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty by Neal Thompson ( Mariner Books/HarperCollins, Feb. 22)
For all that has been written about the Kennedys — and it is a lot — most don't know much about JFK's grandfather. Not Honey Fitz, the Boston mayor and Rose's father, but the other one, P.J. Kennedy, a saloon keeper and minor politician. Even fewer people know much about P.J.’s mother Bridget, who lost her husband Patrick soon after they arrived from Ireland and had to raise her children on her own while running a small grocery and liquor store. She's the heroine of this book in many ways. It's her toughness, grit and success that we see in subsequent generations. Against all odds, she became a successful businesswoman and by supporting P.J. on his first saloon helped him prosper. His son, Joseph, would go on to marry the mayor's daughter, attend Harvard and become one of the richest men in America. And his son, of course, would become president. That’s part of the fun here. You know where this family is going to end up so it is puzzling out how they got there. There could be a great multi-season series here — think one part The Crown, one part Succession and one part the Yellowstone spinoff 1883 – starting with the super compelling story of Bridget and her son P.J. REPS: Rob Weisbach Creative Management/CAA
GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS
Young Adult Animation
Adora and the Distance by Marc Bernardin, illustrated by Ariela Kristantina (Dark Horse Books, March 1) An old friend of mine has shared his son's autistic journey on Facebook for years: the good (high school graduation, the hilariously long Christmas list) and the difficult (a seizure that turned into a broken shoulder). Honestly, it is more compelling serialized drama than 90 percent of what’s on TV. (Though Jason Katims’ new show, As We See it, is about three autistic people navigating young adulthood.) Author Bernardin, a podcaster (with Kevin Smith), TV writer (Picard) and former journalist (The Hollywood Reporter), dreamt up this fantasy adventure about 15 years ago to help him process his own learning that his young daughter was autistic. At one level this is a fun romp about a bunch of adventurers led by the Princess Adora who set off from their kingdom to confront a dark entity called The Distance. The art by Ariela Kristantina is beautiful and vivid. But at another level it is a story about autism and neurodevelopmental difference (with a great twist at the end). I can't say it better than comics legend Neil Gaiman: It "begins as a fantasy, all fun and brilliance, like a Game of Thrones for teenage girls, and then transmutes into something deeper and more moving, a reflection of an interior life that solves all the riddles it has propounded in a way that is both satisfying and heartbreaking." REPS: UTA
NON-TRADITIONAL IP
Supernatural Mystery, Con
Fake Psychic, BBC Radio 4 Podcast (6 episodes)
In the 1960s and 70s, Lamar Keene was so famous as a psychic that could speak to the dead that he was called "The Prince of Spiritualists.” And then he blew it all up with a tell-all where not only did he confess that he was a fraud, but claimed he was part of an underground network he called the "psychic mafia" which worked together to con people. He said he was a marked man, changed his name and entered the storage business. But he couldn't hide. Three years after the book came out, someone tried to assassinate him as he left his warehouse. But how much of what Keene said was true and how much was another con? And how he did he become so successful and why did he turns his back on the whole scheme? REPS: BBC
CURRENT JOURNALISM
Feel-Good Fun
An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist by Kellie B. Gormly (The Washington Post, Jan. 31)
Everyone go awww. This could be the next Wimpy Kid or Captain Underpants or a story about how the kid who dreamed them up. In early December a second grader in Boise wrote and illustrated on 81-page story "The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis by Dillon His Self.” He was so pleased with the results that when he visited the library with his grandmother he slipped it into the picture-book section of the kids’ reading room. The librarians were so tickled by what he did (and became fans of the book too) that they made it part of the permanent collection and created the Whoodini Award for Best Young Novelist for Dillon. Now the book's got a four-year waitlist (!!) and Dillon is, natch, a local celebrity. REPS: Storied Media Group
Thriller, Mystery
The Butcher of Havana: How a drifter from Milwaukee became the chief executioner of the Cuban Revolution — and a test case for U.S. civil rights by Tony Perrottet (Atavist, Feb)
The crazy story of how a drifter from Milwaukee with a rap sheet as long as your arm ended up as El Carnicero (“The Butcher”), Castro's chief executioner in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. His specialty was said to be shooting up a victim's face beyond recognition to intimidate relatives when they picked up the body (nice). He fell out of favor (as one does with despots), came back to the United States, and had his citizenship stripped in a landmark case testing if the government could in fact do that to a native-born American. The drifter, Herman Marks, was rejected for deportation by every country in the world and then, bizarrely, disappeared without a trace, never to be heard from again. REPS: CAA
Q&A: Neil Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own (Crown, 1989)
An Empire of Their Own, a collective biography about the Jews who built Hollywood, seemed ripe to revisit in light of the recent dramas around the Academy Museum, and the were-Jews-erased-in-the-exhibitions contretemps. The stories of larger-than-life pioneers Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures and William Fox of Fox is a world of sharp elbows, business rivalries, womanizing, gambling, labor conflicts and opulent excess. And guess what? The rights on his book, he tells The Optionist, just lapsed. Bob Bookman is repping the project.
I caught up just this morning with Gabler.
Optionist: The Academy Museum has come under fire for ignoring the early Jewish founders of Hollywood. What's your take?
Gabler: The whole idea of the industry when these Eastern European Jews founded it was that basically Hollywood would be their conduit into America and that the ‘Jewishness’ would be something that they could shed, so that's embedded into the very idea of Hollywood. In some ways, the notion that Hollywood wants to put some distance between itself and its Jewish founders is completely compatible with the Jewish founders themselves. I understand it completely. When I submitted the book, it was called an Empire of Their Own and the subtitle, which ultimately became the subtitle of the book, was “How the Jews invented Hollywood.” I can’t tell you how much resistance there was to that idea. The publishing industry and Hollywood are very, very different in many respects, but my publisher, which was run by Jews at the time, had great hesitancy in putting that on the cover of the book. They negotiated with me to see if we could change the subtitle and remove the word Jewish from the book. So the book itself became an object lesson in the very subject of the book, because there was this notion that you just don't address this. They asked me if I would change the subtitle and we went through virtually every permutation of the word ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Jew’ that I could possibly think of until it finally occurred to me, as they rejected all of these things, was that they didn't want the word ‘Jew’ anywhere near the book. This is all part and parcel of, you know, the process of the formation of Hollywood and the formation of American identity.
Optionist: Hollywood is now run by technocrats and bureaucrats. Do you see the influence of Hollywood’s early founders in the kind of stories Hollywood tells?
Gabler: Residually. One of the great transformations of the motion picture industry was the transformation of the industry from novelty to art and that transformation was affected by these Eastern European Jews who very much wanted to be identified with art as a way of raising their own status and that is something that is still residual in the motion picture industry.
Optionist: We care so much about the founders of Silicon Valley and the myth making surrounding them. Should we think about Hollywood founders the same way?
Gabler: We don't think about them in that way at all. We admire the Bill Gateses and the Steve Jobses and the Elon Musks. We have tremendous admiration for their money and for their alleged ingenuity but notice that none of these are Jews. These are not, you know, marginalized individuals. The one who is stigmatized the most is Mark Zuckerberg — rightfully so in my estimation — but I don't know that there isn't some anti Semitism in that though. When people would approach me about the possibility of turning an Empire of Their Own into a film I'd say Hollywood was just like the mafia. It even had, you know, five families. In the same way that the mafia was formed, because those Italian families, and some Jews in fact, were outsiders to America and had to fight their way into it, Hollywood functioned in exactly the same way. It had to fight its way into America. Instead of organized crime, it’s organized culture.
Optionist: Who should be cast in a screen adaptation of Empire of Their Own?
Gabler: The most interesting of all of them in my estimation is Louis B. Mayer. He was extremely articulate and an extremely savvy, and it would take an actor of great subtlety to play someone who understood what Louis B. Mayer understood. He was a master at manipulating human emotion, both on the screen and in life. He knew exactly what buttons to press. So the kind of individual who would play him would have to be an individual of again enormous subtlety. Someone who could, who could play both the loud parts and the soft parts of the piece.
Optionist: The names that immediately come to mind were Brian Cox – Logan Roy but with not with as rough edges — and Paul Giamatti.
Gabler: Yeah, I think Cox is too much. Giamatti is a wonderful actor and could probably do it. We think of Louis B. Mayer as old, but here’s the other thing about all of these guys: They were all on the youngish side when, when they started the industry. They grew old because they commanded the industry for a long time, but they were all young in the beginning. So you have to find someone who's young and dynamic. You need a Robert de Niro who is gonna grow into a Marlon Brando to continue The Godfather analogy. You need somebody who can grow into being the godfather because they did all become godfathers.
Thanks for reading! Have a great weekend and happy reading. See you back here next Friday. Please check out The Ankler, which the New York Times calls a “hit Hollywood newsletter” if you love the business of entertainment.
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