Endless Thread - Rome, Sweet Rome

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

Could a unit of Marines destroy the entire Roman Empire if they traveled back in time? That is the question that inspired the now-legendary Reddit thread that turned James Erwin from an anonymous commenter into a Hollywood screenwriter. His once-in-a-lifetime opportunity did not go exactly as planned.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Emery, do you know that I once belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism? What?

The Society for What? The Society for Creative Anachronism. Oh, okay. What is that? Think like a highly organized international group of medieval history buffs who meet on a regular basis to throw feasts, demonstrations, and friendly, mostly harmless sword fight battles. So it's like a Renaissance fair happening all the time around the world full of live action role-playing nerds? Yeah, we were LARPIN. I usually stayed in what we called the East Kingdom, but yeah, I think you're getting the idea here.

maybe a little bit less silly than a Renaissance Fair. That sounds more ridiculous to me than a Renaissance Fair, but, you know, a lot more about you makes sense to me now, I think. Yeah, totally fair. But I loved it. I had a persona. I had a tunic that I made myself. I had tights.

I had a sword. I had a cloak with a brooch. You had a whole deal. Broach? Yeah, yeah. And this is called the Society for Creative Anachronism because anachronisms are things from a particular time period that are existing in the wrong time period,

and this is the creative use of that, we'll say? Yeah, absolutely. And we are about to talk about what was, at one point, one of the most famous creative anachronisms made by the Internet, specifically the front page of the Internet. Key phrase, at one point. It involves time travel. Legions of Roman soldiers.

Forward much! And an epic battle against a Marine, battalions. Not bad. Yeah, pretty good, right? Yeah. So this was an anachronism that was going to be huge, like Ridley Scott movie huge. All thanks to one man in Des Moines, Iowa, whose tossed off lunch break Reddit post was plucked

from obscurity and optioned by Hollywood. And then never heard from again. Yet. What shall we call this one? How about the title for the movie suggested on Reddit and the name of the subreddit that came out of all this. You ready? Roam Sweet Rome. I'm Ben Brock Johnson and you are listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories

from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my co-host, Amory Seavertson, and we are coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. So this is one of those things that happened on Reddit years ago, but it still has a presence all over the site. The Rome Sweet Rome subreddit has more than 15,000 subscribers. described in this community as recruits. And the description of the subreddit tells you a lot in just a few words. This subreddit is dedicated to ProofRock 451's ongoing story

about a group of Marines who find themselves transported to ancient Rome. Who is Reddit user Proofrock 451? His name is James Irwin. Family man lives in Iowa, used to write software manuals. Well, I did at the time I now work for an insurance company here in Des Moines. I am an IT business analyst too. Obviously, this is what James is on paper. He's done a lot more than that.

He's had kind of an interesting history. He's written technical manuals. He's run websites. I used to run a website, which was murdered by Wikipedia, called Footnotes to History, where I collected little tidbits about countries that don't exist anymore. He has also done tons of research on military history and secessionist movements in the U.S. Believe it or not, a lot of this stuff, James, aka Proof Rock 451, would describe as the hobby part of his life. Hey, some people like doing large amounts of research in their free time.

I agree with that as a guy who knows more than most people about medieval clothing and costuming. We also got in touch with James' wife, Jessica, to talk about this. I currently work for it in the Office of Professional Regulation. Jessica says James is the kind of guy you want on your trivia team. for sure. We would be hanging out with friends or something, and he'd say name happened there, and he just has this history and telling them in a way that's, like, really interesting. Normally, this might be the kind of thing that only people who know you best can say about you,

but James's knack for obscure facts has been on full display three times on Jeopardy. He won twice. Third time, he hit Final Jeopardy, and... Welcome to the final game. He comes down to the week. And I completely blew that because I was burned out full of spent adrenaline. And I bet $15,000 and went home in front of 4 million people. That was great.

But I got to say, I mean, like, if you're going to go home, you might as well bet thousands of dollars in front of 4 million people. Go big and go home. That's how I start every day, thinking that to myself. Okay, so his wagering game might be a little off. But James does actually have a degree in history. which is how he can go, as he did once, 700,000 words deep on military history. That was the last encyclopedia he wrote.

Have you always been this lonely? You know, I'm a lot less lonely now that I actually, you know, I can talk to my wife and children again with that book being done. Yeah. Point is, he's good at writing a lot of stuff pretty quickly, which is how we get to the day Rome Sweet Rome was born. It was a very normal day. I want to say it was a Wednesday?

It was a Wednesday. So, I mean, it's already... The most boring of days. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing happens on a Wednesday. And I was eating the most boring lunch imaginable. I was eating a lean pocket, not even a hot pocket, you know, just like a lean pocket. Which is, you know, it's just like a cardboard with gravy.

You know, I was just sitting there browsing right down my lunch hour, and I came across this prompt. Could a battalion of U.S. Marines destroy the entire Roman Empire in the time of Augustus. James starts writing a story in response. It immediately sounds like the kind of Hollywood blockbuster that you might scratch your head at, but also might say, yes, of course this would be made by Hollywood. He says that looking back, a fair amount of his writing actually makes him cringe. It was very much a first draft. But writing it, I knew.

I just knew something was going to happen with it. Like I could actually feel like this tingle in the back of my head, and like my fingers were a little bit tingling. like, I know this is going to do something. But I, you know, I put it out there and I thought, well, that was great. That was really great. That was fun. I'll get 100 up votes now and then I'll finish my lean pocket.

James's lean pocket-fueled stroke of genius starts like this. A Marine infantry battalion, technically up to about 800 soldiers along with vehicles, some civilian support staff and a bunch of the usual military equipment, disappears from the face of the planet in modern times and reappears on the West bank of the Tiber River outside of ancient Rome. All of their stuff is there with them and still works, except for internet or satellite connected stuff like GPS. The Marines have no idea where they are.

It's chaos. But they start to set up a perimeter and figure things out. And pretty soon, a conflict is brewing. And with James's knowledge about military history, he has the details of how this kind of conflict might play out. He knows, for instance, about pylums. It's a weighted javelin. It's a spear that you would throw.

Ideally, it hits somebody in the face. But if not, it lands in their shield, and then their shield is too heavy for them to lift, and then you get them with the sword. The Romans had all this down to a science. James's knowledge, along with that magic that just happens online sometimes, write post at the right time on Reddit, made his lunch break post turn into something way bigger.

He didn't even finish the story, not by a long shot, but it had already caught fire. So I was at work. It was in the middle of the day. I think it was around lunchtime, and I was at, hey, I posted this thing, and it's kind of blowing up. Like, oh, that's great, sweetie. You know. But momentum only picked up as the day went on.

And then by five, I had already been contacted by a couple of really big websites saying, if you finish the story at our site, we'll give you a pretty insane amount of money. Like, book deal money to finish the story. At the time, I picked him up, we were carpooling at the time. I would pick him up, and then I think by that point he was getting, you know, the calls or emails or, you know, contacts from managers in Hollywood. And, you know, it was just kind of surreal. Like, what, what are you talking about? You know, how is this even possible?

I talked to you at lunch, you know. I had gotten offers from a producer in Europe, and I had also been reached out to buy some folks at Madhouse Entertainment in Los Angeles. And they said, we think this could be a story. we think this could be big. You should call this. And I did. And so that was Wednesday. And then by Friday, I had signed with Madhouse,

so they were my manager. And then on Monday, an interview came out in screen rant saying, this guy has a manager now. And once that happened, I was a real person. And somebody at Wonder Brothers called my manager and said, what is this? Is this a movie? and my manager said, yeah, I think it could be something like this.

And so the executive from Warner Brothers said, okay, hang on, called back a half hour later and said, okay, we're going to do it. The fascinating thing about this is that at the time, it felt like nothing like this had ever happened, on Reddit or elsewhere. Here's a guy who writes a super unlikely tale about time-traveling Marines preparing to take on the Roman Empire, and he becomes part of his own unlikely tale about an understanding. nerd from Des Moines, Iowa, who writes a rant on his lunch break, and in a matter of days, becomes a Hollywood screenwriter. Not only that, they're asking him onto TV shows to talk about this

debate around who would win, the Marine Battalion or the legions of Roman soldiers. I had an interview with the BBC. They put me on, and they said, so we're going to have Adrian Goldsworthy on, who is probably one of the foremost Roman historians of our time. And so here I am with a man who has he's got the plummy you know oxonian action well the Romans they do this and of course they'd be ready for that and you know

he's he's absolutely in command of every possible fact about the Roman Empire and so then they come to me and they say well what the Marines do with the speed of all of this happening back in 2011 you'd think

that the movie is already on DVD and Blu-ray right? Stream by now. Gotta be. But no. Why the heck not? We'll tell you in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science.

Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing. Or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs.

Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions,

the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal. We can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Emery, I may be nerdy enough to have studied the Middle Ages with great care and have crafted my own tunic out of leather, but I am not super into fan fiction. Are you?

No, I'm not a fanfic girl, but I have to say it was amazing to go through all the stuff that was created just for Rome Sweet Rome, very fanfic like. people made soundtrack music. They made trailers, cutting footage from different military movies together with creative voiceovers. It almost looks like Rome from up here. It can't be Rome. Where are the airports and cars? We traded messages with a guy who mocked up a movie poster for the film with rocket-toting helicopters photoshopped into stills from that Russell Crow movie, Gladiator.

Are you not entertained? Sorry, I had to do that. If you weren't going to do it, I was going to do it. Anyway, this thing really took on a life of its own. The guy who made the movie poster, a game designer named Joe D. Donato, told us it was his first ever post on Reddit that went really viral. And he said, in part, I was totally overwhelmed at the response. I can only imagine what Proof Rock's life must have been at 40 times that volume.

It was pretty crazy. James was being thrown into the complex world of movie optioning and script writing. He could write fast. but not like this. I had written nothing that would prepare me for something of that scale. Because you've got, you know, the story treatment, that's 30 pages where you have to break down the entire plot of a movie, scene by scene. And then the screenplay, it's not just, you know, the dialogue or the visuals.

It's a very difficult art. And so I not only had to come in and learn, I had to devise the story and crack everything and get a different. out there, but I also didn't have the amount of time you usually get. I had one month to do the story when you generally get three. Long story short, James was really trying to get up to speed on how to write a screenplay while writing a screenplay. And oh yeah, also doing his regular full-time job as a guy who writes software manuals.

And also, he had a family, Jessica, and a one-year-old son. But James's nose was to the grindstone. It was crazy. Like, he was just reading, reading, reading all of these, like, you know, screenplay writing books and everything he could digest. And he digest books very, very fast faster than anyone I've ever met. So things were tricky, and they start to take a long time to play out once James turns in his first draft. There's a round of edits, things go quiet.

Then, at one point, James hears back through his manager, also a Redditor, by the way, that Warner Brothers, who now owns the rights, is going to get another screenwriter named Brian Miller to take a crack at rewriting the thing. Brian Miller is known best perhaps for a movie from 2011 called Apollo 18. Sort of an astronauts on the moon-based horror film. Rating of that film on Rotten Tomatoes, 23%. Not good. And he started from scratch with none of my ideas except the basic concept. And that's always hard.

But I was also excited because that meant, well, they're putting more into the project. but I was able to talk to the executive in charge of the screenplay and she had actually come on a week before she had replaced the original executive a week before I turned in my draft and so that's a big part of it she had her own ideas about what she wanted to do but I was able to talk to her and get her feedback and what she thought of it I was very interested because it was my first screenplay and I said as much and there's this pause and she said oh I did not expect to hear that. James says the new executive was impressed, but unfortunately, that doesn't mean she was ready

to greenlight the thing, which was also hard for James. The opportunity, the potential upside, was huge, but Los Angeles and the life of a screenwriter felt far away for the whole family. You know, one thing we discussed arose was, you know, if we were in a different position, might be different. Maybe we're single. He probably would. Something that was also hard, James says disappointing Redditors, who had been in three. by Rome Sweet Rome and were now waiting to learn more after James was told he had to stop posting new chapters to his story online because the script would become less valuable if so many people knew the full story. And then, you know, there's a few folks, you know, there's some folks who are disappointed, obviously. Sure.

And the vocal few who were disappointed and angry were, you know, they're their vocal, but their minority. There were some people who said the whole thing was a marketing ploy, which I had to say is probably the most amazing conspiracy theory of all time that they would set me up and develop me for 40 years as the schmoe in Iowa, who does nothing until they have their amazing story that I'm going to pitch for them. And then after that, for seven years, do nothing more. In the seven years of time since the birth and perhaps fall of Rome Sweet Rome, James has been busy. He wrote a sci-fi novel called Acadia.

The manuscript even had interest from big publishers like Random House. But in the end, James went with a Kickstarter campaign, partly because it was a new experiment for him, and partly because his experience with Hollywood's meat grinder made him want as much creative control as possible. In retrospect, James says he might have been too ambitious with the writing in the novel. But at the same time, he got 15,000 orders in two days when it launched. That is not bad. But a lot more people have read that novel, Acadia, than read the story that made James famous. Where is that screenplay?

Where is it collecting dust? I believe it's in that crate from Raiders of the last ark. The one on the giant warehouse. Where is the ark? Um, no, it's sitting on a shelf. I spoke with my manager recently, actually, and I said, like, so what, is there, are there, is there any news? Like, what can we, can we do anything with it? And he said, no, at this point, it really depends on getting a director excited about it.

Or maybe an actor? Or maybe an actor. I can't say who. But there was someone that recently got interested in Rome Street, Rome, and said, I want to resurrect this project and do something with it. And it's someone that people have heard of. I can't say who it was. James told us who it was. We're not allowed to tell you.

But we promise this actor is a big deal. Well, he's kind of short, actually. But yes, a very big deal. Ben, I'm going to smack you if you give away anything else. I've been warned. Okay, but really all of this is about this phrase that supposedly describes Hollywood, right? A million meetings, no deals. Like, you can have tons of people interested and the studio can really want to make the thing,

and yet it can still just languish. Yeah, and that's tough. Even for a guy like James who has actually had several brushes with fame, of which for him, Rome Sweet Rome was the biggest. Were there any challenges of returning to normal life? Yeah, because when something like that happens, you work on something, and you get that tingle in the back of your head saying this is special. and you get that kind of affirmation.

There's thousands of people applauding you in real time. And then it becomes a movie deal. And it's all extremely real and concrete. And the rewards are absurd. And they're also real and concrete. To go back to a world where you're changing diapers, I'm not going to say that my life became dull and boring. That's not true at all.

I'm not going to say that I lost interest in my work because I still love today everything that I do. But what it made it hard for me to do, ironically, it made it harder for me to believe in my writing. It made it harder for me to create. What do you mean? Well, when something like that happens, when you've got lightning in a bottle,

and it just explodes, when something doesn't do that, it gets hard to believe in it. So it makes it harder to take shot. It does, it does. And, you know, I feel like the expectations are higher. I feel like... Sure.

I know what I can do at my best when everything falls together perfectly. And when that doesn't happen, it's tough. It's discouraging. I guess it didn't go the way, you know, we thought it might have, but even in Des Moines, you know, which isn't a very big city. But like my colleagues, I just started this job about six months ago, and one of them, somehow got wind of this and they were like, you know, words spread around the office and they were all

sharing like the articles and stuff and it was like, wow, that's so cool. You know, neither James nor I had any kind of like expectations of this, you know, being something more than it was. I think, you know, yeah, it would have been cool to see it go further, but at the same time, I don't think that I feel any kind of like bitterness or, you know, disappointment even. If I post a story now, it's always, there's always kind of an ironic tinge to it. Like, I don't post now hoping for a big spot on the front page of it. I don't post hoping the world will swing their heads around and gape at me. Do you believe in his writing?

Do you believe that it could, you know, be really big someday? Yeah, I really do. And I think if he were allowed to do, dedicate more time to it, like he did back with the Rome Street, Rome screenplay, he could do some really amazing things. I'm starting to work actually right now on a new project with Madhouse, a new feature of film treatment. And there's a lot of it that's very exciting. So you're not completely out of the game? No. And I think a big part of that is just really over the last year. over the last few months, as the seventh anniversary of Rome Street Rome has come up,

I have begun thinking more about, you know, just taking pleasure in the writing again and not letting my anxiety get the better of me, not feeling like everything I do has to live up to would be measured against those first few pages that I got attention for me. Amory. Ben. Are you going with Battalion or the entire. Roman army. Roman army.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, no offense to the Marines, certainly, but... Here's the one X factor. Okay. Are you ready? The helicopters. If you're a Roman soldier and you see a thing flying in the air like that and it's like shooting missiles and stuff is blowing up, I feel like that could immediately result in

total retreat. Yes. Do you feel like this is a happy story? Does it give you hope? No. I wouldn't say that. I mean, what this makes me think of is with any creative endeavor, this is the right story to hear, you know,

that you're not going to necessarily strike gold all the time, even when it feels like, oh my gosh, this is it. This is the thing. Yeah. But what's hopeful about this to me is that he realizes that, and he has accepted the more realistic takeaway from it, which is like, yeah, this is hard. And you can choose to either keep going in spite of that or to not.

And it sounds like he will. Yeah, it's like a reminder that like even though you're in a field of that's been littered with the corpses of people destroyed by the Roman legionnaires, you know, if you just aim true, you might actually have a shot. Even though you're not like in Hollywood, you might have a shot. So keep going, Ben. You might get a podcast someday. If you're lucky, if you persist. I might get to wear my tunic in the podcast someday. One can hope.

Do we think that he's going to, do we think we're going to hear from James again? Do you think this movie will get made? It will get made. Really? Yeah. Wow. It's like James said, go big or go home. What do I have to lose in this scenario?

I don't have money. Go big and go home. Go big and go home. That seems like a good time for us to go big and go home. Yeah. Let's do it. Endless thread is a. production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit.

Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we told her we were writing a Hollywood screenplay, she said, what could go wrong? Iris Adler is our executive producer who begins all her critical feedback for our episodes by saying, The Truth is Here. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus and John Parati, who called Rome, mildly awesome. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, and on her lunch break, she looked at wholesome memes. Michael Pope is our advisor at

Reddit who said lean pockets are propaganda posters. Even though you don't always hear his voice, it's important to point out that our fellow producer Josh Swartz can also say that Endless Thread is something I made. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg our intern is Candace Lim.

Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Redditor Joe D. Donato for this week's artwork. It is that unofficial movie poster for Rome Sweet Rome that we talked about. You can check it out at our website WbUR.org slash endless thread. On Reddit, We Are Endless underscore Thread.

If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sievertson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.