Planet Money - "Based on a true story"

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

When a group of amateur investors rallied around the stock for GameStop back in 2021, the story blew up the internet. News outlets around the world, including us here at Planet Money, rushed in to explain why the stock for this retail video game company was suddenly skyrocketing, at times by as much as 1700% in value, and what that meant for the rest of us.When movie producer Aaron Ryder saw the GameStop story — an army of scrappy underdogs, banding together to strike back against a financial system they felt was rigged against them — he knew it had the makings for a great movie. The only problem: so did a bunch of other movie producers and Hollywood studios. So Aaron found himself in the middle of a fast and furious race to make the first Game Stop movie.On today's show, one producer's quest to claim the hottest ticket in Tinseltown and the whole hidden machinery dedicated to turning a news story into box office gold. You'll never read the word 'based on a true story' the same way again.Today's episode was reported and hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Jess Jiang, engineered by James Willetts, and fact-checked by Cooper Katz McKim and James Sneed. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money, from NPR. When you go to the movies these days, it can feel like every other movie poster is offering something based on a true story. Hollywood is hungry for dependable box office returns, and they seem to be banking on the idea that people will be more likely to buy tickets to a movie about something kind of familiar. Which maybe explains all these celebrity-laden origin stories, you know, of your favorite sneaker or ill-fated cell phone,

or all the biopics from Elvis to Oppenheimer. And then there's this whole category of movies and shows ripped straight from the headlines, sometimes ending up on the screen so absurdly fast, the stories are barely even over. Think Theranos, Uber, WeWork. But the ones that perk my ears up tell the story of some recent financial fiasco, like the one Aaron Ryder first heard about back in January of 2021. At the time, he was in Canada for work. I was in Montreal in a tiny little apartment, losing my mind. Aaron is a big-time Hollywood producer. He had just gotten to Montreal to shoot a movie, and he needed to quarantine for 14 days. So Aaron was stuck inside. And after two days, I thought, oh my God, I'm never going to make it.

But through a couple bottles of whiskey, an enormous amount of chicken breast and rice, I somehow got into a groove. And thank God for the internet, because it was my only portal to the outside world. And there was one thing going on in the outside world that particularly caught Aaron's attention. I caught wind of this weird story

that just kind of kept getting headlines about GameStop. The struggling video game retailer GameStop, suddenly one of the hottest stocks. A growing group of young, mostly male, amateur day traders inspired by a community on Reddit called WallStreetBets. Started buying, driving the stock price up. And I thought, like the rest of us, why is the stock going up? Aaron started reading about how this group of Wall Street firms had been predicting that GameStop stock would go down in value. They were shorting it.

But then this whole horde of amateur investors on Reddit were banding together and pushing the opposite theory. That GameStop was massively undervalued. theory, that GameStop was massively undervalued. And if everybody got on board and bought the stock, they could both make money and punish Wall Street. You could just see there was an army amassing all in support of this little store that, you know, has no business having its stock price go up the way it was. By the time Aaron is seeing all this, it had become a full-fledged movement. Do you know what to do? Stick it to the short sellers. With people from all sorts of backgrounds. For the Wall Street Bets people, are we still holding?

It even had its own memes and sea shanties. One day when the trading is done, we'll take our gains and go. And as Aaron is watching all this unfold from quarantine, he's thinking, this is the story of a bunch of scrappy underdogs banding together to take on a financial system they felt was rigged against them. This has the makings for a great movie. And given how much buzz it's getting all over the internet, it seems like it might come with its own baked-in, riled-up audience. I became obsessed. I read everything I could, and the more I read, the more I felt like there's absolutely a movie here. But, you know, Hollywood,

we're a bunch of heat-seeking missiles. It's very competitive. You know, you hear something that could be a cool idea for a movie, you're going to have several people chasing it. And I knew that the only way that this could be successful would be to be first. Did it feel like you were kind of entering into a race? Absolutely. And if it was a race, I was determined to win. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. determined to win. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Aaron Ryder was not wrong. All across Tinseltown, producers like him were sharpening their knives and shoring up their war chests in hopes of winning the race to make the one true GameStop

movie. Today on the show, a journey into the bowels of the infotainment industrial complex. How the fight over this one film reveals a whole hidden machinery dedicated to turning our shared reality into Hollywood gold. You'll never read the words based on a true story the same way again. Okay, so it's January of 2021. Producer Aaron Ryder has set his sights on turning this frenzy around GameStop stock into a hit film. It's this thing in me. I see it and I decide I want to do it and I'm hard to beat. But he also knows there's so much buzz around this story, there's no way he's the only Hollywood

heavy with eyes on this particular prize. He knows the execs at Netflix and HBO and Paramount had to be watching too. One of his biggest worries was that if they all move forward with competing productions, they could run the risk of releasing two or more GameStop movies around the same time. That could confuse audiences and could mean less profit for each competing project. And IMDb is littered with these bizarre games of movie chicken. There were two Steve Jobs movies a few years back, two Truman Capote movies roughly a year apart. It's happened with children's bug movies, asteroid movies, volcano flicks. It had even happened to Aaron himself. He once produced a movie about 19th century magicians, only to discover that another 19th century magician picture was coming out around the same time.

That one starring Edward Norton. I had really close friends of mine call me up and be like, I saw your movie. I loved Edward Norton, and I just wanted to cry. Oh, no! It happens. You know, like I said, we're all heat-seeking missiles. We're all chasing after a good idea here. In the case of the GameStop movie, Aaron says the finish line was clear. Be the first movie to get into theaters.

Now, Aaron was actually in a pretty good starting position to pull this off. He had a new deal to produce movies for a storied Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM. You know the one. And he'd even heard that MGM's owner thought GameStop would make for a good movie. So he was entering the race with some serious wind at his back. But he was still going to need to convince the studio to give him a budget and the green light to actually film, which meant he would need to assemble as quickly as possible all the necessary elements for making a movie. He needed a script, a director, and a cast of fancy movie stars. For Aaron, the starting gun went off one Sunday in late January of 2021. That was day one, when Aaron began working on the first piece of that movie puzzle, the script.

Now, he knew he could just hire a screenwriter to make a script from the facts that had already come out. That information was publicly available and fair game. But Aaron knew that in this case, that was not going to be the right strategy. The GameStop situation at this point was still so nebulous, and the competition so intense, that what Aaron needed to start this race was to acquire an article or book or even a podcast episode that had already started to wrangle this woolly story into cinematic shape. The thing that I'm going to need is a piece of intellectual property.

And if I could find the right IP and grab it and make an announcement, maybe I'd get ahead of everybody else. If Aaron could get his hands on the right piece of IP, not only would it give him a kind of blueprint to put together a script, but whoever made the article or podcast could potentially give him access to the real people at the center of the story. And maybe even more importantly, if he made a big public announcement that he'd acquired some blockbuster piece of IP, it could act as a signal to the market. It could strike fear into the hearts of all the other would-be GameStop movie producers

out there. Convince them it just wasn't worth it to compete. So Aaron rounds up all the usual IP suspects. Day after day, he's scouring the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker. He's reading articles, watching videos. Until on day five of his search. An agent friend of mine gave me a tip that there was a book proposal floating around that was all about the GameStop phenomenon. And this wasn't just any book proposal. It was a proposal by a writer named Ben Mesrick, or as his author's bio calls him, the reigning cowboy of narrative nonfiction. I mean, listen, anything that makes me seem like manly and athletic and, you know, riding a horse with a cigarette, listen, anything that makes me seem like manly and

athletic and, you know, riding a horse with a cigarette in my mouth, that's me. And then you meet me and you're like, oh no, what happened to him? Ben may not be as manly or horse-born as he might like you to think, but he is prolific and writes incredibly fast. He's written 25 books in the last 27 years, mostly with one particular goal in mind. My dream was never, you know, win a Pulitzer or win a National Book Award. My dream was always having a tie-in paperback that said, now a major motion picture.

I mean, that's always been my dream as a writer, for better or worse. Ben started out writing pulp fiction thrillers, and he got into nonfiction in the early 2000s sort of accidentally. That's when he stumbled into the story of a group of MIT students who made millions of dollars counting cards in Vegas casinos. That book was adapted into a Hollywood movie called 21. Not long after, another one of his books, The Accidental Billionaires, was adapted by Aaron Sorkin into the script for the movie The Social Network. Now, Ben was not the only one to discover the lucrative wonders of selling IP to Hollywood.

During the golden age of streaming, places like newspapers, magazines, even podcast companies, all got in on the action. But Ben has managed to stand out from the pack in a couple of ways. First, Ben does not identify as a journalist. He takes liberties that would just never fly in a newsroom. Like, he makes up dialogue, or sometimes combines characters to make the most dramatic version of the story. And that high drama has made his books pretty appealing to producers in

Hollywood. What do you think your kind of competitive advantage is in the world of Hollywood IP? That I'm writing a thriller. So it's not like I'm writing trash. I'm trying to write Shakespearean dramatic themes, but it's young people in exciting locales with lots of money and sex, right? As opposed to what a journalist is doing, which is they're trying to give you the facts. I'll give you the facts, but you're going to like them. Ben says the second thing that's given him the biggest edge in selling books to Hollywood

is the understanding that what he's selling isn't really a 300-page book. What he's really selling is the idea of a book, all of it contained in a punchy 10-page proposal. That's the real magic, is being able to sell a story on 10 pages, because nobody in Hollywood's going to read more than that before they're making a decision. So every book for the past 10 years, I've written a 10-page book proposal. I've sold it either as a movie or as a television show, and then I've pitched it to my publisher. So every one of my books has a movie deal

before I present it to the publishers. Wow. So when Ben hears about the GameStop saga in mid-January of 2021, he says it was immediately clear this was his kind of story. He spends just one day doing research, figuring out what characters he might want to focus on, the sources he'll want to interview, how the story arc will work. And by the end of the day,

he's written up a pithy cinematic book proposal, which the next day his agent starts floating out to various producers around Hollywood. And it almost immediately there was excitement. Within just a few hours, Ben was hopping on back-to-back calls. It's, you know, the Netflixes of the world. It's the producers working with the Netflixes. It's the studios. And it eventually was the head of MGM. Soon enough, Ben finds his book proposal at the center of a bidding war. Multiple producers wanted to use Ben's book as the springboard for their movies. Multiple producers wanted to use Ben's book as the springboard for their movies. You know, from the mind that brought you The Social Network.

On one side is our producer Aaron Ryder and his team at MGM, and on the other is another major Hollywood studio. Ben didn't remember which studio, so I asked Aaron Ryder if he remembered. Absolutely. And if you think I'm going to tell you who they were, no way. They're still my friends. Hollywood does seem like a very small place. It's tiny. And, you know, everybody's got their hands in everybody else's pockets. Aaron was willing to go financially toe-to-toe with his friends at the other Hollywood studios because Ben Mesrick was a bankable writer who promised to finish the book in just a couple months. For whichever producer won the bidding war, Ben's book would be a huge advantage to getting to a workable screenplay first.

And Ben Mesrick himself says the bidding heated up quickly. The numbers just start getting crazy. Do you mind ballparking them? What are we talking? It goes beyond a million dollars. Let's put it that way. And MGM, I think it was like at midnight, Let's put it that way. And MGM, I think it was like at midnight, called with a take it or leave it offer that was something like a half a million dollars higher than the other offer. So I was not doing the noble thing necessarily. I was doing the correct thing in this moment. Producer Aaron Ryder had been searching for the perfect piece of IP for five days. And on day seven, he was able to seal the deal and buy the rights to make Ben's book into a movie. And the first thing he does with this deal is announce it to the world,

to send a signal to Hollywood that MGM meant business. We're planting a flag. It's like, hey, we have this piece of IP. It's formidable. We're making a flag. It's like, hey, we have this piece of IP. It's formidable. We're making this movie. And I think that put us in the best possible position to try to jump ahead of the pack. But within a few days, the pack starts to catch up. By day nine, Netflix was reportedly in talks to work with the guy who wrote and produced

The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. By day 13, HBO announced they were teaming up with mega-Hollywood producer Jason Blum, whose company Blumhouse Productions made the Paranormal Activity franchise and Get Out. And eventually, Paramount got into talks with the New York Times to option their reporting. For Aaron, all of this news was more than a little concerning. He knew if another company could get far enough ahead of them in production, it could scuttle the momentum within his studio. But at the same time, Aaron knew that whatever was happening at other studios was out of his control, and that dwelling on the competition was not going to help.

The best way to, you know, to win a race is to not look behind you and just kind of focus on what's in front of you. Aaron had to look forward. He had to take the race step by step. And our next step was trying to find the right writer. Which is to say the right screenwriter. The person to take the baton and turn Ben Mesrick's treatment into actual dialogue and scenes for a director to bring to life. In practical terms, Aaron is looking for people who've written similar movies, whose schedules will work. And near the top of Aaron's list was a screenwriting duo named Lauren Schucker-Blum and Rebecca Angelo. Yes, we are a writing team.

Do you guys identify with any of the classic historical duos? I don't know, Laurel and Hardy or Thelma and Louise or Marx and Engels or something? How do you think of your... Yes, we talk about Thelma and Louise because we're a little bit lawless. Yeah, ready to jump off the cliff. Aaron thought Lauren and Rebecca's writing had just the right tone for the internetty GameStop story. Plus, they'd started their careers as reporters at the Wall Street Journal. So Aaron gets them on a call. He's like, I really want to hire you,

but we have to wait for Aaron Sorkin to say yes or no. Lauren, it's so naughty that you're telling all these details. Yes, Lauren and I are often second in line after Sorkin, the considerably less expensive and female alternatives to him, which is a very happy place for us to be.

We risked to take Aaron Sorkin's trash. His leftovers, his discards. We made gold out of it. Luckily for Lauren and Rebecca, Aaron Sorkin was busy on another project at the time. So we got the job and there were, I think, nine other GameStop projects in Hollywood. So it became clear that our mission was to be the fastest. It was a foot race. And Lauren and I are fleet of foot. Ben Mesrick, also famously fleet of foot,

delivers his book manuscript to Lauren and Rebecca as promised, around two months after he began. And Lauren and Rebecca get to work actually writing a script. And as they jump into writing, they're mostly focused on the task at hand. They don't pay much attention to whatever's going on with their competitors. But there is one project that's kind of impossible to ignore. Because as it turns out, Hollywood is even smaller and more preposterously intertwined than Aaron let on. It goes deeper than everyone just having their hands in each other's pockets. than everyone just having their hands in each other's pockets. At what point did you realize one of your screenwriters was married to another big-time producer who was working on a competing GameStop feature film?

I had a bad feeling you were going to bring that up. Jason Blum, the big-time producer who made Get Out, who is now working on a competing GameStop project for HBO. Jason is actually Lauren Shuker Blum's husband. So every once in a while, she couldn't help but overhear some concerning updates about the competition. My husband went off with the Succession writers, I think. Although at some point I was so infuriated we had to just stop talking about it. So we had like a moratorium of like, I think we even like, I wouldn't even talk about our movie if he was anywhere in the house.

It was very secretive. Yeah. Like, it was like, you know, sleeping with the enemy or something. Like, you couldn't, dinner tables were just silent. Aaron Ryder says he wasn't too concerned about any domestic espionage within the Blumhouse. He trusted his Hollywood peers to handle it like adults. If anything, it seems like it may have actually hardened Lauren and Rebecca's resolve to finish their script fast. Lauren and Rebecca write multiple drafts starting that summer. And around six months later, it's in good enough shape that Aaron could start looking for a

director. For that part of the relay, he hires a director named Craig Gillespie. Because over the past few years, Craig had done a string of successful projects based on true stories. There was I, Tonya about ice skater Tonya Harding. There was Pam and Tommy about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and their home video. And Craig came to the project with a bunch of A-list movie stars who wanted to work with him. It felt like the stars were aligning, you know, things were coming together in the best possible way. The Hollywood stars were aligning. Aaron had his blockbuster piece of IP, a screenplay that was almost ready to start shooting, a big-name director with a stable of A-list actors. He's got all the ingredients he needs to get a green light from MGM to start shooting. To Aaron, their position in the race was looking pretty good. He's thinking,

This is going to come together, and it's going to come together so fast. But. Then came the dreaded but. Then things got complicated. The blockbuster news shaking Hollywood this morning. Amazon buying MGM Studios for $8.5 billion and acquiring iconic film franchises like James Bond and Rocky. It turned out Aaron and his fellow producers weren't the only ones scrambling over intellectual property.

Way, way, way up the chain at Amazon, which, by the way, supports and pays to distribute some NPR content, Jeff Bezos was making his own IP play. Buying out the MGM vault and every movie in development, including Aaron, Ben, Lauren, and Rebecca's would-be GameStop movie. That deal closed right when we were about to go before the Greenlight Committee, and we were put into a drawer, which was just like all momentum is dead inside the studio, so it's just never going to happen. God, the drawer. The drawer is a dark, dark place. After the break, Aaron hatches a plan to break their GameStop movie out of Amazon's dark, dark drawer.

Museums for science, for history, for art, they're everywhere. So why not for economics? I think it's partly that the economy is actually kind of abstract and kind of complicated. But economist Tim Harford is up for the challenge. He knows exactly what he'd put in his fantasy museum of the economy, objects that would tell the story of the modern economy. And it's not a bar of gold. You've got something that is roughly the size of a shoebox,

and it looks as though it's been covered in yellow butter icing by an incredibly drunk chef. That's in our latest bonus episode for Planet Money Plus listeners. If that's you, thanks for your support. If it's not, it could be. Sign up at plus.npr.org. Could be. Sign up at plus.npr.org. A few weeks after Amazon acquired MGM, Aaron Ryder got a call from his new bosses and found out his GameStop movie was dead in the water. They were not going to give him the green light to start filming. And while that seems like it would be a crushing piece of news, that is not how Aaron rides. I, at the time, was disappointed because my plan was not going as I had hoped it would.

But that doesn't mean that it's me falling to my knees, screaming at the movie gods, why? Most would maybe consider that terrible news. I just consider it like, okay, that's not working. Let's move over to the next. Let's pivot. Aaron had spent over a year putting together this puzzle made up of valuable movie pieces. The rights to Ben's book, the screenplay, all the talent that had been attached. He didn't want to let it go just as the finish line was coming into view. So on that call with Amazon, he goes out on a limb. And my next question was, can I have it back? In other words, could Aaron take this project and finish it with some other company? And Amazon's answer to that question was, maybe.

But making a deal to rescue the project from their dark, dark drawer would also be up to Aaron. He was going to need a small army of lawyers to negotiate the deal and to find a new financial backer. Aaron would need money both to buy Amazon out of all that valuable IP and to pay the tens of millions of dollars to actually make the movie. So this is like the moment in a movie that, you know, screenwriters sometimes call like the dark night of the soul or the all is lost moment where it seems like the hero might be facing defeat. Like, was there one moment where you kind of felt that most acutely before you figured out your plan? There was a moment where I went over to Craig's house and we sat down and he said,

I really want to make this film. And I said, I do too. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to do it, but I think we can pull it together. We shook hands and we went out to the town and said, this movie's getting made. Who wants to get involved? Given how far along the project was and all the big names attached, there was a lot of interest, including from some major studios. But most of them would have probably wanted to develop it and do another draft or two. But, you know, at this point, what we wanted to do is, first and foremost, keep it on this fast track.

So your eyes were still on the prize at that point of kind of getting it to the screen as quickly as possible. Absolutely. Aaron is still thinking about beating all the other projects that are vying to be the first GameStop picture. So Aaron and his team started entertaining the idea of going independent, of making the film without a big studio in order to get the movie across the finish line before anyone else. And that is when Aaron found his funder.

It's really one conversation with Teddy. Teddy Schwarzman is a Hollywood producer and the son of Wall Street giant Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the Blackstone private equity group. And Teddy's company, Black Bear Pictures, had the deep pockets and financial independence to buy the project off of Amazon and get it into production almost immediately. And when they hopped on the Zoom, Teddy saw the advantage of moving fast. Teddy basically committed saying, look, if you guys can hit this budget, let's do it. We are agreeing to do it on your timeline. And so we did that. It was a handshake deal right up front.

How did it feel once you kind of had locked in that deal? Once we locked in the deal, then we had an enormous amount of work that needed to be done in a relatively short period of time. But that's the fun of it. That to me is, I love that. That just feels like the movie's getting made then. Pretty soon, Aaron's crew was able to confirm the cast. Paul Dano would star as the movie's protagonist. Pete Davidson, boyfriend to the stars, agreed to play his brother. And Seth Rogen would play a hedge fund manager

whose firm lost billions of dollars on GameStop. Once the package came together, once the financing was in place, once we had a start date, that was the biggest moment because then word gets out about that and other projects start to die. Screenwriters Lauren Shooker-Blum and Rebecca Angelo say it's hard to know which of the original projects they were competing against actually got put into their own dark, dark drawers at their respective studios. But in this case, because Lauren is married to one of the competitors,

she actually did get a little more inside information than usual. At some point, my husband was like, our project is not happening, FYI. And we went, oh. What did you feel when you heard that? It's such a miracle that a movie gets made that

we were just so focused on our movie. It's not, it sounds like I'm being, like, cute, but truly, like, we had a movie that was getting made. We were on set shooting a movie. At that point, we had a movie that was getting made. We were on set shooting a movie. At that point, we had forgotten about everything.

We had shot, like, half of our film. So, you know, it was, we were less worried about that at that point. And by the time I spoke with Lauren and Rebecca and author Ben Mesrick and producer Aaron Ryder, about a year after they started shooting, their film, Dumb Money, was about to cross the finish line, to open in theaters around the country. It seems safe to say that Dumb Money is going to be the first GameStop feature film to hit movie screens at this point. If it's not, if something else pops itself up between now and next week,

that's it, I'm done. I give up. Before digging into this story, I don't think I fully realized how absurdly against the odds it can feel for any of these movies to survive. For somebody to pluck these stories from the real world and shepherd them through the corporate gauntlet of competing Hollywood studios and get them onto the screen. Or that for every movie that does make it, there might be countless others stuck in a dark, dark drawer somewhere. Which is why it felt a little bit special when last Friday night, I got a ticket to my local theater in New York, not too far from Wall Street. I got my popcorn, settled into my seat, the lights dimmed, and the first thing that popped up onto the screen once

the movie had started? A single sentence against the black background. Based on a true story. One important note, we were able to speak with screenwriters Lauren Shuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo despite the ongoing writer's strike in Hollywood, because they are also executive producers on the film. They say they fully support the WGA strike. Today's episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Jess Jang. It was engineered by James Willits, fact-checking by Cooper Katz-McKim and James Sneed. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Adam Davidson, Roseanne Kornberg, Andy Lewis, Jennifer Rothman, Tom Noonan, and Evan Ratliff. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

for helping to support this podcast.