Revisionist History - The Birthday Party with Charles Randolph | Development Hell

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Before Charles Randolph won an Oscar for writing “The Big Short,” he adapted a memoir called “The Birthday Party”: the true story of a white man kidnapped by three young Black men. Is there a way to bring a story like that to screen, in a way that's honest and authentic? Randolph gives us a masterclass on a screenwriter's many minefields.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Oscar night 2016. The stage of the Dolby Theatre is set with what looks like a thousand candles. Hollywood stars are lined up in the front rows, colorful dresses, careful hairstyles, and endless cameras ready to pan from the crowd to the presenters. Ah, here comes Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. Ryan Gosling has a gold envelope in his hand. Good evening, folks.

We're here to present the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. And not to get too technical, but that's the screenplay that was the best at adapting to whatever harsh conditions and obstacles were thrown in its way. No, it's a screenplay adapted from another source, such as a novel, play, short story, or a TV show. Agree to disagree, okay? Well, exactly. Because what are we interested in in this series on development hell?

The maladapted screenplay. The movie idea that does not survive the harsh conditions and obstacles thrown in its way. Anyway, back to the 2016 Oscars. The video montage for Best Adapted Screenplay lists Brooklyn, Carol, Room, The Martian, and The Big Short.

Gosling opens the envelope. And the Oscar goes to Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, the Big Short. Allow me a little bit of name dropping. Charles Randolph, winner of that Oscar, is my neighbor

and my best friend. I met him 25 years ago, when he just started screenwriting. And since then, he's done The Life of David Gale, The Interpreter, Love and Other Drugs, Bombshell, and Big Short. And when he got the Oscar for Big Short, I was at an Oscar-watching party in Brooklyn, and I got so emotional, I had to hide in the bathroom. Mr. Randolph. Mr. Gladwell, how are you, my friend? I'm good, I'm good.

Normally, Charles would just walk over to the studio. His office is down the hall. But today, he's calling me from London, where he and his family are living for the school year. How's it going, man? I haven't seen you in forever. I miss you. Charles, let's do our thingy.

Notice the interaction. He says he misses me. I know. I miss you. Charles, let's do our thingy. We can chat some more. Okay, okay, okay. Notice the interaction. He says he misses me. I get all flustered and try and get on with things. I love Charles. And because I love Charles, there was no question I was going to ask Charles for his development hell story. Because I've talked with him at length

about every screenplay he's worked on for the last 25 years. And I knew instantly which one he would pick. Welcome back to episode four of Development Hell. So tell me, tell me how that whole thing begins. Start at the beginning. So Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise buy a book from a guy named Stanley Albert called The Birthday Party,

which is a true story of him on January 21st, 1998, walking through the West Village. And he is approached by a young black man on his right who he realized has a gun. And the young man leads him to a vehicle that's, I think they're on 13th Street, maybe 12th, 11th. It's right off Fifth Avenue. And there's another young black man waiting who opens the

door and a third black young black man in the car. And they basically kidnap him to steal money out of his bank account. And what's interesting is they're incredibly young. I think the oldest one is maybe just turned 18. His name is Lucky. The others are 16 and I think 14. And they have no clue what they're doing, right? They have no understanding because they don't have bank accounts, right? So they have no understanding that ATMs have a limit. They don't believe it at first. They see how much money he has in his account. I think it's over $100,000. So they anxiously want to get that money and it drives them mad the system that they just can't get that money out over the course of a night right so they decide to hold him in brooklyn with in an apartment with three young women it's basically um three young women that

sort of work for lucky maybe it's kind of hard to tell um as as prostitutes And he's held there for basically almost, I think, 72 hours. And a relationship develops with these kids. And at some point, they're offering him pot. They offer him a blowjob once. They find out that it's his birthday. They're holding him on his birthday. That's why it's called the birthday party. It'll be his 39th birthday.

They want to get the money out. So they sort of hatch a plan to go into the bank with him. Of course, that's not going to work. He sort of talks them out of that. To keep him honest, they threaten his father and they sort of ask for his father's address. And Stanley, knowing that his father's business card is in his wallet, can't really lie. They end up discussing killing him. It's a test they do at one point. It's a really tense situation where

he's afraid for his life. It turns out there's no way they can get the money out and so they decide to let him go. They're adolescents too. They're adolescents. It's adolescents. Yes, right.

It's right. It's three teenage boys. Absolutely. And three teenage girls as well, who are also quite young. I think their youngest one is 14 even. And they just do teenage stuff. They have teenage perspectives.

They have, you know, yet they're very worldly. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, and so it's, you know, there's young have, you know, yet they're very worldly. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, and so it's, you know, there's young one, you know, one woman, you know, talking about

one sexual practice she won't do because she's saving it for marriage. You can imagine what that is. And it's just, it's so heartbreaking that that's her,

that's the thing she's keeping. That's the thing that she has to offer, right? And so it's just, it's just, yeah, it's that youth, you know? But it's also moving. It's also sort of's it's it's it's that youth you know but it's also moving it's also sort of i mean the book's quite good in that sense it's like you get a sense of wow these you know there there's a real community amongst these kids right they are wholly relying

on each other you know and this is the only family they've got and they're and they're they're they're down for that family they'll do what it takes for their families. It just is one of those books where in reading it, it has a rawness to it and an authenticity to it that's just very hard to find, right, as a story. Why do you think Tom Cruise's people were attracted to this book in the first place? Well, I think Stanley's a remarkable guy. What he does over the course of those three days is he pays attention to these little clues,

which you don't sort of see coming. You see him noticing things. And then when he's being interviewed by the police, he just repeats them back. And they manage to find these six people very quickly. I mean, he did a remarkable job. He remembered little bits of numbers that he heard repeated. He remembered the patterns on the floor. He identified the bus schedule going outside the building. He could sort of identify the flight patterns to JFK going over the building. He knew that it was a relatively

big boulevard in Queens. He knew, he could kind of guess by the sequels how far the ocean was away. And so he not only managed to save himself by building a relationship with these young people, but he also managed to put the police onto them very quickly. So that version, there's a slender version of the story, which is just simply Sherlock Holmes. Absolutely. And that's why I think, I think I think, in fairness to Stan, I think that's what he thought he was getting. He thought he was going to get, you know, Tom Cruise was going to play this guy who, you know, heroically saves himself, you know, and then bonds a little bit with these young people. But then, you know, it has to put them away. And I'm presented with this thing, and it's just, it's a fantastic story.

But it has the obvious problem, right? It's a story of three black, young black men holding a white guy, a lawyer, a federal attorney, as a matter of fact, hostage. And it's just, it's hard to describe. It has an ethnocentrism to it because it's rooted in the perspective of the white guy. It just feels a little untoward. It's just one of the stories that we in Hollywood can't tell. You simply cannot tell that story, right? And, you know, if the film were being made in 15 years earlier than 1998, he could have gotten away with that. But by that period, it was already too late to tell this story without fully honoring the humanity of the perpetrators.

And so the thinking is, how can we take this and make it work? And what I end up doing is I turn up everyone's racism, for lack of a better phrase, right? I make Stanley a guy who thinks he's a liberal, but he's trapped by his own categories in the world. I make these kids these kids who have very few opportunities and are trapped in their own kind of perspective of the other. So these are a group of people who, even though Stanley's being held in this apartment, blindfolded and basically in a big room with six kids, six young people,

he can't see them really, literally and metaphorically, and they can't see them really literally and metaphorically and they can't see him right uh and then what happens is you know in in the script you know he starts to rebel against this situation he gets he gets angry and they start to work through their own prejudices prejudices against one another and it sort of culminates in a scene where basically he unloads on them. And he gives voice, I think a little bit of that old essay from Pothurts. Is it Norman? Can you remember? Was it Norman Pothurts? Is that right? Your Negro problem and mine? Exactly. My Negro problem, 1963.

My Negro problem and yours. Yes, exactly. Actually, both Charles and I got it a little wrong. It's My Negro Problem and Ours by Norman Podhoretz, published in 1963. It's a famous, and if you read it today, really unsettling essay, where Podhoretz confesses to, quote, the hatred I still feel for Negroes, quote, based on his experiences growing up as a working class Jewish kid in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn. And the way, you know, I give Stanley basically that perspective.

He is someone who's both understanding of where they come from, but angry that they still act as though the door is closed to them. You know, and I can actually read it for you because I have it on the script. I can read the scene to you if you want it. I do. I want you to. Yes, I do want you to. You want to do that?

Yeah. And you'll see, I mean, the piece is, you know, it's quite raw, really. It's, you know, it's in an era prior to current sensibilities. I think I wrote it in 2007, 2008. And you kind of get a feeling for the script in terms of it's, you know, it's taking some risks. Let me put it that way.

He's been held for a few days, right? So the kids are in the room. Stanley's there. He's looking away from them. He's not, they let him take his blindfold off, but he's facing the wall. Lucky. Stanley, let me ask you something.

If you had a chance to put me away for life, would you do it? Stanley considers. Stanley, you know where I live. You know where my father lives. I don't know who you are. I don't know where we are. I don't care.

I just want this whole thing to be over. Lucky contemplates the flat sincerity of Stan's answer. Then he laughs. Everyone looks. It's a strained answer. Then he laughs. Everyone looks. It's a strained laugh. That's right, Lucky says. Make the Negro think he's got a chance. Open that door wide, then boom.

He slaps his hands together in Stan's ear. Stan flinches. As Lucky stands and turns away from him, Stanley mutters, grow up. Pardon? I said grow up. Yeah, I heard you. Shoot me or let me go. Either way, stop pretending that you're the victim here.

Stop whining. There's no anger in his voice. The door's open, Lucky, okay? Not always, not everywhere, but after 30 years of people like me, it's pretty much fucking open. If you'd stop worrying about being a Negro, maybe you could just walk through it. And if you don't, don't blame the rest of us. White man's keeping you down. White man's put crack in the hood. White man's giving you AIDS. Please grow the fuck up. A stunned silence.

Lucky steps back over to him, looks down on the back of Stan's head with confused menace. Stanley's not done. The door's open, he says. Deal with it. You're just too proud to walk through or afraid. It's either that or you're just plain lazy. Lucky grabs Wren's Tech-9. He yanks Stan backwards by the scarf and crams the muzzle into his mouth.

Stan wretches. Mystic screams. Stan forces himself to keep his eyes shut. Stan, Lucky says. Grabbing Stan by the tie, gun still in his mouth, Lucky drags him to the hallway. Sin and Ren push through.

Stay here, Lucky yells. Lucky forces Stan down the hall. He thinks he's taking him to the bathroom, to his execution. Instead, he pushes Stan hard against the front door. There, there's your door, Lucky says. He pulls Stan back, opens it wide, gets behind him.

Open your fucking eyes, he says. Stan's POV on the building landing framed by the open front door. Dark and dangerous freedom. Lucky presses the gun to Stan's back. Door's open, Lucky says. Go on. Bounce. Walk through. Walk through. He's angry now. Stan doesn't move, can't move, a decisive beat.

Yeah, Lucky says. Ain't that easy. Lucky slams the door. He turns to see Stan, has his eyes still closed. As always, refusing to see him. He gets right in the white man's face and whispers, Negro. Oh, wow. Wait, so in the book... That doesn't happen. No.

At all. And so this is the problem, right? The problem is, you know, to earn the right to tell this story, you have to sort of reframe it and you have to take its underlying racist complexity and you have to make it the theme. You have to thematize that complexity, right? And that's what we do. When we get back, Charles talks about adaptation. We're back with Charles Randolph talking about his adaptation of The Birthday Party and how tricky it can be to adapt a true story for a screenplay.

I'll give you another, not related to me, but a very good example. I ran into Robbie Robinson, who is the Michael Keaton character in Spotlight, who's the editor on the Spotlight team. So Spotlight is the movie about the Boston Globe's investigation of Catholic priests suspected of pedophilia, among other things. And in that movie, Michael Keaton plays the editor of the Boston Globe. Is that right? Am I remembering correctly? And there is a scene. So you run into the guy who was the real editor of the Boston Globe. Correct. Robbie says, you know, love the film. There's this one part I don't love, which is the part where it turns out that the Spotlight team was given the information about what the Catholic priests were doing earlier.

And I was the editor at the time the newspaper was given it, and I did nothing. And he says, the truth be told, when that story came in, it was one of 40 stories on the tip line for that week. It was the second week that I was on the job and I wasn't even there that week. I was actually had taken a vacation week in the transition. And so, you know, I've always been a little uncomfortable with that scene because it's not really quite, my culpability is really not quite what, you know, what the film portrays. And of course, I'm saying to Robbie, you're not winning an Oscar without that scene, right?

That scene is what makes that movie, right? Because in that moment, we see the people in the spotlight team, like all of society, like us as viewers are culpable on some level, right? Of ignoring this problem for many years. And that's what makes it interesting. And so this is the problem that you level, right, of ignoring this problem for many years. And that's what makes it interesting. And so this is the problem that you face, right?

Mm-hmm. In order to understand, to earn the right to make heroes out of the spotlight team, there has to be a moment of resistance in the beginning. Yes. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not in the beginning. It's toward the end of the film. But they have to be not moment of resistance in the beginning. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not in the beginning, it's toward the end of the film,

but they have to be not just people who uncover, right, some horrible truth about society. They have to face their own culpabilities in relationship to that, right? And that's necessary. And so when taking a true story and building a film out of it,

you have to find those moments how can we take this thing and make it something more dramatic and more politically compelling let's say than what it is and the first problem is easy to solve

the second problem is hard and in this case the choice was in my case the choice was to make stanley albert different than the real stanley albert in fact is right because the real stanley albert doesn't have those qualities and obviously the person who hates this version more than anyone is stanley albert right he's always making jokes he's always you know he's he's always referencing things you know he's he's he thinks of himself as a liberal. And it allows me to, in the section I read to you,

it allows me to focus on that critique of African-American culture that at the time was something that went a little bit unspoken but was in a lot of people's hearts, right? Like in the Poehler's essay. But was never sort of portrayed, right? And of course, that did not end very well. We're going to get to that in a second, but this is a really, really crucial thing and I want to kind of spend a little more time on it.

This goes to something you have often said to me about screenwriting, which is that the important conflict is not the external conflict, but the internal conflict. So it is not enough, in other words, for us to have a movie about an obvious conflict

between three young black men and a white guy they've just kidnapped. There must be an internal conflict within the white guy's heart and the black guy's heart for us to kind of, for the movie to come alive. Right. So what you're saying is that you had to construct an internal conflict for Stanley.

Correct. And that means I have to move away from the victim narrative because victims inherently aren't, generally speaking, people who are facing that kind of internal conflict. They're facing, generally speaking, an exterior conflict. And then when you stay up away from that narrative, it becomes a problem, obviously, for someone who sort of feels like they're a victim, right? But it also makes a better story, right? And this is part of the problem with the moment, you know, in which we're recording this podcast, is that there is such an attempt to elevate victim stories, to platform people without often the sort of constituent internal conflict

that's going to make them fully human and fully engaging, right? And that's why so many of those films fail to work or fail to make money is because they don't solicit our attention fully, right? Because there's a reason Schindler's List is focused on Schindler and not the people in the camps, right? Because you could, you know, there's a reason Schindler's List is focused on Schindler and not the people in the camps, right? Because Schindler has a strong internal conflict, right? Which is much harder to do if you're, you know, a victim of the Holocaust, right? It's just, you know, it's much harder to do. And he is criticized, isn't he, for the centrality that he, that the movie, for the fact that schindler is at the

center of the movie and yes and not but by putting by putting schindler you can actually tell the other stories better better right it's the interesting contradiction here right because it gives us a sort of an emotional perspective where we do not know is character going to choose option a or option b that's what you kind of want to be. And all my films strive for that, right? So we have it here with these three kids in the sense they're having to make the choice, how bad of gangsters do they want to be? Do they want to kill someone, right?

And we watch them in the film, discuss that amongst themselves, try and make an effort and they're not up to it. They each try at some point to try and be the guy and they just can't. These kids just can't do it right whereas you know stanley needed the same thing in the story and and for me that was him basically fighting his own desire because he's a talker and he's a man who wants to own truth he said

you know he gets up in front of court he's a litigator right he's a he's a federal attorney and speaks truth uh truth to people who do immoral things. And so he wants to be that guy. In the course of that, he starts to realize, as they express themselves and their background, as their humanity becomes more fully realized over the course of the film,

he realizes that he doesn't see them as in the scene that I just read to you. So his... Wait, so just to go a little bit more over his conflict. He believes himself to be a liberal who can see the broader context in which disadvantaged people act. And yet when he is in this situation, he struggles to maintain that perspective. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So that's another version of the conflict. And bookends with the fact that he has to go at the end of the film to a lineup and basically pick the young men out of the line, which was essentially assuring that justice will be served. So he's making this choice, right? He's come to see their humanity. He knows that the system is going to be incredibly harsh on them. And it was, they all got anywhere from, I think, 15 to 20 years, uh, and, and essentially sort of ruining their, their lives. Uh, and, and, and yet he's, you know, he, he still does it, uh, but he doesn't like it in the film. So describe that ending.

So in the movie version, you've been out back. Does the ending go the way the ending went in real life? Yes and no. I think one thing that it does is it makes him more empathetic to their plight, right? I won't say that the film sees their backgrounds as exculpatory, but the film does suggest that they deserve greater understanding than the system will give them because of the harsh backgrounds they come from. All of them, I think, are essentially fatherless and have problematic

backgrounds. We hear a little bit about that in the course of the film. In the real story, no. In the real story, Stan Albert, a victim of crime, wanted to see justice served, and justice was served. I don't think he felt particularly ambivalent about it. I don't know. I mean, in my discussions with him after he read the script, you know, it seemed to offend him that he owed them more than what was given to them in terms of how he portrayed them in the book. And he may not be wrong. I mean, I'm using his story for my own purposes, right? When we get back, Charles and I talk about who gets to tell whose stories. So in the movie version, he gets, they let him go. The young men are arrested.

And is the climax of the movie him picking him out of the... No, it's them being sentenced. Oh, it's them being sentenced. And remember, they haven't been able to look at each other really through the course of the film.

It's sort of an interesting thing is, you know, he's got the scarf which they've blindfolded him with so it sort of covers most of his face. And then they turn him away. They never really get a chance

to look at each other. And at the end of the film he basically in the courtroom has a chance to lock eyes with

Tlucky the sort of their leader and the first time these two people can actually see each other but he sort of

comes to a place where you know he can see the other finally and that's that's the best we can hope for from that story yeah but he sort of comes to a place where, you know, he can see the other violently. And that's the best we can hope for from that story. Yeah. It's a beautiful metaphor.

They're running throughout this, that we've two people who literally and figuratively cannot see each other. Yeah. And then by the end of the movie- And occupy, yeah, yeah. But occupy the same space. Yeah.

Even as they occupy the same space. Yeah, even as they occupy the same space, by the end of the movie, even as these young men are being sent off to jail, we, the audience, have some feeling that they're seeing each other for the first time. Right, right. Which is necessary because, as you say, if it's simply slam-bam,

if it's a Law & Order episode, then it's not interesting. And you can't do it, right? I mean, there is a history of, obviously, you know, the victim in TV shows and movies, you know, being white and the perpetrator being black,

but it's something that we've been uncomfortable with for a long time now, right? And certainly the idea of three black men preying on a white guy has always been, I mean, not always, but it's been complicated in recent years.

In the last 20, 30 years, it's been a complicated idea, right? And really it's why this thing was sort of in development hell because nobody ever got comfortable with it. So you finished the script and tell me what happens next. Who do you take it to first?

It goes immediately to a few directors. In fact, one director that first weekend calls me on a Sunday night, which never happens based on the weekend read, incredibly excited about it and saying, I'm all in. I love this. This is fantastic. Come Monday, he goes in the office. He has two interns who are graduate students from NYU who are both black who say, no, you can't do this. This is not going to work. And he backs out immediately. So he backs out 24

hours later. But there were a lot of directors who came on board. Unfortunately, there were no black directors available. I think, you know, I think a couple were approached. It was 2008, so there weren't quite as many as we have now, obviously, but no one was around. I think what we tried to do

is we tried to tone it down. We tried to sort of tone down, you know, I remember sort of sitting in the office with Paul going through and counting all the N-words and seeing how many we could take out just to sort of make down, you know, I remember sort of sitting in the office with Paul going through and counting all the N-words and seeing how many we could take out just to sort of make it a little bit more palatable.

Because it's raw. It's very raw. Then what happens? Well, what happens is a couple directors go away, and nobody really works until the great Milos Forman. Milos Forman, famous for directing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975. In 2007, he's well into his 70s. And Milos has a remarkable ability to do comedy and drama at the same time. And Milos says to me, when I first started unpacking the history of the project, he says, stop, stop. It doesn't matter.

If the characters are real, if the actors find in them real humanity and the actors bring their own truth to it, it will work. And all that other stuff will go away. And if it's problematic, we get rid of it in the editing room.

At the time, we called it political correctness. Don't worry about whether or not it's politically correct or not. If it's real and if it's human, we'll be totally fine. And he had another thing he would talk about, which was that, you know, any time you nestle up against censorship, you know you're in the zone where you're making something interesting.

In fact, he would talk about how, and he's from Czechoslovakia, how, you know, the great thing about having our actual sensor is they tell you exactly where the line is. So everybody knows exactly where the line is, and so that you can approach the line with great subtlety,

right? Because everyone knows where it is, and that's the thing that American culture does not have, is that sort of clear sense. No line. Until we, of course, do it. Well, in recent years, we've kind of created some lines for ourselves, but yes, there's no line. Right. And so he said, and so he said, it's good that we make people uncomfortable. It's good that it's raw. It's good that some of it's incredibly provocative because that's, what's going to, to make it real. And he fully owned it. And, you know, I get emotional thinking about it,

but he was just so open to what the thing was, right? And then, you know, I get a series of notes from him and I realize they're notes on a scene he's already done. And I get another series and I realize they're notes on something entirely different. And I get another series and I realize there are notes on something entirely different. And I call his wife and she's like, yeah, he's not been feeling well. Give me a couple

weeks. And then he never came back to it. At that point, I think she had realized that he just wasn't up to it. He was quite old. And so I finally find the guy that I think can bring it home and he's just not going to be able to do it, you know.

I think she worried that he wouldn't even have the stamina to do it, right? Because directing takes two years, takes two and a half years. So if you see problems at the beginning, you know, you got to remember where's this person going to be in two years. When does he die? He dies about three years later. And I do not know what shape he was in at the end. He may have been fully cognizant all the way to the end,

but he died a bit later. But can we just pause on Milos about this? So Milos is a person who comes out from under the Iron Curtain. He grows up in totalitarianism. You know, he has a kind of, I mean, if you're looking, so what this project, what you're saying is what this project needed

was an authenticity in its interpretation. You had written something. It needed fearlessness. It needed fear. And one way to do this is to find a black director with, you know, that's the solution we would do today. Correct.

Right. For whatever reason, there wasn't someone available. But the other version is to find someone like Milos. He started his career thumbing his nose at one of the history's most brutal authoritarian totalitarian regimes. So it's like, he's like, if anyone's going to say F it. It's Milos. It's Milos. And he did.

And he was, and it was, it was, I can't tell you how liberating it was. It was just shockingly liberating after, I think it had been three, maybe four years at that point, you know? And he's like, no, we will get this. Do not worry. This will not be our problem. Yeah. And you think he's right. His interpretation is right.

I do think he's right, yeah. I think what happens is if you hire actors who can bring something to it, if you listen to other people from other cultures, it's a communal effort, a film, right? And if you do that, you will find authenticity, you know, if you're looking for it. Because I know you well, if you permit me a little bit of psychoanalyzing, for those who don't know you, you are the son of an evangelical preacher from Texas. You grew up all over the world because your dad was smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe. In certain ways, you're such an

outsider to Hollywood. It's phenomenal. And the outsider. And The Outsider has, you know, in some ways, you and Milos see eye to eye on this because you're both outsiders. Right, right. It's one thing if this was written by the standard Hollywood screenwriter who is the privileged white guy who went to Harvard

and then, you know, did a graduate degree at NYU and then interned for a famous director and blah, blah, blah, right? That's not you though. There is a privilege in writing something like this. There is great advantage and privilege in not having a dog in the fight, in not being part of the worlds that you're portraying. So we understand the privilege that comes from belonging. The person who belongs can tell a certain kind of story with a degree of confidence and accuracy and verve that the outsider can't. But we're forgetting that there is a separate set of advantages

that come from being someone who doesn't belong to either of these worlds. And my point about you was that in this context, you're not part of Stanley's world, right? You're Charles from Texas. You're not part of his world, and you're not part of Lucky's world. You're off on your own little island. And that's an incredibly liberating moment to be the outsider. So I feel like we're overprivileging the set of advantages that comes from belonging.

And we have underestimated the set of storytelling advantages that come from being the fly on the wall who's just like, you know, you don't owe anything to Stanley. That's why you're able to do that. You're not – if you were part of his world, you would have been constrained in your portrayal of him. Similarly with Lucky. If you were part of his world, you would have been – you're un, you were unconstrained because you weren't, this wasn't, and that's like why it's so important for all of us in storytelling to defend the right of the storyteller to describe worlds of which they are not a part. That is, it's so essential that we defend that. Yeah, absolutely. And particularly for writers, right?

There's something about the screenwriter, which is different from the other jobs on the set, which you're required to give voice to dozens of different people, right? You know? And to be good at that, you need to be able to understand different types and embrace different worlds. And I do think you're right.

We've undervalued in a way what it means to be someone who lurks above it a little bit, right? Certainly in my field. Now, maybe in other fields it would be different, right? I think the end that people want is they want everyone from different backgrounds to be able to tell their story, to be in the position to sit in the director's chair if they want or to sell screenplays if they want. And that is

the goal, right? That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that we should silo off our industry in that way and silo off our subjects because we do, we do lose something when we are no longer communicating across, you know, not just cultural or racial lines, but ideological lines, you know. You know, what's interesting about this story told today is obviously it sort of, it fits, a project conceived in 2007 feels,

makes us a little, of this nature, makes us a little uneasy in 2024, nearly 20 years later. But the other thing is that what's interesting about it is that I feel like our attitude towards projects like this on the kind of racial periphery have become a binary. We think of white projects and black projects. Yes, that's right. And a white project is done by a white person and a black project is done by a black person. But this movie isn't black or white. It's about black meeting white person and a black person project is done by a black person but this movie isn't black or white it's about black meeting white and white meeting black and like so it's like it's not clear each side has a right to tell the story right and right a lot of what's what's

going on in this kind of like like when you talked about the one director loves it and then the interns read it the black and say you can't do it, is that it's a dispute about, they're obviously, understandably, reading this through their eyes as black beats white. Stanley's reading this as white beats black, right? Right, right, yeah. And it's an irresolvable, it's not,

what makes it fascinating is that I can't think of a movie that, a contemporary movie, I mean, this movie today would give us fits. I mean, it gave us fits, but it would give us fits today because no one can decide what it is. Exactly. It would aggravate an unresolved tension in our society. And I think the mistake I made is I assumed that I knew where society was going. I assumed that I knew where society was going. I assumed that I knew that what's going to happen is that we're all going to be better at working through our residual racist attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, and we're going to get closer and closer.

In fact, the film ends with Stanley listening to a bit of rap. And this was, of course, after Obama had been elected. So the sort of message of the film was, actually, we're on the road. You know, we're not there yet, but we're on the road. And of course, that didn't happen. Where I thought society was going is not where we went.

We retrenched back into, you know, even stronger understandings of the importance of race and not to some, you know, idealized version of, we're all just going to learn to ignore our differences more and more and embrace, you know, idealized version of, we're all just going to learn to ignore our differences more and more and embrace, you know, these things that won't matter.

Yeah. And, you know, you couldn't, I mean, you couldn't do the film today. You've been reading it today. I read it today in a restaurant. And I just found myself wincing, you know, every other page because it's, you know, I really went for it. I really, I mean, it's very provocative in places and people saying the things

that they're not supposed to say. You know, I'm always interested in things that feel uncomfortable and awkward for me. Like, I don't know, I want to go there. Because what that gives you, if you will sort of take on those subjects, is the texture of the world starts to become really interesting. You know what I mean? Because suddenly every little choice matters, you know? And that's why, you know, it's one of the scripts that I enjoyed writing the most because every little choice starts to matter, right? Because all comes laden with meaning.

Part of it's just a professional habit of, okay, it's awkward, it's uncomfortable, that's where I'm gonna go, right? But also part of it is, you know, I do feel like, you know, this is not writing a novel. This is a collective endeavor and we get to check our work with people of all sorts of all stripes. And, you know, if we're open and if we're all working hard, you know, we can, we can get to something that feels very true.

You try things and if they work, they work. And if they don't, they don't. And that's what this is. That's why I do this business. And it allows us

to take greater risk, I think, instead of less. Right? Because, you know, we're working together. There is no movie version of The Birthday Party.

When Milos Forman drops out, it's the end. The adaptation does not survive the harsh conditions and obstacles thrown in its way, which is a shame. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, with Tali Emlin and Ben-Nadav Hafri. Editing by Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Echo Mountain.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Next time on Development Hell, Patty Jenkins talks about her R-rated dog movie. This is, I don't, is this, this sort of, on one one level is super bleak. It's not. It's magical. No, it is. It is. The journey is bleak and it seems like it's going to be, but it ends up being magical. And heads up that our friends over at the

Happiness Lab have a special episode coming your way soon to celebrate World Happiness Day. I'm in it, talking about running and the journey versus the destination. Spoiler alert, I'm a destination guy, not a journey guy. It'll be dropping into this feed on March 20th, but you can find happiness tips from Dr. Laurie Santos any day over at the Happiness Lab.