The Birthday Party with Charles Randolph | Development Hell

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It's Oscar night, 2016.

The stage of the Dolby Theater 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.

Agreed or 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 glagwell 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 uh how's it going mal i haven't seen you in forever i know i miss you charles let's do our thingy we can 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

tell me how that whole thing begins.

Start at the beginning.

So

Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise buy a book from a guy named Stanning Albert called The Birthday Party, which is a true story of him in

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, right off Fifth Avenue.

And there's another young black man waiting who opens the door and a third 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 an apartment with three young women.

It's basically three young women that sort of work for Lucky, maybe.

It's kind of hard to tell

as prostitutes.

And he's held there for,

you know, 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, you know, 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.

So it's a test they do at one point.

So it's just a really tense situation where he's afraid for his life.

And

it turns out there's no way

they can get the money out.

And so they decide to let him go.

Well, they're adolescents, too.

They're adolescents.

It's adolescence.

Yes, right.

It's right.

It's three teenage boys.

Absolutely.

Correct.

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

you know and um so it's you know there's 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 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 it's just yeah it's it's it's it's it's that youth you know uh 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's a real community amongst these kids, right?

They are wholly reliant on each other, you know, and this is the only family they've got.

And

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, extremely, you know, 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 what I think, I think that's, 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, with these young people, but, but then, you know, 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 a white guy that 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, you know, in a, 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 him.

Right.

And then what happens is, you know, in the script, you know, he starts to rebel against this situation.

He gets angry and they start to work through their own

prejudices against one another.

And it sort of culminates a in a in a scene where

basically he unloads on them and he gives voice, I think, a little bit of that old essay from Podhertz.

Is it Norman?

Can you remember if it's Norman Poturton?

Is that right?

Your Negro problem and mine.

Exactly.

My Negro problem.

My Negro problem and yours.

Yes, exactly.

That's right.

Yeah.

Actually, both Charles and I got it a little wrong.

It's My Negro Problem and Ours by Norman Podhoritz, published in 1963.

It's a famous, and if you read it today, really unsettling essay, where Podhoritz 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.

And I could actually read it for you because I have it on the script.

I can read the scene to you if you wanted.

I do, but I want you to

do that.

Do you want to do that?

Yeah.

And you'll see, I mean, the piece

is, you know, it's quite raw, really.

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 risk, 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.

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 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 say 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 Rin'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 Rin 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.

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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?

Yes.

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 that 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, 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've faced, right?

In order to understand, to earn the right to have, to

make heroes out of the spotlight team, there has to be a 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 culprit case, the choice to make Stanley Alpert different than the real Stanley Alpert, 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 Alpert, right?

He's always making jokes.

He's always, you know,

he's always referencing things.

You know,

he thinks of himself as a liberal, you know.

And it allows me to, as 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 Putter'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 hearts.

For us to kind of, for the movie to come alive.

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 step 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 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

a victim of the Holocaust.

It's much harder to do.

And he's he is criticized, isn't he, for the centrality that he, that the movie,

for the fact that that schindler's at the center of the movie and yes and but by putting by putting schindler we you can actually tell the other stories better better right exactly it's it's the interesting contradiction here right because it gives us a sort of an emotional perspective for 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 all my films strive for that right so we have it here in with these three kids in the sense they're having to make the choice how bad a gangster 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 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 gets up in front of court.

He's a litigator, right?

He's a federal attorney and speaks truth

to people people who do immoral things.

And so he wants to be that guy.

And 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 a scene that I just read to you.

So his wait, so the just

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.

No, absolutely.

So that's another version of the conversation.

Yeah, well, 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

and essentially sort of ruining their lives.

And yet he's, you know, he still does it, but he doesn't like it in the film.

So you describe that, describe that anyway.

In the movie version, are you now back?

So 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.

And we hear a little bit about that in the course of the film.

In the real story, no.

In the real story, you know,

Stan Albert, a victim of crime, wanted to see justice served and justice was served.

And 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,

he owed them more than,

you know, more

than what was given to them in terms of how he portrayed them in the book.

And he may not be wrong.

I'm using his story for my own purposes.

When we get back, Charles and I talk about who gets to tell whose stories.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

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And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

American Military University is the number one provider of education to our military and veterans in the country.

They offer something truly unique: special rates and grants for the entire family, making education affordable not just for those who serve, but also for their loved ones.

If you have a military or veteran family member and are looking for affordable, high-quality education, AMU is the place for you.

Visit AMU.apus.edu slash military to learn more.

That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

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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.

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 walk 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 the best we can hope for from that story.

Yeah.

It's a beautiful metaphors are running throughout this

that we've two people who literally and figuratively cannot see each other.

And then by the end of the movie, it occupies

the same space.

Yeah,

even as they occupy the same space.

And by the end of the movie, even as these young men are being sent off to jail, we have, we, the audience, have some feeling that they're seeing each other for the first time.

Right.

Which is necessary because, as you say, if it's simply slam bam,

if it's a law and 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, three black men praying on a white guy has always been, I mean, not always, but has 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.

know, I think

a couple were approached.

It was a slightly, it was 2008, so there weren't quite as many as we have now, obviously, but no one, 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 it a little bit more palatable to people 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 Foreman.

Milos Foreman, 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 dramedy and

comedy and drama at the same time.

And Milos says...

to me when we i first start 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, right?

And all that other stuff will go away.

And if it's problematic, we get rid of it in the editing room.

Don't, we, at the time, we called it political correctness, right?

So don't worry about the political, whether or not it's politically correct or not.

If it's real and if it's human, and we, it will be totally fine.

And he had another thing he would talk about, which was that, you know, anytime you

nestle up against censorship, you know you're in the zone where you're making something interesting.

In fact, he talked about, he would talk about how, and he's from Czechoslovakia, how, you know, the great thing about having our actual censor is they tell you exactly where the line is.

So everybody knows exactly where the line is.

And so that you can, you can, 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, that sort of, you know,

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 yeah 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 and and he fully owned it and

you know i get i i get emotional thinking about it but he 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 call his wife and she's like, yeah, you know, he's not been feeling well.

Give me a couple of 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.

You know, he was quite old.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and so, you know, I finally find the guy that I think can bring it home.

And he's just not, he's just can't, 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?

You know, 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?

How short?

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 it's what's but could 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.

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 would really

have something.

It needed fearlessness.

It needed fear.

And

one way to do this is to find a black director with, you know, that's that's the solution we would do today.

Correct.

Correct.

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 eff it,

it's Milos.

It's Milos.

And he did.

And he was, and it was, it was just, 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.

And he's like, no,

we will get this.

Do not worry.

This will not be our problem.

And you think he's...

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.

And if you do that, you will find authenticity

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're the son of an evangelical

preacher from Texas.

You grew up all over the world because your dad was

smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe.

You're so outside, in certain ways, you're such an outsider to Hollywood.

It's phenomenal.

And

the outsider has,

in some ways,

you and Milos see eye-eye on this because

you're both outsiders.

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

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?

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 there's so so much,

that's an incredibly liberating

moment to be the outside.

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 were 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 you know there's something about the screenwriter, which is different from the other,

you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 sort of sit in the director's chair if they want or to sell screen pages 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, you know, 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

fits

a project conceived in 2007 feels a little makes us a little uneasy, 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 person 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 a lot of 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

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.

And like 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.

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 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.

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

even stronger understandings of the importance of race and not to some, you know, idealized version of all just going to learn to ignore our differences more and more and embrace, you know,

these, these things that won't matter.

Yeah.

And, you know, you couldn't, I mean, you couldn't do the film today.

Even reading it today, I read it today in a restaurant and I just shared myself wincing, you know, every other page because it's, you know, I, you know, I really went for it.

I really am.

It's very provocative in places in 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 kick 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 going to 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.

It's

why I do this business.

And it allows us to take greater risk, I think, instead of less, right?

Because

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 Nadaf Haffrey.

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 sort of, on 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 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.

Lori Santos any day over at the Happiness Lab.

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