The First Article I Ever Reverse-Engineered into a Film Sale was Personal

It was always family lore: In 1977, my parents took $2M worth of fur coats, six top models, and an entourage of fashion people to Chile to shoot a Neiman Marcus catalogue. One of the worst storms in history buried them under 12 feet of snow and they had to be rescued by the dictator Pinochet’s military helicopters.

I knew the story was a movie.

So, I partnered with journalist Mickey Rapkin (who wrote the article PITCH PERFECT was based on) and he wrote the story for Elle Magazine.

It went viral. We had multiple studio offers and it sold to Paramount for director Paul Feig (BRIDESMAIDS).

That version never got made, but it was my first step away from the studio desk job and toward being a creative producer who finds and generates IP that leads to film sales.

Now I’ve sold many articles with Mickey, books and short stories from other writers, and my own short stories.

I feel strongly that Substack can be a generator of this kind of short form content. Not only short fiction but articles like this: