From Left: Jesse Barron, Gary Baum, Amanda Chicago Lewis, Jessica Pressler
Gary Miller/Wireimage; Emma Mcintyre/Getty Images; Courtesy Of Subject; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
In a TV season packed with true-crime stories ripped from newspaper headlines, four limited series found inspiration in longform magazine articles: Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville and Pam & Tommy, Peacock’s Angelyne and Netflix’s Inventing Anna.
Journalist Jesse Barron first read about the case that inspired The Girl From Plainville in the news before he spent a year reporting out the story of Michelle Carter, who was convicted in 2017 of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Conrad Roy III, after it was concluded that Carter repeatedly pressured Roy to kill himself. Going to court hearings and eventually moving to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to be near Roy’s family, Barron became embedded in the town and the community. “Part of why it took so long was that there was a mystery at the center of the story. It was very difficult to solve,” Barron tells THR. “This was a story where the two subjects can’t talk, because Conrad was dead and Michelle was prohibited from talking to media by the court. It required going into the community, into people’s homes and into the lives of the classmates to understand what had happened.” The finished piece was published in Esquire‘s October 2017 issue.
Several studios became interested in the material after HBO aired its documentary I Love You, Now Die, which also focused on the case. Universal Cable Productions bought the rights in August 2019, and a year later the project was given a straight-to-series order with Elle Fanning attached to play Carter. From the beginning, Barron was very involved in the show, and earned credits as writer and consulting producer. “I felt an enormous responsibility to the actual subjects who had admitted me into their lives in this period of incredible pain,” he says. “I thought if I could be in the room, and help in even the tiniest, most infinitesimal way to shape the narrative, that I would be honoring my responsibility to the people who shared their story.”
New York magazine’s Jessica Pressler, who wrote the report on which Inventing Anna is based, said she initially came across the story of fake German heiress Anna Sorokin (also known as Anna Delvey), who conned people into giving her hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, goods and services, through a friend of hers who was a courthouse photographer for the New York Post and other tabloids.
“When I started reading about it, I was surprised by the level of people that she was dealing with: these big law firms and financial institutions,” Pressler tells THR. “They’re not the kind of places where you’d expect a 26-year-old, who is a nobody, to show up.” Pressler sent a letter to Delvey, who was in prison at Rikers Island; Delvey called Pressler and the reporter went to visit her, and over the course of months, the story started to take shape.
About a week after the article’s May 2018 publication, Pressler (and New York, which owned the rights to the story) received a few emails from people who were interested in adapting it for the small screen. But Pressler’s call with Shondaland stuck with her. “They had this really relaxing hold music, and the conversation with them was so nice. It was a notable conversation because it was all women,” Pressler recalls, adding that her foremost concern was that whoever adapted the story would take care of the real people the characters are based on, and “not knock them.”
But unlike Barron, who remained heavily involved with his show, Pressler handed off her story and rescinded control after making her decision to work with Shondaland.
Journalist Amanda Chicago Lewis was at the right place at the right time when she heard about the untold story of how Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape was stolen. In 2014, she was freelancing for L.A. Weekly and was looking for the next big-swing story. Attending a party at a mattress store, she met a person who she felt had interesting stories to tell. She invited them for drinks a couple of weeks later, and 30 minutes into the conversation, the person told her, “I happen to know the person who stole Pamela Anderson’s sex tape.” Everything that source told her checked out in the court archives Lewis examined, and after Rolling Stone committed to running the story should it pan out, she set out to find Rand Gauthier (played by Seth Rogen in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy).
“I had figured out where his office was in this office park in Northern California, and I waited outside of it for several days,” Lewis tells THR. “He miraculously wrote back to a Facebook message I had sent and invited me over for lunch. We talked for four or five hours, and it’s all on the record.”
Almost a year later, the story was published, and studios and networks started reaching out to Lewis right away. “There was a lot of interest,” Lewis says. “Rand did not want to be involved, which changed the equation for a lot of people … but ultimately, when it came down to it, I chose the people who I thought would be the most likely to actually make it happen and wouldn’t require too much from me, because I was just very engaged with other work.”
Point Grey Pictures, a production company founded by Evan Goldberg and Rogen, with Annapurna Television, Limelight and Ramon Films, scored the rights to the article, and Lewis said she took a step back from the story after it was published in 2014; it wasn’t until 2018 that the series went into development, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan as Anderson and Lee.
“I didn’t sign the final paperwork on the option until early 2016, and then I was slightly involved in sending all my research to the guy who ended up being the showrunner, Robert Siegel,” says Lewis. “Then he took that and he wrote two episodes, and then they shopped those episodes around. Hulu put in a series order at the end of 2018, and then they were going to shoot in the summer of 2019, but it got so busy that they actually pushed it to the summer of 2020. And then when the pandemic started, I was like, ‘I don’t think they’re shooting this summer.’ “
In 2017, THR journalist Gary Baum wrote an article that finally solved the mystery surrounding the real identity of Angelyne, the L.A. billboard icon who was famous simply for being famous. “At The Hollywood Reporter, I [gave] myself the project of covering the intersection of Los Angeles the city and the industry, and I wanted to cover Hollywood as a theme — the theme of celebrity and the semantics of Hollywood. To me, the project was looking into Angelyne as almost like a landmark or an idea — like, what was her deal? I was interested in her as almost a part of the Los Angeles landscape.”
The 2017 investigative piece followed a 2015 interview conducted with Angelyne — which drove Baum to want to find out more about her. “It advanced the idea that there was a darkness that drove and deepened the superficiality that she presented, but also, the general idea that there was a complexity to this cartoon character that she was known as for decades. It was obvious that there was going to be something more complex. That was the goal the whole time.”
After much negotiation with Angelyne, who was “very headstrong and controlling,” the story was published — and just days after, a lot of high-profile talent reached out to THR to adapt the story for TV, film and even Broadway. But it was producer-star Emmy Rossum’s TV pitch that stuck with Baum.
“It wasn’t really my decision, but I will say that I liked Emmy and her team’s passion and intensity, and I liked the fact that she was working with Sam [Esmail] on it and had the heat and ability to make it happen,” says Baum, who is listed as a consultant on the show and answered questions from writers and offered notes on various drafts of the script.
In the show, journalist Jeff Glaser (portrayed by Alex Karpovsky) is based on Baum. “When they first optioned the material, I had no idea that I or a fictionalized version of me would be written into the material,” Baum says. “I didn’t know this until they sent a draft a couple of years later.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.