Interview (Part 2): Michael Kujak

My interview with 2021 Black List writer for his script Follow.

Michael Kujak wrote the original screenplay “Follow” which landed on the 2021 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Mike about his creative background, his script, the craft of screenwriting, and what making the annual Black List has meant to him.

Today in Part 2 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Mike discusses what inspired him to write “Follow,” a combination of interest in the rise of social media “influencers” and stalker movies from the 80s and 90s.

Scott: That’s a nice segue to your script “Follow.” Here’s a plot summary:

“When a social media influencer meets a fan at a meet and greet, she’s so taken with her cleverness — that’s the fan — and vulnerability that she, the influencer, invites the fan to intern with her for the summer. At first, they’re an unstoppable team, but soon the influencer is forced to wonder who she has led into her life.”

What was the inspiration for “Follow”?

Michael: This idea came out of my friendship with Rachel. She was a comedian out here. She was doing standup, but she started doing digital comedy videos with a lot of influencers out here. When we moved out here, we didn’t know what a YouTube influencer was.

I would watch YouTube to watch sports highlights or bloopers from The Office. I wasn’t following influencers on YouTube, but when we moved down here, we met kids that were nineteen years old, and they had a million dollars, and they lived in a mansion in the Hills.

We were like, “Oh, what is this world?” and so she started doing videos with them. I got invited to a party out there, and we were one of the first people to arrive.

We showed up at this influencer’s house in the Hills, and there was a teenage girl that was there. We were like, “Oh, that’s a little weird,” because this is an adult LA hipster party, and there’s this teenager there.

Me and Rachel went up to her and we were just making small talk with her, and she had won a contest to hang out with her favorite influencer for the day, who was this girl whose house we were at. You could tell the girl was a little bit sad and a little bit scared at being at this adult party.

The influencer had ignored her because she’s trying to host this party, and so we just made small talk with her until her Uber showed up to take her to the airport. She was a sweet girl. She was from Ohio, and she played lacrosse.

When she left, I couldn’t get her out of my head because I could tell she was disappointed with what she wanted that day to be, or what that relationship was going to be with this influencer that she was a huge fan of.

That stuck in my head as a relationship of something I wanted to do a story about. Later on, I thought mixing that relationship in with the classic format from stalker thrillers of the late ’80s and early ’90s, like Single White Female or Basic Instinct to Misery, there’s a bunch.

Just that relationship in that basic thriller format from 20 or 30 years ago was something I wanted to try. When I signed with my manager, John, he looked over the ideas that I had in this list of them, and that one stuck out to him. This one, he wanted to develop with me.

Scott: When I read your script, I had noted some of the same movie associations: Misery, Single White Female, Fatal Attraction. There was an ’81 film called The Fan, that stars Lauren Bacall, and then, of course, All About Eve.

You have a quote in there from your Protagonist, where she says, “You ask kids today what they want to be, and they don’t say astronaut, athlete, or movie star. They say they want to be an influencer.”

I remember reading a poll. It was in some newspaper or something, where it said that the number one thing above and beyond anything else that the kids aspire to is to be famous. This does seem to hit it on the target.

I’m assuming that made it appeal to you like, “Well, I’m thinking about something that can be relevant and have an audience.”

Michael: It did fit pretty naturally to me because a lot of these stalker thrillers, culturally, were darker fairytales or warnings, the danger of going too far…

Scott: Morality tales.

Michael: Morality tales, exactly. When I moved out here and I got used to that influencer culture and saw that girl at that party, I couldn’t get those ideas out of my head. What I later learned to be called parasocial relationships, or these relationships that we have with people online. We know them, but they don’t know us. Who we follow and who follows us.

It was just intriguing to me to explore those ideas of an artist’s relationship to their fans, an artist’s relationship to the emerging technology, and looking at how to find a balance there.

A creator’s relationship to their fan base can get toxic quickly if the entire way you make money is to monetize these young kids’ eyeballs. That’s essentially what you’re doing if you want to be a successful influencer and pay the bills.

I wanted Follow to be a little bit more of a cautionary fairy tale to these young kids who want to do this great thing, which is inspiring other people with their YouTube videos on whatever their craft or their passion is. I didn’t want to completely demonize it. I just wanted to show how parasocial relationships can be quite complicated.

Scott: It’s a slippery slope for both the influencer and the fan because it’s a two-way street. They need each other. The two main characters, there’s Hannah who’s the influencer and there’s Millie who is a 15-year-old girl, who is the fan. Who came first in your story-crafting process?

Michael: They came together. Hannah was based on an influencer that I knew, a general lifestyle influencer. I had her in my mind pretty early on. Millie took a little bit longer to find, but it was a really interesting one to write once I had her down.

One thing that separates this script a little bit from the classic stalker thrillers is that before, in the past, the antagonists are very clearly the antagonists. They’re crazy psychopaths, and Millie is that but we as the audience also, hopefully, empathize with her a bit more.

Like you said, it’s that two-way street. She’s younger. She’s more impressionable, and she’s doing things for more interesting reasons than the classic stalker thrillers, where they want to become the other person that they’re obsessed with. They want to date the other person they’re obsessed with.

Millie believes in what Hannah’s doing and what her channel is about. She was lonely. It saved her life when she was younger. She believes in what Hannah’s preaching, even more than Hannah does. Hannah’s the person who started this whole little community. She knows how it’s fake, how it’s produced.

Millie truly believes in what Hannah is preaching. That makes her devout and sincere in this compelling way.

Scott: It’s pretty easy to slide into Millie’s worldview, and even start to see the…Not that she is the Protagonist. She’s not. To see the world as if through her eyes. She’s bullied. She lives in relative wealth. Her parents jet off to Aspen, if that’s to be believed. We don’t know whether that’s true or not. For all we know, they could be buried in the backyard somewhere.

I always tell my students, you’ve got to find some point of empathy for the nemesis. You don’t necessarily need to sympathize with them, but you have to have some point of emotional connection. You did a really good job with that Millie character.

You feel like this person, Hannah, is important to her, that she has been bullied, that she is a misfit and has found meaning. Let me ask you a question.

Michael: Sure.

Scott: You’ve got these fans of Hannah known as “Fannahs.” Did you come up with Hannah and then hit on the Fannah thing? That’s pretty clever.

Michael: No. I came up with that pretty quick as just a rhyme. I find it funny that all these influencer communities, they eventually…bigger artists, too. Everyone eventually gives their audience some type of name, or their fans some type of nickname. It’s a great way to brand who your audience is. It gives them a sense of identity.

Like Beyoncé and the Beehive. There’s a million of them. Tying that audience together is a smart thing to do.

It’s also very good for marketing and all that, but that was, again, just how it can be a very slippery slope that you’re marketing yourself as these people’s friends, someone you tell something intimate details of your life. Yet, it’s all just to monetize it in a very hyper-focused version of reality television.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Mike does a deep dive into the central characters of his Black List script “Follow.”

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Mike is repped by:

John Zaozirny (Bellevue)
CJ Fight (WME)

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.