Interview (Part 3): Jake Disch

My interview with 2023 Black List writer for his script The Adults in the Room.

Jake Disch has made the annual Black List two times: In 2018 for his script Gunfight, then in 2023 with The Adults in the Room. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Jake about his creative background, the craft of screenwriting, and the challenges associated with writing a story based on actual historical events.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day this week, Jake discusses some narrative choices he made to adapt historical events and real-life characters into a screenplay.

Scott: In a way, it’s its own version of another movie that comes up, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, where you got that Donnie Azoff character (Jonah Hill) in relation to Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), the story’s central character.

That was an interesting choice that you made, because you’re not only telling the story through the perspective of Nishad, but he’s being interviewed by these two US lawyers.

Jake: Yeah.

Scott: That was great because it allowed you to jump back and forth between the present and the past and really highlight those key excerpts, chapters from the past.

Jake: The story needed a framing device. You needed a way to be able to explain all this complex stuff without just pumping the brakes on the whole movie.

Yeah, it’s somewhat convenient, you have these US attorneys talking to him, but also that lets us have the US attorney stand in for the audience and ask the questions the audience would be asking in a scene where these guys are talking fluently about crypto.

It’s totally serendipitous, but Gary and Caroline both flipped pretty quickly.

Nishad didn’t flip, but I had already decided we needed to use him…The first draft of the script actually had three points of view, and it’s Caroline, Gary, and Nishad. We were doing a little bit of a Rashomon thing, but that complicated an already complicated story.

I settled on Nishad, who hadn’t flipped and talked to the attorneys yet. I thought, “It’s probably only a matter of time. He’s going to do this.” If you look, the last date in the script is somewhere on March 23, 2023, or something. The script went out the first week of April.

He flipped as we were finalizing the last draft of the script. I was like, “Oh, thank God, I don’t have to just pretend it’s true anymore.”

[laughter]

Scott: That was a little bit of a gamble on your part.

Jake: You’ve got to gamble. The whole script is a gamble because the journalism’s still coming out. I’m putting the car together, and it’s already on the road. I was reading breaking news and changing my outline day by day as things were coming out.

At a certain point, you just think…You read the same things over and over and different takes on the same thing, then you start thinking, “It feels like we’re circling the truth here.” I have enough, based on all the journalism aggregated and the people I’ve spoken to, to take a crack at this.

Trial happens. I got some things wrong. I’m not afraid to admit it. But I’d say I got like 70 percent of it right.

Scott: Well, yeah. This is an ongoing concern that screenwriters have. First of all, this is like a really hard thing to do, adaptations, period, but adapting real life and, in your case, adapting it as it’s unfolding in some respects, right? It’s like, you’re not doing a documentary.

Jake: The whole time I was writing this, my managers, John and Zach, would remind me often that Mark Zuckerberg was already dating his now wife when he launched Facebook, and that iconic brilliant opening scene in “The Social Network” is made up out of whole cloth, and his entire motivation for starting the company in that movie is made up.

Is the movie accurate? No. Does the movie feel any less emotionally real and resonant because it’s not accurate? Also, no. Yeah, something to keep in the back of my mind anytime I tackle a true story.

Scott: Sorkin, wanted to tell the story of a guy who creates the greatest social network. He himself is antisocial. That’s why he went that route.

Let’s talk about some of these other characters because you got Nishad, who really buys into this, this whole thing on effective altruism. Caroline and Gary, could you maybe talk about these two characters and what their roles were, their personalities?

Jake: Caroline is a very interesting character. Somebody found her Tumblr blog immediately after the whole company fell apart. There’s a lot of really interesting, strange stuff in there.

There’s a bit in the script where she and Sam get coffee in San Francisco, and she’s already dressed to go to a live action roleplay. She’s dressed like a wizard or something. That’s real.

You listen to her talk, and she has this cadence. A lot of these people talk really, really, really fast because they are used to working really fast. She’s notable in that she talks a little slower. And she and Sam were dating for a lot of the time. By all accounts, she was really, really into Sam. You have Nishad, the acolyte who buys into the effect of altruism of it. Then, Caroline, who was not a natural born trader like Sam was. She was into effective altruism and she was into Sam. You have that other angle of the romantic eyes on Sam. So in a few ways she almost feels like a little bit of an outsider.

Then, Gary is just like an old high school math camp friend of Sam’s. He’s the one who never, that I could find, did any kind of public speaking, podcast, anything.

I did read Michael Lewis’s book well after I’d finished the script. In the book, Michael Lewis says that he could never get Gary to say anything more than one word in response to any question. I was very happy to read that because I made him very quiet and deadpan in the script because I had no idea who this guy was.

Reading that book and finding out he’s a very quiet and deadpan guy made me pretty happy. It also felt like everybody else talks so much in the script. To have one guy who can give a one word answer is really helpful just for dialogue pacing purposes sometimes.

[laughter]

Scott: This Sam character, it’s almost like if it hadn’t been crypto, it could have been easily some sort of pseudo-religion, like a cult, because he’s got that kind of personality.

He says, “Because we’re helping people, and you can’t fix the world with a screwdriver. It’s all about taking big risks, breaking systems, and rebuilding. Fuck a billion dollars, fuck a screwdriver, we need a sledgehammer.” He dreams big. People got caught up in that dream, right?

Jake: Yeah, and I think it’s easy to. It happens over and over.

Scott: There’s this dynamic with Nishad, where he’s in the present and the lawyers are asking him questions. Then, you go back into the past, and you see the next sequence. Then, you come back to Nishad, the lawyers say something to him like, “So you didn’t realize this was…?”

[laughter]

He says something like, “Well, in crypto, there’s lots of stuff that seems illegal but isn’t.” It’s starting to dawn on him, like, “What was I thinking?” Even in the course of that conversation he has with the lawyers, there’s an arc going on there where he’s realizing, “Yeah, I really did buy into the…sip the KoolAid here.”

Jake: The way they sent money back and forth between the two companies, I think it’s been proven now that they weren’t the only crypto trading company to be doing that kind of thing. There’s certain things that just never fly in traditional finance that are like norms in the crypto space.

I am a crypto skeptic, I didn’t know much about it going into the script. All the research I did, did not make me less of a skeptic.

I wanted to make sure over the course of the script that I at least got my own voice in there. That line in particular is definitely part of my thoughts, like, “Maybe things that seem illegal but aren’t are still bad to do.”

Scott: It’s a roller coaster ride. You track in the story, they get that initial big funding from the guy who was a Skype dude, and then at some point they decide, “Well, we need to go to another country.” They end up in Hong Kong, and then eventually they go to the Bahamas.

The rationalizations of these people is amazing. Sam saying, “We need to have this penthouse, we need to have this stuff to show the people, potential investors, that we’re serious, we’re not like six guys in an apartment in Berkeley.” The allure of it all, you really get a sense of how powerful the allure of money is in this story.

I’m reminded there’s a biblical verse, 1 Timothy 6:10, which says, “The root of all evil is the love of money.” I thought, “Man, that’s the motto for this story.” Maybe talk about that slippery slope that Nishad goes down and the allure of wealth as you’re writing this thing.

Jake: I think that’s the whole story, is the allure of wealth. These people don’t think they want money for themselves. They think they want to help, but when you become wealthy enough, all of a sudden, you are surrounded by more and more money. People want to give you more money when you have that much money.

People also want to take your money, obviously when you have that much money, but like, Tom Brady, Giselle, Steph Curry, and Larry David don’t come knocking on your door because you have one million dollars. They come because you are somebody they can profit from.

It’s all about the money. I think a lot of the first half of the script is this power fantasy of, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just spin money out of thin air? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you and your friends could go anywhere in the world and people would welcome you and love you, and want to do business with you?”

But a big part of my operating thesis for this script is that no one goes from living in an apartment in Berkeley in 2017 to being one of the richest people on the planet in 2022 without hurting a lot of people.

I don’t care if you say you’re doing good. You can’t make that much money without hurting people. Jeff Bezos isn’t a billionaire just because he had a great idea on Amazon. He’s also a billionaire because his drivers piss in bottles.

I think to me, it’s the allure of the money, but the money is also the trap. You’re setting it for yourself. You’re going to hurt people.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Jake reflects on how The Adults in the Room and the story of Sam Bankman-Fried is a cautionary tale about the role and influence of money in modern society.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Jake is repped by Bellevue Productions.

@jake_disch
@jakedisch.bsky.social

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