Interview (Part 4): 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 4 of a 6-part series to run each day this week, 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.

Scott: I don’t know if you would call them subplots, but there are a couple of times where you drop into like normal people, I guess you would say. Then, the denouement at the end, where you’re cutting back to them and just seeing how their lives were, in some ways, destroyed by their faith in this guy.

Jake: That was important to me, in large part because anyone I talked to who is in this world said that, if you’re going to write this, you have to make sure you include the victims.

I think that it’s easy to have fun watching a guy get what’s his or whatever, but you have to remind yourself always that real people got hurt. A lot of those people are his own employees who kept all their money on FTX. Then, a lot of them were stuck in the Bahamas with no way out of there because all their money was gone.

Scott: Yeah. You have a moment with Nishad where he calls up his parents. He’s on the verge of tears, saying, “I don’t have any money. I just want to come home.” He starts crying.

Jake: He’s in a multi-million dollar penthouse crying to his parents about how he has no money.

Scott: That’s a metaphor for the whole crypto thing, isn’t it?

Jake: Ha, absolutely.

Scott: One thing that I thought that Sam did, apart from just the fact that he is extremely adept at moving and figuring out the angle, is that he kept insisting, “We need to move a lot faster,” right?

Jake: Yeah.

Scott: I think that that makes it even harder to disconnect from it. If you’re just frantically doing stuff 24/7 to support this thing, you don’t even have a chance to think. That was an interesting dynamic that he kept pressing them to go faster and faster.

Jake: Yeah, and I think that there’s two elements to that. It’s definitely based in fact, this company grew astonishingly fast. A lot of that was the crypto bull market. They really took off during COVID when Bitcoin was going gangbusters.

It’s also this philosophy of effective altruism. You’re not just trying to make some money, you’re trying to make all the money. If you stop and think about what you’re doing, that goes against Sam’s whole ethos. You’re not taking the risks, so you’re not trying to grow which means you’re not trying hard enough to save the world.

There’s that aspect to it, and there’s also creating urgency in the story. That’s a craft thing, in that once they have all the money and they’re on top of the world and Tom Brady makes a cameo or whatever, where are your stakes?

Your stakes are the Sam character is going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing until he pushes you off a cliff.

Scott: Let’s talk about these, because it’s true, all these celebrities. Let’s see. There’s this guy Nathaniel, I guess he’s a marketing guru or something like that. He says “You need to find faces, everyone you can trust” and boom, you brought Tom Brady. Nathaniel says this thing, he says, “The eccentric billionaire genius is a hot item right now. Just look at Elon.”

Jake: This whole story of Sam Bankman-Fried is also a great cautionary tale for why we shouldn’t lionize billionaires. Again, you’re not a billionaire unless you’ve stepped on a lot of people who aren’t billionaires on your way up, and you have to keep standing on them in order to keep your money.

There is a weird culture around of people who don’t stand to profit from billionaires, and in many cases, aren’t taking advantage of billionaires, and yet love billionaires. This is a huge cautionary tale around creating that cult of personality around someone just because they have money. It’s hard not to throw an Elon reference in there because of that.

Scott: Sam stepped in it because he pissed off a billionaire, this guy CZ, who in effect is a nemesis character and was key to bringing the company down. That’s all based on historical truth.

Jake: I may have taken maybe the most liberties with the CZ character just because what he did is really pretty simple. His motivations were maybe more complex than what I present, which is like, “Screw this kid. I’m going to toss him out the window,” or whatever.

I don’t think he knew when he announced that he was not going to buy FTX just how bad it would get. It winds up hurting him too. Crypto crashes really hard. He ends up under investigation. He’s being charged with the crimes now. There was some reckless action on his part too.

I thought including someone who’s a real crypto guy was important, because Sam was never even a real crypto guy. He got into crypto through effective altruism. He was not a crypto native, but I have this crypto native in CZ who’s pulling the strings and doesn’t like the way the new guy is doing business, who felt like a very natural kind of antagonist.

Scott: Here’s a moment, it’s right at the very end, where SBF is in voiceover doing this thing. This is what I was talking about, over the normal people and then we’re going through Nishad, Caroline, and whatnot.

He says, it’s his final line of dialogue, “My goal, my one goal is to do right by my customers. Again, I’m sorry.”

That moment ends with this scene description: “SBF takes in a deep, self-satisfied breath. He smiles a tiny, private smile.” It reminded me of the ending of “Psycho” where she says, “I wouldn’t even hurt a fly.”

[laughter]

Jake: That dialogue is verbatim his tweets. His own tweets that I think are still up. It felt so natural. He knows what he did, he knew what he’d been doing. When you read those tweets back, it feels sinister.

He’s trying to hold it together. He’s trying to keep people from entirely bailing. He’s hoping to get investors to come and save him. At that moment on the beach, to me, it was really him being like, in his head, I really think the only thought in there is, “Let’s try again.”

Scott: Yeah, even when he sees Nishad at some point, he’s still in a state of denial. That’s part of the gambling thing. It’s an addiction, too.

Jake: Absolutely. Yeah. Even at his own trial, the guy’s saying, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.” He took the stand in his own defense with absolutely no plan. He bombed on the stand, but he really thought, and really still thinks that everything he did was an honest mistake.

Scott: Yeah, that his one big mistake was declaring bankruptcy.

Jake: Yeah, that he’s smart enough, and that he’s the only one good enough that could have pulled the company out of the hole they were in. By declaring bankruptcy, he thinks he doomed himself and everyone else.

Scott: It’s a terrific script. What’s the status of the script now?

Jake: We have producers attached. We’re out to talent. I finished the script right before the strike.

Scott: At the very least, I’m sure it’s getting you a lot of meetings as well as it should. I’d like to ask some craft questions. I’m going to start by asking some questions about the script because you do some interesting things.

The Page One. I’ve had so many conversations with writers about this, and how they obsess with that first page, and particularly want to land on that last line as a kind of cliffhanger to get people to turn to the next page and you do that.

I don’t know whether it’s intentional or not. You have this wonderful sort of action. Page One and the last line is SBF going, “Something’s really fucking wrong.” So, I want to know what’s really fucking wrong. Did you plan that? Was that just serendipity?

Jake: The only pages in this entire script whose beginnings and endings I planned were the one where that’s the whole page of his tweets on page four. That’s the only place where I actually planned a page break. That page one thing was serendipitous. I mean… it was totally on purpose.

Scott: There’s another thing you did, and not a lot, but in scene description at some point early on, you say, “The group all crowds around SBF, peering at his phone. Don’t worry, we’ll meet a lot of these faces soon enough.”

You’re kind of breaking the fourth wall a little bit, acknowledging the reader. That’s an interesting choice to make. It’s trying to create a sense of connection, I guess with…You have any thoughts about that? Because some people would say, “Oh, you’re breaking the fourth wall, you shouldn’t do that in scene description.”

Jake: I think it’s perfectly OK to do that in the scene description if it makes the script better. You can do anything you want if it makes the script better. Right there, I had the option of introducing five named characters on page one or two named characters.

The answer is always when you’re right up front, don’t overwhelm your reader with names and description, get to the action, get it flowing. It’s also the experience of watching the movie.

You’re not going to know who those faces are when you watch the movie, but you will meet them later, and you’re probably assuming we’re going to meet these people later as you’re watching the movie.

It’s simulating the experience of watching the movie and not overwhelming your reader with information they simply don’t need. I don’t know. If it makes a script better, do it. That’s always my philosophy.

Scott: There you go. That’s my man. I tell my students that all these people who say there are these screenwriting rules, I say, “If there were rules, they’d have a rule book.” You don’t have a rule book. As long as it serves the story and your story is clear….

Jake: I read a script a couple weeks ago, and the first line the script had “We see…” in it, and I sent it back to the writer. I was like, “I’m sorry, I can’t read this.”

[laughter]

I saw the first line and it says, “We see you’re clearly an amateur.” This guy’s successful and all that. I was obviously joking, but yeah. It’s so silly.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Jake answers some craft questions.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Jake is repped by Bellevue Productions.

@jake_disch
@jakedisch.bsky.social

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