How to Lean into the Truth of a True Story: Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum Discuss ‘Dumb Money’

During the pandemic, a lot of people didn't know what to do with their spare time. Some delighted in comfort food. Some binge-watched movies and television shows. Some increased their income bracket by shaking up the investment market. Financial analyst Keith Gill is one of the latter. Gill, aka, Roaring Kitty, started a “dumb money” movement via YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit where his posts prompted individuals to invest in GameStop. Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Lars and the Real Girl), this David vs. Goliath story recently hit the big screen on September 29, 2023, and stars Paul Dano, America Ferrara, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Seth Rogan, and Nick Offerman.

This marks the first feature for screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, both former writers for The Wall Street Journal. They adapted the script from Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network and used their journalism acumen to get to the heart of the story. 

They currently have a full plate - they’re working on adapting the 1980s television show Murder, She Wrote into a feature and writing a Netflix project for Adam McKay. Despite their busy schedule, Lauren and Rebecca recently took the time to speak with Script Magazine about writing ‘Dumb Money’ and finding the truth in a story.

Sonya Alexander: How did you start writing together?

Rebecca Angelo: Lauren and I met in The Wall Street Journal newsroom as cub reporters and found we had a lot of common interests and had both gotten into journalism because we admired people like Nora Ephron and Joan Didion. Women of a previous generation who were revolutionary in how they told stories through journalism. We found ourselves starting to get a little frustrated with the limitations of the modern era of journalism so we followed our heroes into screenwriting eleven years ago and we've been working as a team this whole time.

Sonya: Do you find that you follow the same routine when you write or does it depend on the story?

Lauren Schuker Blum: We sometimes joke that we're method writers and that we have a new routine for each project that's dictated by the subject matter.

Rebecca: It's fundamentally really immersive, especially with Lauren. We like to get totally lost in the world of the story that we're telling.

Lauren: That's part of the method. We take on the characters and the world very deeply. For this project, we immersed ourselves in the world of Reddit and Wall Street bets. We do research for any project. We write fictional things too. We're writing a Murder, She Wrote movie right now. But even for that, we immersed ourselves in the world of Cabot Cove in a similar manner.

Rebecca: We use the idea of radical empathy. It's our job as screenwriters to put ourselves behind the eyes of every character we depict on screen, not just the hero. And to do that you really need to do the work. You need to talk to people whose lived experiences more closely align with that character. You need to read everything you can get your hands on.

Sonya: How did you get involved with this project?

Lauren: We followed the story like anyone else did. We kept seeing headlines about GameStop and we were wondering why everyone was talking about this video game store at the mall. We were trying to follow this complicated story. Then Aaron Ryder who is a producer for MGM, approached us about the film. We had written another movie tying into internet populous. We were very interested in the topic. The minute we started talking to him it sort of all clicked.

Sonya: How much did you know about the world of investment prior to this project?

Rebecca: A lot since we'd worked for The Wall Street Journal and covered the markets. But we still had a lot to learn. The event of the movie primarily took place in January and February of 2021. We came onto the project in April of that year so it was like stepping onto a roller coaster in the middle of a ride. We had to learn a lot and catch up. Also, there was a bit of the ride left. So we rode on the rest of this ride, watching it play out.

Lauren: It was the emotional part of the story that was interesting to us. We wanted the financial aspects to be something everyone could understand. Part of our education process was diving into Reddit and TikTok. Many of the people had bought a stock for the first time and then taught each other about things like short squeezes. One of the surprising things we found out was that many of the people invested because they believed in this movement. They wanted to be a part of something bigger and their biggest regret in this whole saga was selling it all. They felt they betrayed the movement by selling their stock.

Sonya: How did the climate of the pandemic affect the dumb money movement?

Rebecca: That's an essential question. I don't think that you would have seen this without the pandemic. This is a story that was born of people being stuck in their homes. Of being isolated and feeling small and alone. We certainly felt that way during the pandemic. It created an opportunity for lots of people to learn about something they didn't know before. It created a lot of anger and frustration at the galling income inequalities that made pandemic experiences so different for the ultra-rich than for the rest of us. So these people found each other online and notched an important victory for the little guy.

Lauren: It was also a challenge on a script level because how do you tell a story that takes place during the pandemic about people who don't know each other, are not in the same rooms, are never going to be in the same rooms, who are not going to meet? How do you do that in a grounded fashion? We didn't want to pretend that these Wall Street guys were actually talking to these Reddit investors. So we had to turn to different tools to connect our very disparate characters in our ensemble. Since they weren't in the same rooms we had to use things like music or images to bring them together. Or have one character finish the other's sentence so that where one scene ends, the other picks up. We thought of the script like a French braid, where we were weaving these different strands of characters together in a painstaking way to tell an emotional story about people who are far apart.

Sonya: Did you have a chance to speak to any of the real-life people?

Rebecca: Yes, we did. We always immerse ourselves in what really happened before we get into the structure of a script so that we can be surprised and lean into the truth.

Sonya: What message can the audience take away from this film?

Rebecca: When we talk about a project we want to do, we always consider how the audience will feel when they leave the theater. In this case, we want the audience to feel a little more optimistic than they are pessimistic. It's very easy to lay around these days and feel how broken everything is and how rigged every system seems to be. But here's a story about regular people coming together and doing something greater as a group than as individuals and notching a meaningful victory against powerful forces. We want people to feel hope and realize that with action they can achieve change.

Lauren: It's the story of the power of collective action that made us want to write this movie because those stories are few and far between.

This Columbia Pictures release is currently playing in theaters nationwide.