Filmography:
Love Creator, Executive Producer 2016 – 2017
Brooklyn Nine-Nine Executive Story Editor 2013 – 2014
Awkward. Story Editor 2013
Girls Staff Writer 2012

Agent: Larry Salz (UTA)
Management: Circle of Confusion
Legal: Lev Ginsburg (Ginsburg Daniels)

In the Media: 
Lesley Arfin on Love, Selfishness, and the Art of Oversharing  |  New York Magazine  |  February 24, 2016
Sitting in the cluttered Los Feliz apartment that writer Lesley Arfin shares with her husband, comedian-writer Paul Rust, I feel as if I’ve stepped through a TV screen and into the living-room-interior set of Love, the new Netflix series the couple co-created, and found the show’s fictional universe rolling confessionally along.

Love, which premiered February 19, was co–executive produced by Judd Apatow and tells the fitful story of how L.A. 30-somethings Gus (Rust) and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) become a couple. It’s not all just meet-cute. The episodes are 30-minute deconstructions of modern courtship, with all the detours and dysfunction that occurs when two maladjusted people try to achieve some kind of intimacy.

“Mickey and Gus are based on Paul and me,” the 36-year-old Arfin explains, sitting on a green corduroy couch. “Well, versions of us.” The genesis of the show came from questions Arfin had been asking herself about her relationship: “I’d said to Paul, ‘I know I love you, and it’s like, why? It’s not just, You’re my soul mate.’ ”

Excavating that “why” is a preoccupation of both the show’s and Arfin’s, and the blurry line between where her fictional characters end and her personal life begins is even blurrier here at home. As Arfin is talking, Claudia O’Doherty, the Australian comic who plays Mickey’s roommate on the show, pops down the stairs, trying on dresses for her friend’s approval.

Arfin, a former writer on Girls, had been looking to tackle the subject of post-infatuation love. “What does it look like when there is no romance anymore and we’re on the couch in our sweats? Because I didn’t know. I was figuring out how people got together and stayed together.”

Armed with that idea, Arfin and Rust, who married last October, began outlining a film script, which they took to Apatow. He liked the idea but envisioned a TV show that followed a relationship from the outset rather than picking up in the middle. After some light coaxing, Arfin and Rust went along with the change. “I can be stubborn,” says Arfin, “but ultimately, Judd has to remind me all the time that I haven’t been doing this for a thousand years like him.”

Once the narrative parameters were in place, Arfin did what she always does and began mining her own life for material. “Even though Mickey is sort of modeled on me, she’s a type of me that I like to think doesn’t exist anymore,” says the chatty Long Island native. “She’s very selfish.” Indeed, Arfin has outgrown her selfishness enough that she’s okay with watching her real-life husband act in a relationship with her fictional proxy. “What a turn-on!” she says. “I want people to love Paul as much as I do. Doesn’t mean there’s less of him for me.”

Prior to Love, Arfin had made her name as a writer with her revealing Vice column “Dear Diary,” a clearinghouse for the squirmy formative moments from Arfin’s life — ex-boyfriends, awkward social encounters, her since-vanquished heroin addiction. She followed that with an online advice column, “Ask Barf,” which she wrote for the Vice competitor Street Carnage. Whatever the venue, Arfin’s tales of being young and semi-tortured in New York appealed to another oversharer, Lena Dunham, who invited Arfin to join the Girls writers’ room.

The thing that makes Love most different from the vehicles through which Arfin’s shared herself in the past is that now she’s got a room of co-writers. (She’d never seriously considered playing Mickey herself.) And all of them have been tasked with shaping the version of her that’s being presented. Which has its drawbacks. “I’m not crazy about being in a writers’ room,” admits Arfin, who, after leaving Girls, wrote for the Andy Samberg sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. “I’ve had to say, ‘This is isn’t true to character,’ and when the writers don’t agree with me, I have to listen to them.” In this, her old boss’s efforts were instructive. “Girls is Lena’s show,” says Arfin. “She writes, directs, and stars. My voice in Love is a small percentage of it. There’s compromise.” Insight, too. Gillian Jacobs, for example, “tapped into a part of Mickey that I didn’t know existed — she’s smarter than she thinks. I never thought that about her.” She pauses. “I certainly never thought that about who I am before,” she says, then smiles, pleased at uncovering yet another part of herself.

Lesley Arfin Talks Love, On-Screen and Off  |  Vogue  |  February 19, 2016
There’s a scene in the trailer for the new Netflix series Love in which a guy (Gus, played by Paul Rust) rides shotgun in the car of a girl he just met (Mickey, played by Gillian Jacobs). Inspired by her freewheeling attitude and his own bitterness toward an ex-girlfriend, Gus disgustedly flings romantic comedy Blu-rays out the window.

“We just keep believing in this fucking lie that a relationship evolves and gets better,” he yelps as Mickey eggs him on. “Where do these lies come from? Fucking movies! Pretty Woman? Fuck you! Sweet Home Alabama? Lies! When Harry Met Sally? Fucking lies!”

It’s not the subtlest moment, but it pretty well sets the scene for the show, which bills itself as a rejoinder to the kind of pat, formulaic love stories depicted by the rom-com genre’s worst offenders.

In its 10-episode first season (a second is already in production), available on Netflix today, Love follows Gus, a nerdy tutor and aspiring screenwriter, and Mickey, a wild-child radio-show producer with a complicated relationship to substances, in their journey from total strangers to tentative romantic partners. But that arc is just a prelude to the show’s real undertaking: a darkly humorous look at a long-term relationship through all its peaks and troughs, with none of the typical Hollywood gloss.

Gus and Mickey seem at first like archetypes, but Love dives deep into their complex, often ugly psyches, to reveal them as far messier creatures than we might have imagined. When they come together, things get messier still, and the show’s narrative sometimes has a way of rambling. But since Love is really about process—about the stuttering momentum and miscommunications and uncertainty of a relationship—that untidiness ultimately works to bolster a sense of realism. And when the show begins slowly to peel back the layers of Mickey’s convoluted relationship to addiction, the commitment to realism really pays off.

Appropriately, the series comes from Judd Apatow, by now the industry’s go-to guy for projects that find the funny in romantic malaise. But the idea actually originated with the husband-wife team of Rust and writer Lesley Arfin (You know her from her long-ago “Dear Diary” column in Vice and her stint as a writer on Girls.) It reflects, Arfin tells me by phone, the questions she began asking herself as she and Rust settled in for the long haul. We chatted about her experience collaborating with her partner, the show’s unusual depiction of drug use, and why it’s important to see women behaving badly on-screen. That conversation, below.

Tell me about how this show happened.
Well, Paul is my husband, but he was my boyfriend at the time. He’s an actor and a writer, and I’m a writer, and his manager suggested that we write something together. I was like, “Ugh! Never! Worst idea!”

I had been writing a Web series that I was going to do with HBO called 34 and Pregnant, because I was 34 and I wasn’t pregnant and I wanted to be. So while I was working on this thing, I was like, I’ve never seen a movie that was about a relationship, but not a meet-cute and then a montage and then a happy ending. What happens when the honeymoon is over? What does a relationship looks like when you’re sitting on the couch in your sweats, eating ice cream, getting into fights, not having sex that much? I love Paul, but we’re not in our honeymoon phase. I was like: How do people stay in relationships? What does it look like? It’s this thing that everybody wants so badly, and at the end of the day we’re sitting on our couch eating ice cream and not having sex. What’s the big deal?

How long had you guys been together at that point?
Like three or four years. We both knew we wanted to marry each other. I had never felt that way about anybody. I’d been out with a lot of people.

Then I Googled the word love to see if it had ever been the title of a movie or a TV show. It hadn’t [at the time]. I talked to Paul about it. He was working with Judd at the time on Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. I’d known Judd from Girls. Judd said, “I love that idea, but I love it as a TV show if we start from the beginning and go through slowly from start to finish.”

I think Judd saw something in Paul and me as a couple. He and Paul are a lot alike. His wife, Leslie [Mann], and I are a lot alike. Paul’s the nerdy guy, and I’m the wild chick. But it’s not like I’m the Courtney Love and Paul’s the innocent Kurt Cobain. Paul has issues, too, and I’m a good person, too! We’re this odd couple that isn’t really that odd, that’s kind of every couple.

Was there any moment when you were thinking maybe this wasn’t a good idea?
Oh, my God, of course! Of course we fight. I don’t know if we were ever, like, maybe this is a bad idea, because it doesn’t affect us to that point. Nothing is more important to me than family and marriage. If the show were interfering with that, I would step away from the show first. It’s a TV show. Paul’s my husband. There are other TV shows.

He’s one of my favorite writing partners. But when we’re at work, when we’re in the same workspace, we bicker. There’s ego involved. He’s like, “Oh, Lesley, I don’t know about that idea,” and I’m like, “Stop feeling threatened!” It’s never about the work: We haven’t figured it out yet. There are other times when I think, What would I do if I didn’t have him at work? We really have each other’s back.

Has Judd offered any words of wisdom about collaborating with a spouse?
Totally. I was like, “Judd, how did you deal with watching Leslie and Paul Rudd have sex scenes?” He was like, “I think it’s the funniest thing. I love it; I think it’s hysterical.” Judd is very drama-free, so if there’s ever anything I’m freaking out about, he’s really helpful; he’s like, “It’s going to be fine; so much changes in editing.” I feel very safe with him.

You Instagrammed a quote recently from Maureen Dowd’s female filmmaker piece about Bachelorette director Leslye Headland: “She wants to make films in which women behave badly and are not held at a higher moral standard or seen as ‘less than.’” It that also your mission?
Yeah, as a writer and as a viewer. I’m interested in seeing women who make mistakes and, like, don’t learn a lesson from it. Or they make mistakes and the consequences aren’t that bad. Or maybe they make them again. Maybe there’s a way to have a female character who is both good and bad, and who isn’t a mom or a vixen or a baby.

I always think about Walter White and how he became the person he was meant to be, which was not a good person. Maybe he never was a good person. Maybe he was so afraid of being a bad person that when he was finally given permission by death, he was allowed the freedom to be himself. I really identify with that. I’m not selling meth. I’m not killing anybody; that’s not Mickey’s agenda. That’s not Gus’s agenda, but there’s something that Mickey does: She knows the difference between right and wrong, and sometimes she’ll make the wrong choice on purpose. Maybe the consequences for her aren’t so black and white. Maybe that’s the truth with Gus. I’m so sick of seeing the nerdy white boy as the hero to the crazy girl. I lived in that fantasy for so long, the Cinderella complex. I think Gus probably has that fantasy, too. I think he really loves the idea of being needed, being able to fix somebody. There’s a lot of anger behind that. I’d be less shocked if he sold meth.

There’s something I really get about fucking ruining your life on purpose.

Have you ever done that?
On purpose? Yes. Subconsciously? Yes. And accidentally? Yes.

I’ve had to make the same mistake eight times in a row before I realize: This isn’t going to work. There’s no moral lesson. It’s more of a behavioral thing, how to get along with the world, be at peace with myself and my decisions. But morally? I don’t know what that means. I’m not killing anybody and I’m not selling drugs. Anymore.

The relationship to drugs in the show is interesting. We see the characters doing lots of them, but it’s never quite clear to what extent they are a problem.
I don’t think that drugs are the problem. Alcoholism, addiction, those are diseases. Some people have that disease, some people don’t. You know what I love? I love in the movie Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis smokes a joint and she’s the hero. Smoking a joint doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re going to end up shooting heroin tomorrow. It’s important for me to show that. I’ve only ever seen: Drugs equals bad.

Although in Mickey’s case, she’s at least somewhat convinced that drugs are bad for her. Right?
And maybe for her they are. I think part of her journey is that drugs, booze, dude stuff—all that wasn’t helping her be happy at this moment. Maybe that’ll last. Maybe it won’t. But I also think she’s the person she is because of everything she’s done. She needed to experiment and figure out how to do things the wrong way before she knows what the right thing is for her.

Can you think of other characters like that, ones you related to?
I’ve always been inspired by Winona Ryder’s character, Veronica, in Heathers. There’s something very twisted, dark, wrong, and perfect about her. She shoots her fucking boyfriend at the end of the movie! I also loved Roseanne, how she never really apologized for who she was, and there were all sorts of problems going on in that family.

Carrie Bradshaw, too! What a great character. Somebody who just wanted to be in love so badly and was so obsessed with this guy who treated her like shit. But I get it! The whole series she suffered from it, but she wanted to suffer. I get the drama of wanting. I think that’s something about Mickey that I really relate to. It’s a part of me, too. We’re dramatic people. It doesn’t make you the most likable person. I don’t know if Carrie Bradshaw was the most likable person in the world, but people loved her because they related to her. She really was a female antihero.

Lesley Arfin Talks “Love” and Asking Lena Dunham for Advice  |  W Magazine  |  February 25, 2016
Love is an ideal Netflix show. Created by Judd Apatow, Lesley Arfin, and Paul Rust, the romance between Gus (Rust) and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) burns so slowly that it may as well be happening in real time. But Arfin and Rust, who are married and who came up with the idea together (there is a lot of both in Mickey and Gus), are hoping that a series of small, honest, hilarious moments will, over time, add up to much more than your typical rom-com montage. (They’ll begin shooting a second season on Friday.) And Love is as lived-in and rumpled and embarrassing and charmingly messy as, well, love. Arfin, who was previously a writer on Girls (not to mention the editor of Missbehave), talked about her husband’s sex scenes and why it’s important to have haters after she binged the first season when it premiered over the weekend, just like the rest of us.

How are you? Do you have a feedback hangover from the weekend?
No! Not even. I’m so happy that people seem to like the show. But even if there’s backlash — my friend texted me the other day and she was like, ‘I’m overhearing people in the alleyway behind my house talk about Love.’

Is that the new subtweeting?
Talking about it in an alley? Yeah, that’s what the kids are calling it. It’s shorthand, but much longer. I was like, ‘What are they saying? Even if it’s bad, I don’t care.’ What would be worse is if nobody talked about it at all! I think if you don’t have haters, you’re doing it wrong!

The critics’ reviews, at least, are pretty positive.
Yeah, totally! And that’s awesome, too. I mean: that’s even better. [laughs] It’s cool when you make something, and people respond and identify with it. There’s nothing better. I do have like 30 unanswered texts.

They’ll understand.
I hope so! People are weird, and everybody wants everybody else to fail, or have a reason to hate somebody. I’m not a huge phone person anyway. So, whatever.

Funny that Love premiered the same weekend as the show you used to write on, Girls.
I consider them our sister show. Everybody there are still my closest friends. I ask Lena [Dunham] and Jenni [Konner] for advice all the time. Now I get to watch Girlsonce a week. And people can watch Love however they want.

I watched most of it while hungover. 
That’s ideal. I watched every single one except the last one.

Why not the last one?
Because then it’s really over! Even though there’s another season. And especially watching it with Paul, there’s some stuff I never realized that just really hit so close to home for us. That is so meta.

So you two binged it together like everyone else? 
We watched it together, alone, and with some friends who came over. But yeah, we just wanted to watch it on the big screen like the rest of the world. We’re proud of it. It’s kind of like when someone comes to your house for the first time, and you can see it through their eyes. Like: ‘Oh, I wonder what they think looks good or not?’

How did you feel about the pacing while watching it? It’s such a slow burn. 
Part of our original idea for the show was we wanted to see what relationships were like when you cut into the montage. When you take that out, and you’re just in it. To do it as slowly and in real time as possible — it’s hard. I’ve never seen it before. As a person who’s in a relationship, I’m curious what that looks like. I’m interested in how unromantic it really is. I’m always interested in what’s beautiful about love, and what’s really ugly about it. We just wanted it to be a narrative out of a lot of small moments. Even if we didn’t have a two-season order from Netflix, that was always our approach. When we first had this idea, we wanted to do it as a movie. And when we told Judd about it, he was like, ‘I think it would be so great as a TV show.’ And he was right. He saw something we couldn’t see.

Have you gotten used to writing and being present for Paul’s sex scenes?
I think there was a time where I was like, ‘Um, should I be worried?’ And then I talked to Judd about it, who’s had a lot of experience with this [with his wife, actress Leslie Mann]. He was like, ‘Oh my god, it is the funniest thing, I love it.’

Paul’s character is an aspiring TV writer, but he’s not very good yet. There’s that awful scene on his one and only day in a writers’ room. 
It’s so painful. Not that that doesn’t happen when I’m in the room on our show, but I’ve been in other writers’ rooms. No matter how many shows you’ve been on, when someone makes a joke in a writers’ room and no one laughs, a part of your soul dies. Especially with me — I’m not a natural collaborator when it comes to writing. Before I started working in TV, I just wrote on my own. The first time I got edited I was like, ‘Ugh. Oh my god.’ And now I’m like, ‘Thank god you’re making me sound like a better writer than I am.’ A great editor is kind of the same thing as a great showrunner.

You guys have stocked a lot of the secondary roles with comedians like Brett Gelman.
Some. But a lot of my friends who are just musicians or just natural performers are in there, too, like Binky Shapiro. I learned a lot about this from Judd. We didn’t want everybody to be so familiar, because then it gets to be a joke on a joke. Where it’s a show where a character like Gus is trying to make it in Hollywood, and all of these people who are well-known in Hollywood are pretending to be normal.

Some people have characterized Love as another show about awful people. While I don’t agree, does that upset you, knowing a lot of you and Paul are in these characters?
I think people are horrible. And I think people are beautiful. They’re both, all the time. This isn’t the story of the nerdy guy saving the crazy druggie girl. Everybody’s just trying to do their best; we just wanted to make it real.

Erin Cressida Wilson (born February 12) is an American playwright, screenwriter, professor, and author.

Wilson is known for the 2002 film Secretary, which she adapted from a Mary Gaitskill short story. It won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

She also wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, and has authored dozens of plays and short works.

She has taught at Duke University, Brown University, and UC Santa Barbara.

She also wrote the screenplay for the erotic thriller Chloe, theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. The film became director Atom Egoyan’s biggest moneymaker ever, although it was a financial flop.

Agent: Rowena Arguelles (CAA)

Sex, cinema and secrets: early exposure at the arthouse

Erin Cressida Wilson (born February 12) is an American playwright, screenwriter, professor, and author.

Wilson is known for the 2002 film Secretary, which she adapted from a Mary Gaitskill short story. It won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

She also wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, and has authored dozens of plays and short works.

She has taught at Duke University, Brown University, and UC Santa Barbara.

She also wrote the screenplay for the erotic thriller Chloe, theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. The film became director Atom Egoyan’s biggest moneymaker ever, although it was a financial flop.

Agent: Rowena Arguelles (CAA)

Manager: Julie Bloom (Art/Work Entertainment)

IMDBpro: https://pro-labs.imdb.com/name/nm0933379/?ref_=sch_int

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Cressida_Wilson

Filmography: 

Maestro Writer

Peony in Love Writer

The Girl on the Train Writer 2016

Vinyl (TV) Writer, Producer 2016

Men, Women & Children Writer 2014

Call Me Crazy (TV) Writer 2013

Walking Stories (Short) Writer 2013

Stoker Contributing Writer 2013

Chloe Writer, Associate Producer 2009

My Lunch with Larry (Short) Writer 2007

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of… Writer 2006

Secretary Writer 2002

In the Media: 

Sex in the Digital Age: A Q&A With Erin Cressida Wilson  |  Signature  |  October 17, 2014

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson is fearless when it comes to exploring and exposing the darker fringes of human sexual experience, often with a provocative dash of black humor. A professor and playwright (“The Erotica Project,” “The Trail of Her Inner Thigh”), she took home the Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay in 2003 for turning a Mary Gaitskill short story into the S&M-tinged drama “Secretary” (fun trivia: the male character’s name is Mr. Grey!). A few years later she drew from Patricia Bosworth’s Diane Arbus: A Biography to inspire her script for “Fur,” an imaginative biopic about the transgressive mid-century photographer. Wilson’s work on the erotic thriller “Chloe” in 2009 led to a follow-up collaboration with Oscar-nominated writer-director Jason Reitman, a producer on that movie. Their new film, “Men, Women & Children,” based on the 2011 Chad Kultgen novel, is a very of-the-moment dissection of how the Internet-and-smart-phone age has influenced, changed, and corrupted humans’ ability (and willingness) to make connections in the real world. Signature recently spoke to Wilson about the ideas and issues addressed in the film, which expands wider this Friday, October 17.

SIGNATURE: You have a whole creative history of exploring the kinds of issues at play in this movie. How and why did you get involved with this adaptation?

ERIN CRESSIDA WILSON: I was at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and Jason and I ran into each other. I knew him and he’s like, “You should read this book.” By the time we left two days later we were writing it together. I have a son, and at the time I read the book he was nine. He gets really into his iPad; he can get very lost in games. If I get very frustrated with it I will grab it and hide it, and it’s as if I’ve taken his entire world away from him. That relationship, and the sort of horrible way that parents tend to rip this world away from their children, interested me a lot. I was fascinated by the idea of how romantic and sexual relationships have changed for kids and for adults because of the Internet, for good and bad. My mother used to say about technology: “Improved means to unimproved ends.”

SIG: The author of the book has been criticized in some quarters for writing misogynistic material. Did you experience the book in that way at all? And was that any kind of concern for you?

ECW: Not at all. I have a very nonjudgmental view of characters that do things that aren’t necessarily all good. And I have a very open mind about sexuality, about being not just non-political about it but actually politically incorrect. I’m just reading to see: How can this be a film? In addition to that, I feel very much that everybody has his own view of the world. And Chad’s view did not offend me in the least. I had no problem with it because I thought it was his honest view. I enjoyed it because he was unapologetic. I’ve taught for years, and I’m not ever prescriptive about what people’s political motivations are. In fact, I don’t see why the personal has to be political anyway. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.

SIG: This feels like the first time a movie has really tried to address what’s happening with millennial teenagers on the Web, particularly as it pertains to their ability to form connected relationships that aren’t based on fantasy.

ECW: Yeah, I’m very interested in this epidemic of boys whose first touch with sex is on the Internet viewing really out-there pornography, so that they’re not equating sex with love, with human touch, with even kissing or intercourse. It’s no longer even part of what it’s about. It’s about being provided with high stimulation that’s totally under their control and is not messy the way real human relationships are. Boys not being able to get it up for girls is really turning into a major problem. I’ve talked to shrinks who say that they have a lot of boys that have this issue. It’s fascinating and scary and worrisome to me. In terms of the false sense of self that one can get from the Internet, I think it can be dangerous, but it can also be a way to open up doors that you didn’t know were there in your imagination with another person. It’s probably a little safer if you’re an adult and your mind hasn’t been calibrated to be in this world from the very beginning.

SIG: Yeah, it’s not a tattered Playboy magazine that a young kid will be exposed to these days. It’s sexual imagery that is beyond inappropriate. It’s just not the same as it was twenty years ago.

ECW: That’s very true. We know that there’s a timebomb sitting in our house — on every iPad, every iPhone, every computer — for our child to see something that in our wildest imaginations we would have never seen at age ten. It’s horrible! Even when I see these images, either by mistake or on purpose, I’m a little taken aback that I can just go click-click and see videos of the most pornographic nature. The kids in Chad’s book are younger than they are in the film. We raised the ages to make it slightly more palatable, but really the book is about twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. We wouldn’t leave pot or heroin or even alcohol out for a ten-year-old to take. And yet the computer is on and available. And the thing is, once they start doing whatever they’re going to do so early on, yeah, I do think it can lead to an addiction. It’s an incredibly torturous situation for parents. I know it’s the number-one issue that we’re all talking about. So I think the time is now.

SIG: You’ve explored the less conventional aspects of sexual connection throughout your career. Was there anything you came across on this project that genuinely surprised you? Any new discoveries or insights?

ECW: Well, I didn’t really think it through and know about boys, their situation with not being able to get it up for girls. That was eye opening. Certainly I didn’t know anything about the sites that encourage anorexia. When I first read about it I didn’t believe it was true. It’s just psychotic! But it is really true. And then there’s a lot of stuff in the book that’s not in the movie, some seriously pornographic stuff that is … something I had never thought of [laughs]. Things that had never occurred to me!

SIG: If you could have viewers take one thing away from this film, what would it be?

ECW: Truth, which is probably not quite the right word, but I would hope that they’d feel a truthful experience and portrait of our times. The film to me is a comedy of manners and a portrait of what we go through. It’s not meant to be more than just recognizing where we’re at and acknowledging that we’re all here experiencing this. My hope is that there’s something really embarrassing about this film — that it makes you squirm with recognition.

‘Girl On The Train’ Scribe Erin Cressida Wilson To Adapt ‘Maestra’ For TriStar  |  Deadline  |  September 25, 2015

EXCLUSIVE: TriStar president Hannah Minghella and producer Amy Pascal have set Erin Cressida Wilson to adapt Maestra, the L.S. Hilton novel that Sony acquired just before it established itself as the runaway hit of the London Book Fair last spring. Wilson, best known for scripting the 2002 film Secretary, takes the job after adapting another female-driven novel sensation, the Tate Taylor-directed Girl On The Train.

Bonnier Publishing has sold publishing rights for Maestra to 25 territories round the world, and the book was published in the UK last March. Maestra follows the story of Judith Rashleigh, who works in a prestigious London auction house by day and an insalubrious bar at night. When she stumbles across a conspiracy, she ends up in a battle for her life. The book, set against the backdrop of the European art world and Europe’s seriously wealthy, Maestra marks the beginning of a razor-sharp and meteoric sequence of novels by Hilton.

This is one of several plum projects that Pascal is producing. She’s nearly wrapped on the Paul Feig-directed Ghostbusters, is readying a new iteration of Spider-Manwhich she’s producing with Marvel’s Kevin Feige, and she is teamed with Scott Rudin to adapt The Girl In The Spider’s Web, the new installment of the adventures of anti-hero Lisbeth Salander. That novel was written by David Langercrantz. The late Stieg Larsson wrote the Millenium Trilogy that launched Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

TriStar prexy Minghella was key in bringing this in quickly for a preemptive buy, and she is overseeing the project for TriStar. Wilson is repped by CAA and Art/Work.

Erin Cressida Wilson Boards ‘Girl On The Train’ For Marc Platt & Dreamworks  |  Deadline  |  January 13, 2015

Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) is adapting Paula Hawkins’ hot-button novel Girl On The Train for DreamWorks and Marc Platt. Wilson, who most recently co-wrote Men, Women And Children with Jason Reitman, is close to delivering her first draft.

The novel, pre-emptively acquired by Dreamworks and Platt in March, is getting a lot of buzz as one of 2015’s most eagerly anticipated titles. The Hitchcockian thriller, the latest in a recent line of complex female protagonists, is about a young woman who becomes entangled in a murder investigation because of what she witnesses on her daily commute.

Marc Platt is producing through his company Marc Platt Productions. He is in post on Steven Spielberg’s untitled Cold War thriller starring Tom Hanks.

Girl On The Train is Paula Jenkins’ debut novel. She previously worked as a journalist, including the deputy personal finance editor of The Times in London. She is repped by RWSG Agency, Lizzy Kremer and Georgina Ruffhead at David Higham Associates. Wilson is represented by CAA and Julie Bloom of Art/Work Entertainment. Her attorneys are Joe Dapello and Nancy Rose of Schreck Rose.

Sex, cinema and secrets: early exposure at the arthouse

Written by Erin Cressida Wilson  |  The Guardian  |  November 27, 2014

Growing up in 1970s San Francisco I was often dragged by my parents to explicit foreign films at small cinemas like the Clay or the Vogue, the Balboa or the Castro.

There I’d sit, underage and somehow smuggled in, on a scratchy red chair that smelled of popcorn and sticky floors, surrounded by bohemians and intellectuals watching the same thing that I was watching: sex.

Back then, the entire city felt drenched in sensuality, and so did my home. It was here on sweaty afternoons that I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman on TV, curled up with my mother, drawing constellations and stars and universes from freckle to freckle across her skin. 

I was trying to find the secret – the reason that fueled her to grab my hand on Sunday afternoons, take a left turn as far away from the playground as possible, and rush me to the opening weekend of I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969 – age five), Carnal Knowledge (1971 – age seven), Last Tango in Paris (1972 – age eight), A Clockwork Orange (1972 – age eight), The Mother and the Whore (1973 – age nine), and Swept Away … by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974 – age 10).

I would sit next to my mother on these afternoons and inevitably a tendril of tension would start emanating from the screen, and from her. Suddenly, in a fierce whisper, she would instruct me to look at the floor. And so I would stare at a discarded popcorn box, a spilled drink or simply the darkness that disappeared into the seat ahead of me – listening carefully to quickening breaths – allowing the film’s soundscape to caress me. I learned to peek with my eyes to see bodies in motion, pushing like animals, doing something mysterious that I didn’t understand, but somehow enjoyed.

It was during this era that even the more explicit films like Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) managed to cross over into the mainstream. My mother blessedly spared me these films. A confluence of factors – among them the rise of television and a growing counterculture – led film-makers to mine previously taboo topics. The abandonment of the Production Code in 1968 opened the floodgates for sex to migrate from dirty theatres to more legit venues. But it was short-lived thanks to a 1973 Supreme Court decision that once again shunted these features to adult picturehouses. Nevertheless, it was a transformative time to be coming-of-age.

But despite this early education in sexually-explicit cinema, I never quite understood how I came to construct the power dynamics in my script for Secretary (2002 – age 38). It wasn’t until I came across my mother’s diary, a few months before her death, that I started to fully comprehend what was at work in my subconscious. This journal kept a weekly record of what turned out to be my mother’s 20+ year affair with her shrink. One afternoon in 1951, after only a few sessions, he pronounced my mother to be a sadomasochist. Not great shrinkage, but there was a lot of truth there. And reading my mother’s diaries brought me to understand that secrets that fly around a house actually do get absorbed by children in ways that are mysterious.

Ours was a house full of books. Food to eat was scarce but it was packed to the rafters with words to read. It took hours of searching the pages of highbrow literature to find anything naughty. I quickly figured out that in a cinephile’s house, some of the easiest sources of sexy images were film magazines. Curious and dressed in my school uniform, knee socks, and saddle shoes, I would sneak down to the basement and flick through my father’s stashes of magazines. Alongside the mildewed copies of Oui, Hustler and Playboy, were stacks of Film Quarterly whose pages were charged with erotica, drama, and – best of all – a lot of European men.

If the city and our house felt like extensions of all things carnal, then our derelict basement seemed to be the epicentre. Oddly, my parents’ bedroom, with its door always open, seemed to be the one place sex did not inhabit. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard has written much on basements and their psychological connotations. In The Poetics of Space, he posits the attic as the site of rationality and the basement as the site of irrationality – manifestations of the conscious and the unconscious respectively. While the attic provides reassurance, the basement provides mystery.

And mysteries it held. It’s where my father hid not only his porn, but his alcohol. It’s where my mother, a lover of many men, hid her love letters – locked in a metal box buried in the dirt under the house. She would often say to me, “Don’t go under the house.” And just as her order to not look at the sexy films had spurred me on to do so, I would indeed look under the house. When I finally uncovered “the box,” I found on the very top, a note to my father: “Dear heart, if you find these letters, I loved only you.” And then underneath were handwritten and typed letters from the men, often writers. On thin onion skin paper were words of love and sex and longing. But my mother had, like a true self-censor, carefully cut out all the explicit words with scissors. If I held the paper up to the light, it was like lace.

It was also in this basement that my mother would invite the dustbin men in. They were Italian-Americans who collected our trash in large burlap sacks that they’d throw over their shoulders before going back down the 30 or so stairs to their truck. In the same way I imagined my father would linger on the sexy images of his magazines, my mother admired these men, their muscles dancing and backs straining under the weight of our detritus. She would say to me, “Look at his hands. Look at his lips. Look at his back. Listen to his voice.” She was giving me erotic instruction.

It felt natural that in my early adulthood I would start writing plays about sex. Though in the 1980s New York theatre scene, a woman liking men was practically against the natural order. There appeared to be a rulebook thrown at every emerging playwright. If you were gay, an obligatory coming-out play was what was called for. If you were a person of colour, you were told to cash that card in and write with that in mind. If you were a woman? It was advisable to write about how abusive men were. It was not so good to be a thinking woman who was phallus-embracing. At Smith, the all-women’s college I attended in Massachusetts, girls walked around in T-shirts that said, “A Century of Women on Top”. And I remember asking, “What if you don’t like being on top? Does that mean you aren’t a feminist?”

My Women’s Studies professors would say: “You don’t know how hard we fought for you.” And yet, when they told me my sexuality was not correct, I felt embarrassed. I knew I had longings that didn’t line up with the politics, but I refused to repress them, particularly in my writing. I fought to unravel a political correctness that was censoring desire.

By the time I wrote the screenplay for Secretary, I had given up all hope of ever reaching a wider audience. No movie star would accept playing the lead in that film. After all, to portray a submissive and to be spanked onscreen would be a disastrous move for their careers. In addition, there was talk early on that the script was sexist because it ended with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character making a bed and dropping a cockroach on it – so that her husband would find it and punish her. It was repeatedly suggested to me that – instead – she should “find herself,” and become a lawyer herself. She should be powerful in a way that appeared strong through a traditional feminist lens. There was also a vibe around the film that Gyllenhaal’s character should overcome her problem. Again, I didn’t consider her to have a problem. And so I decided that this was a coming-out film for a masochist.

When the film screened at the Sundance film festival, middle-aged feminists stomped out during the spanking scene. I’d sit on the bus that shuttled us through the snow between screenings and eavesdrop on conversations. When the subject of Secretary came up, film-goers would look sideways. No comment. After all, in 2002, educated film-makers were not supposed to like this sort of thing. They were not supposed to like BDSM. And so we came away from Sundance with an honourable mention and exhaustion. We had not sold the film to a distributor. I had observed other films like Tadpole getting sold to Miramax for $5m. It was not a sexy situation. Perhaps we were the ultimate masochists, attempting to make this film in such a climate.

But Secretary was allowed to sit on the vine for a long time thanks to an eventual distribution deal from Lion’s Gate Entertainment, the advent of home video, DVDs, streaming and the glory of late night airings on the Sundance Channel. Today, it seems that what was pornographic 12 years ago is passé and maybe even clichéd. One generation’s risqué becomes the baseline for the next.

These days I watch films with both eyes open. There are no discarded popcorn boxes on the floor to stare at because I’m at home, alone. And I’m usually not watching a film, but a serialised cable television show. Sometimes I miss being uncomfortable around other movie-goers. I miss the furtive glances as we exit the dark into the bright light to fall into a café and get drunk on caffeine or alcohol, cigarette smoke streaming out of our mouths as we anxiously talk in and around the film we have just seen. 

My mother used to tell me – among the many things she told me – that there was nothing sexier than a man whose breath smelled of scotch and cigarettes. I miss cinema and sticky floors and popcorn on an empty stomach. We move forward, but some of us stop sometimes to remember what it was like to fill in the blanks of a dirty letter, to hunt for the naughty film magazine, and to look up between one’s fingers to catch a glimpse.

Random House Studio is a group of Penguin Random House book publisher that holds its Book-to-film division and its book-to-TV show division, Random House Films and Random House Television.

RH Studio is the brainchild of Peter Gethers, a longtime Random House editor and a writer of books, screenplays, and television series. He conceived of the Random House Films unit in 2005, as a way to expand the readership and sales potential that our publishing teams see in books they acquire, by pitching appropriate titles to partners in the theatrical film industry.

Jeff Silver

Jeff Silver is a literary manager, partner and co-founder of Grandview.

Ex-CAAers Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Matt Rosen, Jeff Silver Form Grandview Management Co. |  Deadline  |  May 19, 2014

Producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones (Sinister, Insidious), CAA lit agent Matt Rosen, and manager Jeff Silver (Fourth Floor Productions) are forming their own new management company focused on repping writers, filmmakers, and TV producers across multi-genres and mediums. The trio first met while working at CAA, where Rosen and Silver were in the film lit department and Kavanaugh-Jones was in film finance and sales. Grandview will see Rosen and Silver running management and repping clients while Kavanaugh-Jones advises on film production and packaging. Doors open in June on the new venture which will add Fourth Floor managers Chris Goble and Zac Frognowski. Automatik will retain executives Bailey Conway and Rian Cahill.

Rosen will be leaving his post at CAA to co-run Grandview. He first joined the agency in 2006 before being upped to MP Literary Agent in 2009, representing clients including Arash Amel (Grace of Monaco), Mark Heyman (Black Swan), and Aron Coletie (WB’s upcoming The Twilight Zone). Rosen also packaged and negotiated the Skydance-Annapurna rights deal for The Terminator and negotiated comic book label Boom/Archaia’s first-look deal with Fox.

Silver brings with him a number of Fourth Floor Productions clients including screenwriters Michael Mitnick (The Giver), Andrew Dodge (Bad Words), and Matthew Charman (Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ Untitled James Donovan Project).

Kavanaugh-Jones is still an active features producer whose upcoming titles include Air starring Norman Reedus and Djimon Hounsou and Focus Features’ The Signal, starring Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fishburne. He’ll continue to serve as President of his production/finance co. Automatik. Kavanaugh-Jones is currently producing Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special and the Nicholas Hoult-starrer Autobahn, and has horror threequel Insidious 3 starting this summer.

Former CAA Agents Form Grandview Management Company  |  Variety  |  May 19, 2014

Former CAA lit agent Matt Rosen, manager Jeff Silver and producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones have formed management company Grandview.

Grandview will manage writers, filmmakers, and television producers, focusing on high-end commercial fare stretching across all genres and mediums.

Rosen and Silver will helm the management side, working as representatives, which will allow them to focus more time on building the careers of their clients while offering a more complete package than a management company alone. Kavanaugh-Jones will advise clients on production and packaging while continuing to produce films under his Automatik banner.

“We are building a company that is solely client focused and rooted deeply in talent, ambition and culture. Grandview will provide the resources of a big firm but still have the intimate feel of a family operation,” said Silver.

“CAA has been an amazing home for me, and while I am sad to leave, I am very excited to start this new endeavor with Jeff and Brian,” said Rosen.

Grandview will retain clients from Silver’s past company, Fourth Floor Productions, including screenwriters Michael Mitnick, Andrew Dodge and Matthew Charman. Kavanaugh-Jones’ upcoming credits include Jeff Nichols’ “Midnight Special” and “Autobahn.”`

“I am so excited to be partnering with Jeff and Matt and have the opportunity to bring my producing and financing background to the table for Grandview and their clients,” said Kavanaugh-Jones.

CAA Literary Agent, Manager, ‘Midnight Special’ Producer Form New Management Company  |  The Hollywood Reporter  |  May 19, 2014

Matt Rosen, Jeff Silver and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones’ Grandview will rep clients, build careers, and advise clients on production and packaging.

CAA literary agent Matt Rosen, manager Jeff Silver and producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones have formed Grandview, a management company that will have writers, directors and TV producers in its lens.

The focus will be across all genres as well as mediums with clients creating high-end commercial fare, the trio say.

The company will be split into two areas of concentration: Rosen and Silver will be repping clients and building careers, and Kavanaugh-Jones will help clients with packaging and production. (He will also continue to produce films via his Automatik production shingle, which is behind Autobahn, which will star Nicholas Hoult andFelicity Jones; he also produced Jeff Nichols’ new feature, Midnight Special with Michael Shannon, and this summer will be in production on Insidious: Chapter 3.)

Grandview will open for business in June, and the plan is to expand into other areas beyond literary management, such as talent.

Grandview will retain clients from Silver’s past company, Fourth Floor Productions, including screenwriters Michael Mitnick (The Giver), Andrew Dodge (Bad Words), and Matthew Charman (DreamWorks’ untitled James Donovanproject for Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks), whom he represents with Rosen.

The trio originally met at CAA, where Rosen and Silver were in the motion picture literary department and Kavanaugh-Jones was part of the firm’s finance and sales group.

Rosen, who joined CAA in 2006 and worked for Richard Lovett and John Campisi before his promotion to agent in 2009, reps clients such as Arash Amel(Grace of Monaco) and Mark Heyman (Black Swan). He packaged and negotiated the Terminator rights deal with Skydance/Annapurna as well as negotiated a first-look deal at Fox for comic book publisher Boom!/Archaia.

Silver’s 5-year-old Fourth Floor Productions had clients running the gamut from screenwriter Jonathan Igla (Mad Men) to playwright Robert Askins (Hand to God, which is getting a Broadway run this fall) to novelist Charles Cumming (The Trinity Six).

Kavanaugh-Jones recently wrapped Air, starring Norman Reedus and Djimon Hounsou, and has The Signal, a sci-fi thriller starring Brenton Thwaites andLaurence Fishburne, opening June 13.

Grandview have a staff that includes Fourth Floor managers Chris Goble and Zac Frognowski as well as Automatik executives Bailey Conway and Rian Cahill.