Stay ConnectedEvery week, author and pop culture writer Mike Vago pitches stories that Hollywood needs to bring to the big screen, with guests from the pop culture writing world.
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Copyright: © Mike Vago
In 1959, nine friends went on a hike in Russia's Ural Mountains and never returned. Their bodies were found with a bizarre set of injuries, including head trauma, internal bleeding, exposure, and traces of radiation. 60 years later, the Dyatlov Pass Incident is one of history's great unsolved mass deaths.
Pop culture writer Lauren Thoman (Collider, Looper, PopSugar, Parade, Vulture) visits the show to talk about death in the mountains, and why this real-life story would make a great horror movie.
During the Vietnam War, a student protest at Washington University in St. Louis erupted into violence, with a campus ROTC building being burned down. A student named Howard Mechanic was accused of the crime, and when he was sentenced to federal prison... he vanished. He had been represented by civil rights attorney Louis Gilden, and he and his daughter Nina obsessed over Mechanic's whereabouts for years.
Now an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founding director of Washington U.'s Documentary Center, Nina Gilden Seavey joins us to tell the story of her ten year search for Howard Mechanic, the much larger story about government surveillance she uncovered, and how her 8-episode podcast that tells the story, My Fugitive, is ready to be made into a movie.
In 2012, a fungal meningitis outbreak killed 100 people and infected 750 more. Two doctors at the Center for Disease Control raced against time to stop a nationwide pandemic eight years before the Covid pandemic. Journalist Natalia Megas, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Washingtonian, and The Daily Beast, joins us to talk about a race-against-time medical drama that's different enough to not be a too-soon Covid movie, but can still speak to our present ongoing crisis.
A quick special episode, in which we honor the best films and performances of 2020 not nominated for an Academy Award. Hear who won this year's Best Snubbed Supporting and Lead Actor and Actress, Best Snubbed Director, Best Snubbed Picture, and winners in three categories of filmmaking ignored completely by the Academy: Best Stuntwork, Best Voicework, and Best Casting. Then next week we return to our usual format with another movie pitch.
It's not a secret that Coca-Cola's original formula included cocaine. But what's less well-known is that the soft drink still uses coca leaf, just not the part that gets you high. One plant in all of America is legally allowed to process cocaine—the drug for medical use, and the byproducts for Coca-Cola. Kyle Ryan, TV/film producer and alumni of both The A.V. Club and The Onion joins us this week to talk about why a cocaine factory in New Jersey is the perfect setting for a heist movie.
A serial killer is targeting underappreciated artists. The twist: he's their art dealer. Emerson Rosenthal, a script consultant who's instagram account, @freemovieideas, is a nonstop font of clever elevator pitches for movies like this one. The second twist? Instead of pitching me the story, he challenges me to take his germ of an idea, and flesh it out into a full-on movie.
In 1184, two German nobles had a land dispute. They presented their case to the King at a monastery in the town of Erfurt. Dozens of nobles packed into the room... the floorboards gave way... and 100 people plunged into the latrine in the basement. Annie Rauwerda, the mind behind Depths of Wikipedia, takes us through history's number one number-two-related disaster.
LSD came into vogue in the 1960s, but it came back in a big way in the '90s, as teenagers embraced the cheap, long-lasting high it produced. Jon Reid, host of Radio Free Brooklyn's Race to the Bottom, joins us to talk about how to make a film about the second wave of LSD that's neither D.A.R.E.-style scare tactic, nor rose-tinted nostalgia.
In the year 2000, a secret military task force discovered Al Qaeda operatives working in the U.S., possible including the 9/11 hijackers. They claim they were ignored or silenced by the government. The government claims they never found anything worth silencing. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
This week Shane Harris, Washington Post senior national security writer and co-host of the podcast Rational Security joins us to talk about Operation Able Danger, who saw the first hints of a cataclysmic event that proved impossible to predict, and why their story could be The Big Short for the national security apparatus.
2,750 New Yorkers died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, but in 2004, the number was updated to 2,751. Sneha Philip was a young doctor who lived in lower Manhattan who was last seen on 9/10/01, and her final fate remains a mystery. Did she run into the towers to help and die in the collapse? Was she murdered the night before and forgotten in the confusion of that day? Or did she fake her death to escape mounting personal and professional problems? Comedy writer and Saturday Night Live background player Tom Murphy joins us to talk about a small-scale mystery backdropped by a large-scale tragedy.
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