Personal essays
A story of a loss that ended up launching a career.
Grab
On a recent episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast, his guest told the story of having his phone stolen.
He was walking in Philadelphia and someone on a bike grabbed the phone out of his hands and pedaled away.
The nature of the theft made the guy feel even worse.
If someone robbed him at gun point or knife point then he’d have a story that others would understand.
You’d feel bad for him that this had happened.
Somehow this was different. Some person on a bike stole his phone.
Smash
In either scenario the victim isn’t to blame.
I mean, sure, someone would say “what are you doing walking around with your phone out like that?”
But that’s what we do.
When Kim and I moved into our first house there were old radiators in the garage so we had to leave our cars out.
A week after moving in, someone went from house to house breaking into cars and stealing the radios.
Our cars were locked behind our house and still someone broke a window and stole my radio.
When we called it in the officer asked if our cars were in the garage.
Sigh.
Mine
This is not an essay about theft in the time of AI - that’s for another day.
But years ago someone contacted me to tell me someone had stolen something I had written and was using it without attribution.
It was so obvious that one of my readers had noticed.
In one of my books I’d written a poem to illustrate a point. Someone had taken the poem and presented it in a talk they gave on the same subject.
I know we worry about theft because of our exposure to technology - I’ll give you an example of that.
In the early days of Twitter people would post, “I’m off to meet a friend for coffee.”
And then someone figured out that they could scan Tweets and post who would be away from their home for a while.
Suddenly your house or apartment was a target.
The theft of the poem or the radio or the phone is kind of old-school.
Monitor
I don’t know if you’ve heard the story of the movie “Monitor” but it’s a lot like my poem story.
Eight years ago Matt Black and Ryan Polly wrote a short film named “Monitor”. They produced it and posted it online.
Then about four years ago they got a call from someone who’d been invited to pitch his take on how to make a story named “Radio” into a feature film for a big time producer at a major studio.
“Wait,” you ask, “why would someone call Matt and Ryan about this other film?”
Ah. Because it wasn’t another film.
The writer, Nick, had recognized that “Radio” was really “Monitor”.
Someone downloaded Matt and Ryan’s short film and replaced the title and credits with their own and had taken it to a studio to get a deal.
And they had gotten a deal. And now the studio was looking for writers to turn this little short into a full feature film.
So it turns out the director who had stolen their film ended up getting caught.
Then someone called Matt and Ryan and asked if they had any ideas for turning the short into a full feature.
So they lied and said “yes”. After some starts and stops they end up making the movie and it’s coming out next year.
Why did I tell you this story?
I don’t know. I liked that it’s a story of a good old-fashioned theft with a happy ending.
Given that their movie is a horror film, I’m more interested in a movie about the movie than the movie itself.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 324. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe