Ben Manalowitz (B.J. Novak) is an aspiring New York podcaster in search of a story. When the body of a woman he’d been hooking up with is discovered in a West Texas oil field, he stumbles onto exactly the sort of true-crime tale that could make his career. Launching an investigation into her death in collaboration with high-powered producer Eloise (Issa Rae), the confident Ben finds himself in over his head attempting to navigate a wildly unfamiliar culture. As he grows unexpectedly close to the young woman’s eccentric family and encounters figures like the enigmatic music producer Quentin Sellers (Ashton Kutcher), he’s forced to confront his own shortcomings and preconceptions. At the same time, he’s drawn into an ill-considered plot to avenge the crime. Emmy Award®-nominee B.J. Novak (The Office) makes his feature film directorial debut with an insightful, irreverent fish-out-of-water black comedy about myth, misunderstandings and murder.
WHEN COMEDY MEETS TRUE CRIME…
“The idea came after a breakup,” Novak explains. “I was obsessing over all my regrets about how little I had paid attention to the relationship while it was happening, and now that it was over, I could see all the pictures of her online and fixate on everything I had never paid attention to before. Once it was over, I wanted to know her, and her family, all of it. Was that just idealization in the social media age? Or was that my real heart finally expressing itself? These days, when our closest connections are so often through text message and a screen, it’s so easy to be unsure of what we mean to each other. My mind drifted to this dark idea: what if someone who had been acting the way I had been acting—kind of absent—had been expected to avenge the death of someone he didn’t feel serious about at all? It made me laugh, but also made me wonder about myself and about relationships in general these days.
“Although that premise has been in movies since the beginning—falling in love with the dead girl—and it’s a very male-gaze, classic movie trope, it’s also extremely social media age, this sense of loss and the digital ghost of someone,” Novak adds.
As he began to think about the film’s protagonist, he decided Ben Manalowitz should be the physical embodiment of a Brooklyn intellectual. A writer at the New Yorker—not to be confused with New York Magazine—Ben prides himself on his ability to observe the world and make connections that others can’t. He’s a bright, ambitious scenester who is extremely uninterested in anything resembling a serious relationship. “When you meet this character in the beginning, he definitely has issues with commitment to say the least,” Novak says. “He’s atop Soho House trying to keep track of who’s in his phone.”
Hoping to maximize Ben’s initial discomfort at the outset of the story, Novak began searching for a locale where he himself would feel ill at ease: “I was thinking, what’s the funniest place to put a shallow, New York, would-be player-intellectual? I looked at a map and Texas was just staring at me. Texas is a mythological place to those outside it, and even more so, in a way, to Texans. It felt larger than life to me, and that made me realize, that’s where this character would have to go—a place that he found as mysterious and intimidating and foreign as I did.”
To research the culture there, Novak undertook numerous trips to West Texas, touring the state in the company of journalist Christian Wallace, the Texas Monthly senior editor who had created the podcast Boomtown about the oil industry. Wallace, a native of Andrews, Texas, introduced Novak to families throughout the region in places like Merkel and Pecos, the latter of which is home to the world’s first rodeo and became the de facto setting for Novak’s script.
“The people in Texas blew my mind,” Novak says. “Texas feels like its own country, which for a while, of course, it was. I’ve been to foreign countries where I felt way more at home than I did in West Texas at first. But its contradictions, with each trip I took, fascinated me and drew me in more and more. It was the most intimidating place from the outside, but the friendliest I had ever been once I was there. And I realized quickly that vengeance is in Texas’s DNA. The foundational story of Texas is the Alamo. It’s about a defeat that was never forgotten, that inspired the battles they won next.”
It was a 2016 tweet from Novak that ultimately set VENGEANCE into motion. Referencing the 2013 horror satire that spawned a long-running franchise, Novak noted on Twitter, “The Purge is the best premise since Jurassic Park.” The compliment caught the eye of Couper Samuelson, an executive at production company Blumhouse, which had overseen the Purge films and was then readying Jordan Peele’s future Oscar-winner, Get Out. Novak and Samuelson met over lunch, and Novak mentioned his desire to craft a comedy with thriller elements that would thoughtfully explore both heartbreak in the social media age and the cultural divisions that exist between the coasts and the middle of the country. Samuelson was sold.
“He had faith from the beginning,” Novak says. “I went to Blumhouse, too, because I didn’t want to just make an arty movie, a smart movie like Albert Brooks goes to Texas. I wanted it to be a movie for everybody. When I saw Get Out, I thought, I’d love some of that influence—to make a popular, exciting movie in a bit more of a genre box that I can push the edges of.”
Blumhouse chief Jason Blum was similarly excited to work with Novak to shape the story and signed on to produce, bringing on his frequent collaborators Greg Gilreath and Adam Hendricks to join him through their Divide/Conquer banner.
As fresh and funny as the finished film is, the experience of writing the VENGEANCE screenplay sometimes made Novak feel as though he was living in a horror movie. “It’s the scariest thing I ever wrote in my life,” he says. “I literally once went to the hospital and got an MRI because I thought I’d had a stroke, I was so scared of this movie because it’s so exposing.”
His fear stemmed not only from the self-doubt that often grips even the most gifted writers but also a place of real vulnerability—in creating his smart but superficial protagonist, Novak had given the character many of his own less-than-desirable traits. “There were a lot of things I didn’t like about myself that I had written into the character,” Novak says. “And then his growth in the film, I thought that people would roll their eyes. Being so invested as the writer and the actor, too, I was just scared. It was such a personal movie, and it is this blend of tones. Anytime one tone in the script got too big—it was too thriller-y, it was too jokey—I wanted to tear the whole thing up. It was a really intimidating project.”
Once he’d completed a full draft of VENGEANCE, his producers were truly impressed with what Novak had achieved. “B.J.’s such a brilliant writer, his script was just so readable,” says Gilreath. “It just grabs you, the mix of the comedy and the thriller element. What B.J. does so well is the poignancy and the relevancy to the moment. He gets to the heart of character and story and really rounds out these characters while also making a larger point about society, which is such a rare thing to read. Everybody wants to make social commentary, but no script that I’ve read came even close to the deft hand that B.J. had in putting that together. On top of that, it’s hilarious.”
Adds Hendricks: “One of the things that I love about this script is that it’s incredibly internal. He really looked at himself and created a character that embodied all the things that he dislikes about himself, which I think is incredibly brave as an artist. He threw that character out into the world both as a means to explore that side of himself but also as a means to grow.”