Turned Upside Down

The Duffer brothers thought they’d flamed out in Hollywood. Then they came up with Stranger Things.

 

- Adam Sternbergh

LET ME TELL YOU the story of a pair of twin brothers who, not long out of college, wrote a screenplay for a horror film that prompted such a bidding war that they were able to persuade its eventual buyer, Warner Bros., to allow them to direct it—a film you probably haven’t heard of, and certainly haven’t seen, and that was dumped without even getting a theatrical release, and those twin brothers were never heard from again.

Except this isn’t that story.

Let me tell you the story of how M. Night Shyamalan read that screenplay and, attracted by its M. Night Shyamalan–y premise and structure, tracked down the twin brothers and hired them to work on his TV show, Wayward Pines. And how, emboldened by their experience, the brothers thought that maybe they, too, could create a TV show—so they came up with a concept that melded together all their myriad childhood obsessions yet could be encapsulated in one simple pitch: “What if Steven Spielberg directed a Stephen King book?” And they hooked up with some producers who encouraged them to downplay the whole Spielberg King aspect of it and shopped that pitch to about a dozen TV executives, some of whom stared at them in disinterest and all of whom eventually passed on their idiosyncratic show.

Except this isn’t quite that story either.