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Ben Mezrich owns a magic radio. It’s an antique, the stand-up kind families used to gather round, stare at, and listen to, with a large dial that resembles a marine compass. He bought it for $50 in the late ’90s, back when he was a mid-list author deep in debt and contemplating giving up writing for an M.B.A., after wandering into a yard sale. For years, he kept the radio at his high-rise apartment in Boston before transporting it to his country home in the village of Quechee, Vermont, where it now lives in an extra bedroom he uses as a writer’s studio. One day in August, padding around in pink shorts and white socks, Mezrich, a bespectacled 55-year-old with spiked hair, leads me upstairs to behold it. The studio is sparse: Besides the radio, there is a desk, an unmade bed, a ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ puzzle, and the rudimentary word-processing device he uses, called a Neo2.
At some point after he bought the radio, Mezrich decided it possessed the genielike ability to grant him three wishes, so long as he kissed it when the lights were turned off and “The Crystal Ship,” by the Doors, was playing. The first thing he wished for was to meet his future wife: “I asked the radio for Tonya. I just described her exactly. Well, not exactly, but, like, I wished for a beautiful, model-y, smart girl.” That very night, at a Boston nightclub, he met Tonya Chen, a dental student who would go on to become a local TV personality and charity-circuit fixture. (They married in 2006.) Mezrich’s buddies started coming over to try to kiss the radio, but he wouldn’t let them.
Next was his career. He asked the radio for his book Bringing Down the House, about a card-counting MIT blackjack team, to become a New York Times best seller. After that happened in 2002, he had one wish left and knew just what to ask for. Mezrich wanted a movie studio to greenlight an adaptation of one of his books, didn’t matter which, into a feature film. And not a TV movie, which he’d already gotten when his thriller Reaper, about a virus that calcifies its victims, became a TBS feature called Fatal Error, a film he has assessed as “really a piece of shit.” He wanted a blockbuster, so he turned off the lights and asked for one.
Mezrich got his blockbuster when Bringing Down the House became 21, opening at No. 1 at the box office in the spring of 2008. After that came the Oscar-winning The Social Network, adapted by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin from his book The Accidental Billionaires, lending sudden prestige to the growing Mezrichian oeuvre about young rule-flouting underdogs trying to make gobs of money. Last September, his book about the GameStop meme-stock frenzy, which he titled The Antisocial Network, became Dumb Money, beating out a staggering number of rival projects in development, including a Netflix movie set to be written by Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal and an HBO project anchored by Billions co-creator and Times financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Authors have been selling out to Hollywood since Hollywood has existed. The difference with Mezrich is he is guilelessly up front about it. Over the course of the several days we spend together in Vermont and Boston, Mezrich repeatedly needles me for writing anything, such as this article, that lacks obvious cinematic potential. “What’s the high?” he asks, genuinely curious. “You write a ten-page thing, you hand it in, people read it in two seconds and then it’s gone. Like, that, to me, was not the same as writing a book that became a movie that a million people saw.” Plus there wasn’t real money in it. Mezrich, with his gift for the pulpy one-liner, likes to boil his life story to its essence: “My dream was never to win the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. It was to have the paperback come out with the little thing that says NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.”
As Mezrich’s career has progressed, so has his own genielike ability to enchant film executives. Most recently, in May, studio-of-the-moment A24 won a competitive auction to adapt his forthcoming chess-scandal book, Checkmate. “He goes cinematic on the page before we even get to it,” says Mike De Luca, the co-chair of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, who produced 21 and The Social Network. De Luca says Mezrich’s brand of nonfiction, with its dramatic peaks and valleys and neat three-act structure, makes him “feel like there is order in the world.” Lauren O’Connor heads up acquisitions for Amazon MGM Studios, which is developing one of Mezrich’s novels, Seven Wonders, into a series. “His ability to land a commercial tone and character,” O’Connor says, makes him “recessionproof.”
Mezrich’s bankable reputation in Hollywood exists in inverse relation to the critical reception of his books, which have been almost uniformly panned. In journalism circles, Mezrich is known as one of the great nuisances of modern nonfiction — a man who has built his career making things up. His unique hybrid style, announced to readers in a disclaimer-type author’s note, relies on narrative devices such as re-created dialogue, composite characters, imagined scenes, and compressed or scrambled timelines. Times critic Janet Maslin, who relished mauling his books, once called Mezrich an expert at “making up conversations he did not hear” and “sexing up parties he did not attend.”
Mezrich’s best friend of more than 35 years, who was his roommate at Harvard, is the Atlantic editor Scott Stossel. Where Mezrich is happy-go-lucky, a civically disengaged “Muppet” who says he would be content “whoever the king is,” Stossel is a ball of nerves who wrote an acclaimed memoir titled My Age of Anxiety. “He mocked me all the time: ‘Why are you wasting your time? You spend all this time getting all these details correct, and it’s for so much less payoff,’” Stossel says. “And he’s not wrong, by and large! But the truth is if, as actual journalists, we tried to do what he did and passed it off to any serious journalism outlet, and made do with the kind of reporting and sourcing he does, it would kill journalism.”
In a way, Mezrich’s books aren’t even books. What they really are is IP: intellectual property designed for Hollywood adaptation. This has served him particularly well in the streaming era, which has goosed demand for oven-ready content and incentivized writers to thirstily seek a lucrative second life for their books and articles onscreen, ideally by reporting on heists, capers, scams, feuds, and other narratives with theatrical appeal. “He is unabashed that his work is a first draft intended for the screen,” says Rebecca Angelo, a onetime journalist who co-wrote the Dumb Money screenplay with her former Wall Street Journal colleague Lauren Schuker Blum. “There is pearl-clutching about that notion — that the published work should be an end unto itself. Ben, smartly and rightly, was like, Nonsense.”
In the past two decades, Mezrich has published at an astounding clip: 13 works of nonfiction, three works of fiction, and a new novel this fall (plus children’s books). Some of these you may not have heard of. There is Woolly, about the race to create a genetically engineered mammoth. There is Sex on the Moon, about a heist of lunar rocks. Busting Vega$ and Straight Flush were essentially reboots of Bringing Down the House. Last fall, after Dumb Money hit theaters, he put out Breaking Twitter, about Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. Some may one day become movies or TV shows, most will linger forever in studio purgatory, but all were optioned for the screen.
It’s not just that Mezrich has capitalized on Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for IP — he has perfected the art of selling his stories for the screen. Normally, a writer publishes a book or article, then tries to get Hollywood interested in adapting it. Mezrich does it the other way around. “I write a ten-to-14-page book proposal, we take it out to Hollywood, and I sell the movie rights,” he says. “Then I go to the publishing houses with these ten pages and I sell the book. Then I write the book in three months while the screenwriter is already working on the screenplay.” If Hollywood doesn’t bite? He just won’t write the book, shelving the idea and coming up with another one.
Mezrich’s business is a brazen content-creation pipeline that even the most venerated, in-demand book-to-film journalists — Michael Lewis, David Grann — haven’t attempted. And with the streaming industry now retrenching after years of expansion, he’s an unlikely giant left standing as the flood of content recedes, his career at once totally inimitable and an object lesson in how, with maximum chutzpah and minimum rigor, to strike it rich in Hollywood.
Ben and Tonya Mezrich’s country house is in rural Vermont, but because it’s ruled by their pugs, Bagel and Cream Cheese, as well as their two school-age children, its defining quality is not so much pastoral tranquility as a kind of happy domestic chaos. The scene: iPads, chargers, dog toys, piano sheet music, a menagerie of South Park dolls, half-eaten summer-camp lunches deposited directly into the sink. Most of our time together Mezrich spends in a leather recliner, periodically dipping his feet into one of the electronic foot massagers he compulsively buys. (Buzz Bissinger is addicted to Gucci leather; Ben Mezrich, foot massagers.)
“I was a weak, small child, a kid who couldn’t play sports,” Mezrich narrates, deadpan. He revered celebrity from an early age but felt he lacked the looks or athletic talent to become famous. Then, as a teenager in New Jersey, he encountered the glamorous romans à clef of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, and it struck him that he might be able to achieve stardom as a writer. He was already plugging away at genre fiction at Harvard before he and Stossel moved into an apartment above a dentist’s office in Boston to pursue their respective writing careers. Mezrich’s father and two brothers are doctors, and his contribution to the family business wound up being sci-fi and medical thrillers. “I think the first novel he submitted was called Mutant Brew,” Stossel says.
Mezrich’s bible as a young author was Writing the Blockbuster Novel, by veteran literary agent Albert Zuckerman. He followed its advice ruthlessly, honing his literary trademarks: oscillating character perspectives, flashy contemporary locales, strong interpersonal bonds between heroes and villains. Mezrich wrote brochures for a nonprofit while doggedly cranking out 40-odd pages a day on the side. In a gambit so self-consciously cinematic it may have been designed to end up in a biopic, Mezrich tacked up his rejection slips from book editors, about 200 in all.
He wasn’t discouraged by the rejection, possessing what he calls a “delusion of genius.” “Part of this is having a Jewish mother,” he supposes. “I would go to school and take a test, and if I didn’t get an A, there was something wrong with the test.” He published his first novel, Threshold, in 1996, when he was five years out of college. It was about an intrepid med student investigating a rogue doctor who was working with the government to map the human genome and the mysterious deaths that trailed in the project’s wake. In one trade-fiction roundup, a critic wrote, “This is a bad book. Somebody should option it for the movies.”
Mezrich was delighted. Threshold didn’t sell, but he was sufficiently on the map to land what he recalls as a $250,000 advance for his next novel, Reaper. He remembers the following years as a blur of hotel suites in Amsterdam and Los Angeles. “It’s funny,” Mezrich says. “I didn’t do any drugs. I had no vices, really, except I wanted to live extravagantly.” Stossel remembers the era vividly: “He had been living hand-to-mouth, crashing with an ex-girlfriend. As soon as he started selling thriller novels, getting decent advances, he rents this fancy apartment on Boylston Street in Boston, goes to the furniture store, buys all the fanciest leather furniture. I think he went into debt in one day.”
Burning cash at an untenable rate, Mezrich saved his career when he was introduced to an ex–MIT blackjack player at a bar in Boston, then told his story in Bringing Down the House as if it were a novel, using every literary embellishment in his toolbox. The team’s coach, played by Kevin Spacey in the movie, was, in fact, a fusion of several people who say they never spoke with Mezrich. A couple of the MIT kids themselves, after reading the book, did not recall being beaten up by menacing casino goons. Bringing Down the House sold over 2 million copies, introducing readers to Mezrich’s hyperkinetic universe of hotshot strivers, who were constantly grinning or sweating or barreling into rooms, often in the company of hot, grinning women typically broken down into the categories “blonde,” “Asian,” and “brunette.”
“Bringing Down the House was tons of guys’ first book they read after Harry Potter,” says Mezrich, who has lost count of the number of women who have told him about boyfriends and husbands who categorically “don’t read” yet read his books. The Times’ Ginia Bellafante wrote a Sunday “Styles” profile of Mezrich in 2004 titled “What Do Men Really Want (to Read About)?” In the article, Mezrich answered the question succinctly: “They want to read about money, sex, and people beating the system.” Spacey’s business partner Dana Brunetti christened the genre “dick lit.”
Mezrich pivoted full time to dick lit, allowing him at last to fuse his lifestyle with his subject matter in Bright Lights, Big City fashion. “I write about kids living this high life, and I do it, too,” he sunnily once put it. In 2004, a publicist successfully submitted his name for People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue on the logic that “the author category is the easiest category.” This triumph came after Mezrich’s equally unlikely turn as a contestant in the Sexiest Bachelor in America pageant, for which Tonya submitted his name, even though they were a couple. Massachusetts being the “author category” of sexy states, he was once again accepted, before bowing out in round one. Meanwhile, the Mezrichs were cultivating Ben’s style, recognizable to any lad-mag reader of the mid-aughts: frosted hair, silvery ties worn with untucked dress shirts.
His fans wanted in on the experience, and Mezrich set up a tip line through which guys would call him with sensational book ideas. One of the great advantages of his fact-fiction blend, Mezrich says, is it encourages sensitive sources to seek him out. Plausible deniability is part of his pitch: “If you talk to me and you feel you don’t like what I wrote? Just say you never talked to me! I don’t care!” Everyone will assume he made it up anyway.
A couple of weeks before I visit him in Vermont, Mezrich invites me to meet him at a social club in Boston called the ’Quin House, a Soho House variant that caters to the city’s yuppie elite. Occupying six floors of a McKim, Mead & White–designed mansion in the Back Bay, it takes its name from the Algonquin Club, the building’s former occupant. A host leads me to meet “Mr. Ben” in a plush reading room furnished with a number of unnerving old-world totems: sand-filled hourglasses, statuettes of greyhounds. Mezrich, in a loud bespoke dress shirt, manages simultaneously to stick out and look utterly at home.
As we talk, Michael Lewis’s name comes up; they share a film agent. “Every time I write a book, my brother will call me and say, ‘It’s good, but it’s no Michael Lewis.’” I ask him how that makes him feel. “I think it’s hilarious,” he replies. Does he think it’s true?
“No. We write very differently. I think the FTX story — mine would be a very different story than how he wrote it,” he says, referring to Lewis’s recent book on fallen crypto prince Sam Bankman-Fried. “Did he open with an orgy in the Bahamas? Because my book would have opened with a drug-fueled orgy in the Bahamas.”
In early 2008, with 21 about to hit theaters, someone named Will McMullen emailed Mezrich with an intriguing pitch: “My best friend founded Facebook and no one’s ever heard of him.” Mezrich set up a meeting with the friend, named Eduardo Saverin, at a hotel bar. “I remember this exactly,” Mezrich says. “He drinks, like, two beers. And he starts the conversation, and he’s like, ‘Mark Zuckerberg fucked me.’” The two started palling around, Mezrich jotting down notes as Saverin unspooled the story of his broken friendship with Zuckerberg.
By May of that year, Mezrich had finished the book proposal for The Accidental Billionaires, which at the time he had called Face Off. He teased a “story filled with sex, exotic locales, vast excesses, and betrayal.” The proposal was leaked to Gawker. It began:
The true story of two best friends — geeky outsiders at a prestigious Ivy League university — who wanted nothing more than to get into one of the elite fraternities on campus, so they’d have an easier time getting laid. In this quest, they inadvertently did something that quite literally changed the world — and made them both instant billionaires …
The proposal was stuffed with wild and dubious revelations, like the one about Zuckerberg and Saverin eating koala meat outside Monte Carlo on the megayacht of the Sun Microsystems CEO, who, for starters, didn’t have a boat. But the spine of the story — a dramatic legal feud between two close friends over the founding of Facebook, a saga that had escaped the notice of the mainstream press — was legitimate. The very day the proposal leaked, according to Mezrich, Saverin began negotiating a settlement with Facebook and had a lawyer send him a demand to cut off contact. (It’s unclear if this timeline or its details is entirely correct. Saverin’s nondisclosure agreement probably ensures we’ll never know.) Mezrich thinks Saverin, currently No. 56 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on the strength of his Facebook settlement, should send him a gift.
Mezrich theorizes that Facebook settled with Saverin to sever his access to him and block the book’s eventual publication: “But what they didn’t count on is the way I write books. I don’t need three months, six months with Eduardo. I’ll write a book in four weeks!” (In the end, he amends, it was more like 11 weeks.) In any case, Mezrich already had what he needed from Saverin. The rest he could fill in from the parallel legal drama between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, “hundreds” of other unnamed sources, plus anything he dreamed up, such as one memorably absurd scene in which Zuckerberg must evade the notice of a couple of snogging co-eds as he sneaks around in the dark, trying to hack into the database of a Harvard residence house.
Mezrich’s great narrative insight was to frame the creation of Facebook as a kind of revenge plot against the exclusionary social clubs that ran Harvard. And whatever Saverin or other sources told him about Zuckerberg’s true motivations for creating Facebook — Mezrich never spoke with Zuckerberg, despite his efforts — his best source material may have been his own college-age psyche. “As Harvard freshmen, we were both intimidated by the elite social players, such as they were — fancy kids from Andover and Groton,” Stossel says. “We thought of ourselves as some combination of Revenge of the Nerds and Statler and Waldorf.” It’s hard not to read Mezrich’s description of Zuckerberg — “a nebbishy geek who hacked his way to stardom” — as aspirational.
After the proposal leaked, then–Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal called Sorkin to gauge his interest in adapting it. Sorkin had already seen it that morning and told her he was hooked after a few pages. Mezrich sold the rights off his proposal, the first time he’d done it that way. “Once that happened, we saw that that was a very successful way not only to put a project into the right hands but to do so early in the process so that a movie doesn’t come out years after the book is out,” says his film agent, CAA powerhouse Matthew Snyder.
After the sale, Mezrich locked himself in a room at a hotel and began feverishly writing the novel as Sorkin started his screenplay. “As he was writing it, he was sending chunks to Sorkin,” says Mezrich’s book agent, WME’s Eric Simonoff. “Never seen anything like it.” The book came out the summer after the proposal leaked, and the film followed a little more than a year after that — an incredibly compressed timeline for a major movie.
In the run-up to the release of The Social Network, Sorkin put some distance between himself and Mezrich, suggesting he based his screenplay on Mezrich’s general premise, not the actual book. Later, the film’s producers refused to grant the movie’s art and name to the paperback version of the book — as is customary, theoretically enhancing the promotion of both properties — which incensed the usually docile Mezrich. He has theorized that Scott Rudin, one of the film’s other producers, feared that any association with his downmarket brand would hurt the film’s Oscar chances. (Rudin wouldn’t comment. A source close to the film said the real reason was to keep Facebook’s lawyers, who hated the book, at bay.)
And yet Sorkin clearly had used the book. A number of scenes, including the ludicrous one in which Saverin and Zuckerberg are getting it on with their Harvard “groupies” in adjacent bathroom stalls, didn’t appear anywhere else. (When I called Sorkin, his reliance on the source material came back to him: “You’re right: I’m not giving Ben enough credit.”) If anything, when Sorkin did go off on his own, he took Mezrich’s premise further, cementing the culture’s image of a Zuckerberg motivated by resentment and longing. In The Social Network’s famous opening scene, Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is dumped by a Boston University student, played by Rooney Mara, who can’t stand his needy obsession with Harvard’s final clubs. Afterward, Zuck goes home and cruelly blogs about her cup size. None of it came from real life: no bar, no BU girlfriend, no LiveJournal revenge-blogging. Sorkin created the character off a few lines in a post Zuckerberg did write — “Jessica Alona is a bitch” — about a person who has never been identified. The movie’s final scene finds Zuckerberg friend-requesting the fictitious ex-girlfriend on Facebook, then refreshing the page as he awaits her reply.
The year 21 came out, Spacey said of Mezrich, “You see him in circumstances when we go to Vegas, or we’ve brought him to a couple of events and parties, and he’s like the kid who can’t believe he got in. He’d normally be the guy behind the rope.” Now that he’s in, he can’t get enough of a place like the ’Quin, practically a facsimile of the final clubs he didn’t belong to. Maslin once wrote, “If he has a single favorite sentence, it is this, best savored slowly: ‘Billionaires.’ If that needed a follow-up, which it doesn’t, his heightened version is: ‘Billionaires. Was it really possible?’”
The film and tv industry has always been interested in nonfiction adaptations. Producers love “based on a true story,” and so do viewers. What has changed in the past decade-plus is the rise of the streaming services and their debt-fueled quest to entice subscribers with piles of content. In 2009, according to an analysis by the network FX, 210 scripted shows aired. Three years later, Netflix began releasing original programming, and by 2022 there were 600 original series in total on network TV, cable, and the streamers. Pre-pandemic, the same paradigm held for movies: 872 were released in 2018, compared to roughly 520 in 2009.
Mezrich’s Hollywood rise coincides exactly with this period of heightened demand. In a broad sense, studios and streamers started buying more IP because they needed “turnkey” content to feed the maw, from comic books to young-adult novels. For nonfiction in particular, the appeal of IP is that it confers perceived value on a story anyone could theoretically write about. “There is such a reactionary and fear-based way of developing projects,” says one book-to-film agent. “People need somebody else to anoint it first, to add validation to it.” A shiny book or magazine story by a prominent author is easier to sell to a studio head than a .docx screenplay about the exact same topic. “People are excited by things that seem exciting,” says an IP scout at one of the streamers. He compares IP to so-called Veblen goods, intrinsically valueless luxury items that appreciate because others want them.
Journalists tend to get paid by Hollywood via an “option-purchase” agreement. The option is the studio’s prerogative to rent the dramatic rights for a fixed period of time while trying to get a screenplay written and talent attached. The purchase price, sometimes ten times that of the option, is what the writer gets paid if the picture gets made. Thanks to the IP glut, option payments were inflating from five figures to six or more. In 2016, The New Yorker’s Grann sold the rights to his book Killers of the Flower Moon for a flat $5 million, bypassing the option altogether. Two years later, the freelance journalist Jeff Maysh caused a minor sensation by optioning a Daily Beast article about a McDonald’s Monopoly game for $350,000 — for a film that has yet to be made. For authors facing the demise of media, catering to Hollywood’s tastes became a business model in its own right.
The boom helped Mezrich, for whom the book business had become less attractive on its own terms. In the early part of his career, with his books appearing on best-seller lists, he saw movies as a promotional tool. Now, the dynamic has flipped. He worries the pandemic helped kill off the airport paperback, and his usual demographic, men, doesn’t seem to be reading at all. Sales have become an afterthought with adaptation representing the whole ball game. According to the publishing-data provider BookScan, his GameStop book, The Antisocial Network, sold just 10,000 physical copies in the U.S. (Mezrich insists that if you include e-books, audiobooks, and foreign sales, the number is closer to 50,000 or maybe even 100,000.)
The mere optioning of a book or article creates another piece of value: the breathless announcement of the deal in a trade publication, which might freeze out competitors. “Let’s say you pay Ben Mezrich to option a book,” supposes one journalist with success selling his work for the screen. “By buying it and announcing it in The Hollywood Reporter, everyone else pauses. Do I want to buy The Wall Street Journal’s reporting if Sony is already putting money into this?” And then, as Mezrich points out, there’s yet another benefit of adapting a story that’s already dominating the news: “From a PR perspective, you can get a million articles written about it.”
This chain of events happened more or less exactly in late January 2021, when the GameStop mania began. Aaron Ryder, a producer of Arrival, was quarantining at a hotel in Montreal, watching an army of amateur day traders drive up the value of a supposedly worthless stock. He had recently signed a first-look deal with MGM and got a call from the studio’s then-co-chair, Pam Abdy. “She’s like, ‘I think it’s a movie.’ I’m like, ‘I do too,’” he says. “First order of business: What’s the piece of IP that will help put us ahead of everyone else?” Ryder says he started scouring the internet for reporting and was talking to journalists at the Times. “And then, out of the blue, I heard a whisper that Ben Mezrich may have a book proposal, and I was like, Oh, that’s gold.”
The GameStop saga spawned its own genre of articles about the sprint to turn it into a movie. Accentuating the absurdity of the gold rush, one of the screenwriters of Mezrich’s project, Lauren Schuker Blum, was competing with her husband, the producer Jason Blum, who was racing to get HBO’s project developed. MGM bought Mezrich’s Dumb Money book proposal outright for more than $1 million.
And in the end, only his feature got made. “Because he’s doing this sort of nonfiction-fiction thing, he’s able to make it super-dramatic — possibly more dramatic than it is in real life,” says one executive producer. This, in turn, gave Dumb Money’s screenwriters, themselves ex–finance reporters who could write quickly, a ready-made model to work from. As Simonoff, Mezrich’s book agent, says, “His book proposal is a sales tool for underlying dramatic rights. The book itself is a template for the actual screenwriter.”
In retrospect, the GameStop free-for-all may have represented the peak of the easy-money IP boom. When the pandemic lifted and filming resumed, production pipelines suddenly got filled, reducing the need for new content. Netflix’s competitors realized they couldn’t compete with the industry leader and scaled back development. Even after the writers strike ended last fall — a strike triggered in part by the rise of streaming, which didn’t generate the residual payments television writers earned from reruns — the industry continued to contract. As TV production has fallen from its 2022 peak, so has Hollywood’s interest in spraying money at journalists. For the average magazine writer or podcast producer, the free-money spigot has tightened, option payments have declined or vanished, and journalism has returned to its resting state of not making you wealthy.
If anything, what Hollywood craves now isn’t fresh ideas but reliable IP from proven commodities. Mezrich’s IP, precision-engineered for the screen and filled with tall tales that can’t be found in the public domain, may be some of the only IP worth buying. And lately he has streamlined his system. Once upon a time, he hunted down little-known yarns, like Saverin’s. Beginning with Dumb Money, continuing through Breaking Twitter — sold to MGM — and now with his forthcoming Checkmate, he’s been ripping from the headlines.
This past April, he wrapped up his latest novel, The Mistress and the Key, a sequel to a heist book–historical thriller he wrote during the pandemic. (“I would really love for it to turn into The Da Vinci Code,” he said. It came out in October.) He started brainstorming what to do next. “True crime is superhot right now, but I’m not really a crime writer. And then I was like, Am I going to write the AI thing? Chase down Sam Altman and those guys? But I don’t really have a connection, and, honestly, I don’t know what the hell’s going on in that world.” He consulted Google: “I Googled ‘scams.’ This is the worst, right?” He didn’t see anything he loved. He tried “cheating.”
There it was: a news hit about the infamous 2022 match in which tempestuous chess upstart Hans Niemann beat Magnus Carlsen, the greatest player of all time. The upset was so spectacular that Carlsen intimated Niemann was cheating, causing a meltdown in the sport. Mezrich vaguely remembered the story, but he couldn’t recall how it was resolved, if at all. He clicked around to verify that nobody was doing a book or a movie about it, then emailed his respective book and film agents to see if they were into it, which they were.
He took a couple days to bang out his Checkmate proposal, which clocked in at 15 pages. Opening with a scene of Carlsen staring in disbelief at a chessboard, sweating profusely, he teased a tale of “larger than life personalities, exotic locales, lies, betrayal, and billions of dollars.” Checkmate, though it didn’t contain new information about the cheating mystery, would nonetheless “blow the doors off one of the biggest scandals in recent sports history.” Mezrich’s book agent hung back, while his film agent worked to attach potential stars and took the PDF out to studios and streamers to create a bidding war.
When the Checkmate proposal started circulating, not everyone in Hollywood saw the appeal. “It was so thin. I was like, What is this? ” says one agent. Someone who works in adaptations at a streamer remembers when it landed in his inbox. “It doesn’t tell you anything you couldn’t get from any other place,” he says. “It really does feel like the type of thing that is somewhat engineered to spark significant interest in the marketplace.”
Of course, it wound up doing just that. “There’s a much better chess book to be written than Ben Mezrich’s,” says one journalist with a toehold in Hollywood. “And there’s probably one being written right now by some, like, incredible New Yorker writer, but that’s going to be a harder sale in three years when it comes out for the film-and-TV rights because there’s already this Ben Mezrich project in the universe. He’s doing these land grabs.” (In fact, New York published its own article on alleged chess cheater Hans Niemann around the time Mezrich sold his proposal.)
The journalist says, “He’s not even finding anything! He reads the newspaper: Oh, this is a story. He’s doing some other thing where he’s lending his name to the hottest story of the day, and it creates this K-Y Jelly for these projects that are looped into the Hollywood system. Like, Oh, Ben Mezrich — yes, I know what that means. It’s a sexy, contemporary, fun take on this, even if the book sucks. He’s not even selling intellectual property. It’s kind of incredible. He’s, like, post-IP.”
Ben and Tonya were in the car when A24 made the winning offer with Nathan Fielder pegged to direct and Emma Stone to produce: seven figures, guaranteed, whether or not it gets made.
The Mezrichs invite me to spend the night in Vermont, and I wake up the next morning to the sound of Ben in the other room making excited noises about Hans Niemann and Magnus Carlsen. The two rivals hadn’t played since the alleged cheating incident but now found themselves on an unexpected collision course for a dramatic rematch at a tournament in Paris in September. Whatever happened, it would make for a perfect ending to his book. He and Tonya begin discussing hotel accommodations in Paris.
“My career has been magical to the point where I get why people like Elon Musk think the world is a simulation,” he says about his never-ending streak of good fortune. He goes further, wondering if he is, in fact, dreaming the world into being. “Deep down, I think I’m probably creating the simulation.” Which is, of course, another way to describe his approach to nonfiction. Looking back, Maslin feels Mezrich was a harbinger of the post-truth paradigm. “When he started, I was reviewing a lot of serious nonfiction and we lived in a fact-based world,” she says. “I couldn’t have known he would become more of the norm.”
For a journalist, the lure of fact-checking Mezrich’s books is irresistible. I did it myself by calling Mezrich’s sources. In the book that became Dumb Money, a Duke student named “Jeremy Poe” has a disastrous Zoom date, in part because he keeps tracking GameStop’s share price instead of paying attention to the woman on his computer screen. In fact, Mezrich invented the date completely.
But I only learned this because Jeremy Poe is a real, findable person named Noah Lanier. Mezrich’s methods have created a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” dynamic. In his Times review of the book, the journalist Giri Nathan suggested that “Jeremy,” as well as another crucial character, a nurse named Kim, were invented. But they weren’t. Both told me Mezrich nailed the key details of their stories, including the ups and downs of their financial positions, and weren’t bothered by his cinematic embellishments. And each came to Mezrich with their stories after learning that he was working on a book. “In my head, I was like, Okay, this is going to be a movie. Ben won’t write something that won’t become a movie,” Lanier says.
Mezrich talks like he writes: Everything is a little exaggerated. But there’s a way in which Mezrich’s cinematic approach to the world can yield results that feel cosmically true. With Zuckerberg in particular, a standard journalistic tack may not have necessarily shed more light on the founder’s collegiate mind-set. “I think the movie got it exactly right,” Mezrich says. “The idea that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook because he wanted to save the world, and not because he wanted to get laid, is ridiculous.”
Every time some reporter starts poking holes in his books, Mezrich thinks, They’re the ones being unscrupulous. “I love journalists, and I think what they do is great, but I understand you’re all shooting for that viral beef now because you don’t make enough money just writing articles,” Mezrich says. “The only way their articles explode, which turns them into a bigger journalist, is if there’s something juicy or scandalous.”
I don’t think Mezrich can win the holier-than-thou game. But if you spend enough time with him, it’s impossible not to ponder an ethical quandary of your own: If you could write as quickly and cinematically as Mezrich; if you could put a child or two through college by selling a single 15-page Word document you dreamed up in a weekend; if you could fudge a few details and make it in Hollywood, might you do it, too?
The Mezrichs start plotting their trip to Paris to watch the chess match — they’ve decided it will double as a wedding-anniversary celebration — and Tonya asks me if I’m going to come with them. I tell her I probably can’t. “You chose Quechee over Paris,” Mezrich informs me.
As I agonize about missing my own perfect ending to this article, in which I am watching Mezrich watch the chess match, he tells me to stop worrying. Why do I need to go all the way to France to write a scene that happens to take place there?
“You can still write it! See, that’s what I would do. What’s the difference?”