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It was a weird, fun ride. My writing partner Lutz and I work in tech, but have a real passion for filmmaking. We lost some money on $GME, so we had to tell the
by ggambetta 5y ago
It was a weird, fun ride. My writing partner Lutz and I work in tech, but have a real passion for filmmaking. We lost some money on $GME, so we had to tell the story from our point of view.
The result is STONKS, a comedy/drama feature screenplay [0], fictional but inspired by the GME events, and a love letter of sorts to WSB. We queried Hollywood producers but were ignored; we shared on WSB itself but we were insta-banned and never told why (but given the founder sold the rights to his life story to Hollywood [1], we can make an informed guess).
Anyway, here it is. Feedback welcome.
[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/files/STONKS-2022-02-02.pdf https://gabrielgambetta.com/files/STONKS-2022-02-02.pdf
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddits-wallstreetbets-founder-sells-life-story-to-movie-producer-ratpac-entertainment-11612440001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddits-wallstreetbets-founder-...
- galcerte 5y agoMost discussion around $GME takes place on r/Superstonk these days anyways. Can't remember why it was banned from WSB. Something to do with the new mods I believe.
- swarnie 5y agoBecause it took over the entire subreddit for months on end and dominated all conversation. You can only read "Reporting in from Kazakhstan with 2 shares, stay strong apes HODL" so many times....
- voidfunc 5y agoHonestly it didnt just take over the sub it ruined the whole sub and community. Im not going to say WSB was civilized pre-pandemic but it was much smaller with a range of interesting takes on things plus funny memes. And also degenerate gamblers who at least knew what they were fucking with. The quality of poster is much much worse now.
- NoboruWataya 5y agoI followed WSB for a couple of years before the GME thing kicked off. When it did, it was great fun for about a week, then I unsubscribed. It got very repetitive and boring.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoThey could at least pick a different moon to aim for.
- jayolden 5y agoAgreed, I'm a big WSB lurker in the past, but I wasn't so sure when the GME event erupted.
- wsb_mod2 5y agoYou should check it out again. We recently restricted memes to Friday afternoon to Sunday morning and the context is almost all text now.
- phonebanshee 5y agoI can't figure out if this is sarcasm or an actual response.
- djanogo 5y agoI used to visit WSB 5 or 6 years back, whenever I visit it now it all seems to be millionaires pumping their positions in separate trading account as "YOLO" trade trying to get dumb people to pump the stock. All WSB does now is magnify the winners/pumpers while leaving trail of poor people without their money.
- wsb_mod2 5y agoGameStop was never banned from WSB. It is the 3rd most discussed ticker in the past 30 days. (After SPY and TSLA) [0] GME had it's own daily thread well into April, at which point it was still completely dominating with significantly lower quality discussion that extended outside the GME specific daily thread. Once we ended the daily thread and asked people to move to r/GME or r/SuperStonk, people incorrectly assumed it was banned, and continued to repeat this narrative, despite our repeated mentions that it was not banned. Also, the WSB mod team is more or less the same as it was in 2019 or earlier. The majority of the team has been around for 6+ years. [0] https://www.quiverquant.com/wallstreetbets/ https://www.quiverquant.com/wallstreetbets/
- CommieBobDole 5y ago/r/superstonk used to show up in my feed on Reddit a lot, and it seemed like most of the highly-upvoted posts were elaborate explanations of how, any day now, there was going to be some sort of massive short squeeze that was going to cause $GME to hit a price of ten or twenty million dollars a share (at which point the outstanding shares of $GME would be worth more than everything else on earth combined), and everybody who bought in was going to be billionaires. I was never clear if this was some sort of in-joke/meme, or some fringe idea that kept getting upvoted because it was hilarious, or if the people in there actually knew so little about stocks and economics that they thought something like that was possible.
- zinclozenge 5y agoSuperstonk has pretty much been a qanon-esque community since day 1. I still hold 10 shares of GME (bought at $220 oof) _just in case_. With that said, every now and then they come up with something that makes me do a double take. Right now they're obsessed with direct registering their shares. I'm guessing they think that if they can lock up the whole float they can force a short squeeze. Also if ryan cohen issues an NFT dividend. But I can assure you that the members are 100% serious.
- conorcleary 5y ago> But I can assure you that the members are 100% serious. < We are, to an extent. > Direct registering shares < If the outstanding float of a stock is il-liquid and unable to be lent out, that'll force a short squeeze if the rest of the conditions are met. Lots of due diligence is readily available over there to show that those conditions are only getting more dire for the funds that never actually hedged their bets with authentic shares. > Issues an NFT dividend < This forces the hedge funds to also buy those NFT's to pair with the shares, which they'll be forced to buy too = short squeeze.
- lern_too_spel 5y agoIt looks like they are serious. They really believe their "DD" about "authentic shares" and "NFT dividends."
- anyfactor 5y agoI will be your WSB historian. Two folds to the story - WSB Side WSB mods alleged the sub was suffocating with the GME and subsequent squeeze stock posts and shitty memes. I made couple memes myself but after the weeks to come WSB was inundated with all the memes centered around this one topic. WSB is a general investment subreddit that took a turn towards GME everything. Another problem was GME's foundational investment theory, that it had high short interest. But if you look at DFV's way of investing he preached low valuation high potential stock. Just the mere short interest as a determinant wasn't true but an after thought. From that point on, many people who thought they were late in the GME game started to pile on other high short interest stock like Bed Bath and Beyond, WKHS etc. At that point WSB was becoming less of a shitty DD based stock to shitty meme based stock site. Mods clutched up modding but you can never know the difference between one pile of shit vs another pile of shit when it comes to a post. So post removal felt arbitrary. Superstonk Side The GME centered group left WSB because there was a new mod who didn't fit the WSB philosophy. There were some personal hypothesis about her(?). They even alleged I believe that mod made their adolescent child a mod of WSB who were also removing content left and right. My post about cautioning people about GME which reached some magnitudes of thousand upvotes and plenty of agreeable comments was removed without notice. There were several highly upvoted and good value posts removed which led to people believing that the real wall street might have infiltrated the WSB. So, in this cloud of distrust groups left and they started their own spinoff version of WSB.
- wsb_mod2 5y ago> The GME centered group left WSB because there was a new mod who didn't fit the WSB philosophy. There were some personal hypothesis about her(?). They even alleged I believe that mod made their adolescent child a mod of WSB who were also removing content left and right. You are confused. This has nothing to do with WSB. What you are describing happened solely on r/SuperStonk or the other GME subreddits. WSB has never had a child moderator.
- anyfactor 5y agoCan't edit or delete the comment. I was dmed by the WSB mod who posted the daily GME megathread on reddit. I have confused the GME subreddit with WSB on the point about the child moderator. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/mkdpk3/plumdragon_mod_for_gme_is_sexist_and_allowed_her/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/mkdpk3/plumdrag... --- Also WSB discontinued the daily GME thread and people moved (refugee-d) to superstonk. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ms8681/rwallstreetbets_has_discontinued_their_gme_daily/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ms8681/rwallstr...
- GVRV 5y agoI read a few pages and found it really good (maybe cause I was following the saga online)! I hope I get to see it on the big screen!
- eternalban 5y agoRead it, it's good. (Typo page 45 r/the approach/they approach). "not bad for a day's work" Interesting definition of work. I see Kyle's future having morphed into Ivanov..
- ggambetta 5y agoThanks! Fixed the typo for next drafts. Who knows, maybe this is the origin story of Kyle as a hedge fund supervillain? :)
- iib 5y agoI am in the process of reading it. I never understood the disclaimer at start, that "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental." in works were I saw it. Is this usually written to defend one legally, even though the events have clear, non-coincidental resemblance to real-life events?
- lkrubner 5y agoA roman à clef is protected legally. It's why a movie like Citizen Kane was protected, despite the fact everyone knew it was about Hearst.
- idealmedtech 5y agoPrecisely. There was a film early in the industry's history (Rasputin and the Empress, early 1930s) that depicted events from a real person's life in a very negative (and most importantly, false) way and the studio got the pants sued off them. Hence the disclaimer edit: it was Rasputin! Here's a Slate article describing the events: https://slate.com/culture/2016/08/the-bizarre-true-story-behind-the-this-is-a-work-of-fiction-disclaimer.html https://slate.com/culture/2016/08/the-bizarre-true-story-beh... edit2: Here is a secondary source from Stanford, which is drier, but also less subject to hyperbole: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/HistoryWired/Davis/DavisAuthenticity.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/HistoryWired/Davis/DavisAu...
- dmix 5y agoFunny how it got banned on Reddit, you got the full Reddit experience.
- wsb_mod2 5y agoWell yes, users do get banned for blatant self promotion. WSB is not, and has never been, the place to promote your art, especially when you're explicitly trying to raise awareness so you can sell it. OP did the same thing with a gamedev book a year prior. Easy ban.
- ggambetta 5y agoThanks for explaining the ban - I messaged you (I suppose) on Reddit asking why, but never received an explanation. I would have imagined a screenplay like this would be of interest to the community, and I couldn't really figure out what rule I had broken, but apologies for breaking the rules nonetheless. I did in fact announce my (freely available) CG book [0] on Reddit, where it was very well received - 1300 upvotes in gamedev [1], 2500 in programming [2], tons of awards. Turns out Redditors respond positively to original quality content shared for free :) [0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/index.html https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/i... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/lbmbdf/computer_graphics_from_scratch_now_as_a_real_book/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/lbmbdf/computer_gr... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lbmda2/computer_graphics_from_scratch_now_as_a_real_book/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lbmda2/compute...
- jstanley 5y agoI read the whole thing and loved it. Great work. I wish I could watch the film!
- lutzwutz 5y agoThanks! So are we :)
- wsb_mod2 5y agoJaime Rogozinski is a grifter who repeatedly abused community trust to profit off WSB. This is why he was removed by Reddit admins in January 2020, a full year before the GameStop saga. The only time he ever came to WSB after 2016 was if someone approached him with a way to make money off the community. It's laughable that anyone would buy the rights to his story when he wasn't around at all. If WSJ cared about integrity, they would put "DISGRACED" ahead of the word founder.
- throwthere 5y agoSomehow I think a label like that would be prized in that place.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- prionassembly 5y agoI haven't seen screenplay typography in a while... how did you typeset that?
- ggambetta 5y agoI used Trelby on Linux to write it, then just print to PDF.
- whatshisface 5y agoI like the script but you might want to tone it down at the start. I think it was good up until the christmas tree, and the wishing star was a little over the top. The emotions being expressed are clear already, and you don't need to translate it into symbolism for the audience to understand. :)
- lutzwutz 5y agoLutz / Co-writer here. Thanks for your feedback! I'm mostly to blame for the excessive use of symbolism as I'm personally a big fan of visual storytelling as opposed to focusing on dialogue to explain the set-up in a scene. But I agree with you, maybe it was a little too much considering the context was already set very early into the scene!
- iib 5y agoOn page 7, it seems that IVANOV is the one that tells ANTHONY to short WeDeliver, but on page 31 it seems that IVANOV is mad at ANTHONY that he (IVANOV) lost money. I understand how a perceived egotistic person that IVANOV seems to be would feel this type of anger, but why would ANTHONY accept this?
- ggambetta 5y agoGreat observation. I don't have a clear answer for this. The relationship between Ivanov and Anthony reflects the power relationship between their respective hedge funds (and later when Feng shows up, Feng > Ivanov > Anthony). Could say that Anthony was responsible for executing Ivanov's plan, so he's blamed when it fails, or that Ivanov is the kind of person who blames everyone but themselves when things go wrong, and Anthony is weak and/or afraid of Ivanov, so he just takes the blame without pushing back. But again, great observation, will try to improve in future drafts.
- Melting_Harps 5y ago> Anyway, here it is. Feedback welcome. I'm 10 pages in, it's engaging and taps into the whole 'GME is Occupy Wall Street 2.0' narrative that was widespread in late 2020-2021. It reads a lot like 'How to Sell Drugs Fast' to me. I think we really should have a monthly screen-writer post on HN, throughout the years here I've read a few things that seemed like it had potential if it were fleshed out but usually fell on deaf ears. I have a few pilots and screen plays I go back to when I have down time. Who knows maybe a FAANG worker has an in at Netflix? Edit: Just finished it, the last act seems really rushed, like it was meant to meet a page threshold more than finding the protagonist's resolution. The overall arch was solid, with typical banter and some inside jokes that could still be relatable to the uninitiated.