Jane Schoenbrun wants weirdness to know no genre boundary. Following their breakout Sundance hit film “I Saw the TV Glow” and the long publicity tour that followed, Schoenbrun is looking forward to taking a bit of a break, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have ideas in the tank, ready to go when called upon. Speaking with friend and collaborator Brigette Lundy-Paine for the A24 podcast, Schoenbrun shared some of the concepts percolating in their mind as well as some failed pitches that pushed them to explore new mediums.
“I think I’d really like to make an Apatow style comedy,” Schoenbrun said to Lundy-Paine somewhat seriously, later adding, “I want to make a stoner comedy for reals. And I feel like I’m always trying to think of a movie concept worthy of Conor O’Malley. I’ve got a couple of good ones, but here’s one. Let me pull it out of the archive. School shooting comedy. But you know, like active shooter drills.”
“Basically, our main character is the guy in the local PD who plans the active shooter drills in school,” said Shoenburn, “and the movie opens with him doing one. And it’s this whole set piece. And you think it’s a real school shooting until you realize that it’s just an active shooter drill. And then he goes back to his chief’s office with his partner who’s in love with him. And they’re sitting there, and the chief — real chief kind of character — kind of shakes his head. And he’s like, ‘Fellas, we got to talk about the active shooter drills.’ And they’re like, ‘What is it, chief?’ There’s like a long pause. And the chief goes, ‘They’re not fucking scary enough.’ And so then basically, like he’s trying to plan the most hardcore possible active shooter drill.”
Continuing on this trend of coming up with fake movie ideas, Schoenbrun also discussed their interest in creating a “they/them serial killer.” She said on the podcast, “It would be a movie called ‘Pronouns.’ It would be like an office, you know, like an office setting. And like every day in the office, like somebody fucks up someone else’s pronouns. And there’s just like a big pregnant pause after it happens. And then inevitably that person ends up dead the next day.”
Veering back into the subject of real potential projects, Schoenbrun acknowledged how they were hoping to create a screen trilogy, following up “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow” with a massive world-building epic.
“It’s called ‘Public Access Afterworld,’” Schoenbrun said. “And I just wrote — no one asked me to — but I wrote like 1600 pages of a screenplay that was meant to be the first two seasons of a three season TV show.”
Unfortunately, when they took the idea out, not many networks were that receptive. Schoenbrun said of the experience, “So I pitched it and a bunch of the networks were like, it skews a little young for us.”
“There was this person at HBO who really loved it,” Schoenbrun said later, adding, “but I think couldn’t pick it up because at the time there was like a strict edict that they could only pick up new shows that had like, that were like ‘Succession,’ like about like dysfunctional families.”
Rather than give up on their concept, Schoenbrun pivoted the form it would take on.
“I was like, all right, I’m going to write this thing as like a series of three novels,” said Schoenbrun. “And I’m going to teach myself how to do that. And I basically spent the next year and a half doing that.”
