The Big Short

ON THE UPPER LEVEL OF BARNES & NOBLE at the Grove, Marcus Kliewer shifted anxiously onstage. Six years ago, the bearded, introverted Canadian was listening to horror audiobooks while working as a landscaper. Now the actress Judy Greer was cheerfully peppering him with questions in front of a crowd of about sixty people.

It was April 21, and Kliewer was on the first stop of his national book tour promoting his latest novel “The Caretaker,” which is already set to be adapted into a film starring Sydney Sweeney. But Kliewer’s original path to Hollywood began with an unlikely — but increasingly common — first step: He posted a short story on Reddit.

As Hollywood scales back its buying and greenlighting, the self-published short story has become a surprising conduit to industry success  — it may, in fact, be the hottest format in town.

These are not the literary short stories you might find in The New Yorker or The Kenyon Review, but pulpier genre pieces posted online or sometimes never published at all. Short stories like these have now driven multiple million-dollar deals and bidding wars among distributors including Netflix, Amazon, and Universal. High-profile stars from Michael B. Jordan to Nicole Kidman have signed on to adaptations. And the deal-making model has proven so successful that many established screenwriters are now foregoing pitches and spec scripts — for decades the standard operating procedures for selling a film or television idea — and getting into the short story game themselves.

“It is a boom. It is a gold rush,” Matt Reilly, a former longtime Vice President at Universal Pictures and current President of Production for Arena SNK Studios, said. “It’s a thing.”