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.”

Is the short story a bright spot in a Hollywood landscape defined by job loss and the existential threat of AI? Or is its popularity the inevitable product of an industry obsessed with intellectual property and shortened attention spans?

The Hollywood operator broadly acknowledged to have ignited the short story market, for one, is optimistic about the trend: producer Scott Glassgold told us that, together with his agent David Boxerbaum at Verve, he has sold more than forty short stories just in the last few years.

From Upvotes to Option Deals

Glassgold sat in the front row of the Barnes & Noble event. At its conclusion, he walked around ebulliently, shaking hands and making introductions.

The night felt particularly special, Glassgold said, because it was "the first time we've ever had so many of us all in one room." The "us" was a constellation of agents, producers, directors, and writers who have championed the short story model. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt, jeans, and an all-black Dodgers hat — but joked to L.A. Material that, as the man "revolutionizing" Hollywood, we should get a picture of him in a beret.

Glassgold arrived in Los Angeles two decades ago, and for the bulk of his career treaded the waters of a contracting industry. He produced the 2009 high school basketball movie Hurricane Season starring Forest Whitaker. Nearly a decade later he produced Prospect, a sci-fi thriller starring Pedro Pascal — before Pascal became a superstar.

“On any given day, any working producer in this town feels like they're fighting for their lives,” Glassgold said.

The stars began to align for Glassgold in 2020 when Harrison Query, a screenwriter with whom Glassgold had previously collaborated, told him that his brother Matt had posted a story on a Reddit forum called r/NoSleep. NoSleep, a subreddit with nearly twenty million members, is a platform for uploading scary stories that must be written in first person.

The forum has a cult following that has spun out beyond Reddit. There's a NoSleep podcast that features the stories read aloud. The team behind the podcast will be available for meet and greets during the "CrimeWave" cruise experience next February, where fans can “vacation to the Caribbean with [their] favorite true-crime creators.” There are compilation YouTube videos like “1 hour of disturbing reddit r/nosleep stories” — which, as one commenter noted ironically, many people like to fall asleep listening to. TikTokers like @blonde.girlyy read NoSleep stories while doing their makeup, a twist on the popular “Get Ready With Me” content genre. 

The Query brothers had realized that NoSleep was an active community where they could get immediate validation and feedback on their writing. “It gives you such a strong compass bearing of [what] people are really leaning into and interested in, and it's incredibly helpful that way,” Harrison Query said — like having a writers’ room made up of thousands of people. Matt Query’s original post for "My Wife and I Bought a Ranch" — about a young veteran who purchases a plot of possessed land with his wife — is still up on r/NoSleep, with more than 5,000 upvotes, the currency of approval on the site.

Kliewer was also a NoSleep poster: in 2021 he posted "We Used to Live Here," also about a possessed property. Most of the story is also still posted to Reddit, where it has 3,200 upvotes. “Her mouth twisted into a pained, toothy grimace and then, the ants started swarming her face. Crawling into her nostrils, her mouth. Writhing ants frantically forcing their way between the cracks of her gums, her teeth,” reads one passage.

Back in 2020, when Glassgold read Matt Query’s story, "it was just perfect," he recalled thinking. Then he got to work, sending the story out with the help of agents David Boxerbaum and Adam Levine at Verve.

"Within five days, we sold that short for over a million bucks," he said. Netflix secured the rights, and the following week they had a book deal as well.

Glassgold knew immediately that this sale was a turning point in his career. "It was one of those lightbulb moments that I really just sort of said, 'OK, time out. Stop everything. We're going to do things differently.'"

Short Story Boot Camp

After that first sale, Glassgold started to develop a playbook. “If you were looking at my laptop right now, you'd be scared for me,” he said. “It's all Google Docs. So I have like, 10 tabs, and they're all Google Doc tabs of different stories in various stages of development.”

After Glassgold finds and recruits a writer, he works with them for about four months to get their short story into “commercial” shape. They go back and forth on Google Docs, pinging between emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages. Once Glassgold is happy with the story, which is normally around 40 pages, he brings in David Boxerbaum and other partners to start strategizing on how to package the story for studios — finding potential directors, actors, and producers to get in on the project. 

Glassgold says that when it comes to selling short stories to studios, they sit somewhere “between a pitch and a spec script.” In a traditional pitch, a writer sits down with executives in person (or, increasingly, on Zoom) and presents an idea for a TV show or film. A spec script, meanwhile, is a completed draft made available for purchase by studios. Glassgold says a short story is “far more tactile than a pitch” and “far more malleable than a spec.”

“What we find with this short story is it's very inviting to talent, whether that's a screenwriter, an actor, director, or, frankly, our studio partners,” he said.

Matt Reilly, the former Vice President at Universal Pictures, who bought three short stories from Glassgold during his tenure, said that Glassgold has “the Midas touch,” and sees the upside of bringing short stories to market as opposed to traditional spec scripts. “It only takes you a half hour to read it, which is also awesome,” he said. “Because the script takes, you know, an hour and 15 minutes, usually.”

After selling stories from the Query brothers and Kliewer, the pace of the greenlights started to pick up. In March of 2023, Glassgold sold “The Dwelling” by Aaron Jayh to Amazon, with Michael B. Jordan attached to produce and potentially star. That same month, Netflix bought “I Am Not Alone” by Chris Hicks, with Jessica Chastain attached. 

“We sold that over Oscar weekend,” Glassgold said. “So we're closing the deals while everyone's at the Oscar parties. That was fun.”

Most of Glassgold’s early sales were written by little-known or extremely unknown authors. So unknown, in fact, that some of them weren’t even real people.

Glassgold confirmed that Jayh, who sold “The Dwelling” and “Run for Your Life” in 2023 and “After Shock” in 2025, and Nick Moorefox, who sold “I Think My Mother-in-Law Is Trying to Kill Me” in 2022, are both pseudonyms. In an unusual twist for Hollywood, where careers generally benefit from media attention, announcement stories in the industry trades didn't reveal who the writers were or note that their work was authored pseudonymously.

Glassgold didn’t want to share any information about Aaron Jayh’s real identity, or why the writer wants to remain anonymous. The Nick Moorefox story is more complicated. In 2023, a mystery writer from Savannah, Georgia named Nicholas Kassotis was charged with killing and dismembering his wife, Mindi — and during the trial last year, he testified that he was the author behind “I Think My Mother-in-Law Is Trying to Kill Me.”

“I don’t know too much about it, but it has been brought to my attention,” said Glassgold, who told us that he has not spoken to Kassotis since he was charged with murder. Kassotis was ultimately convicted, and the project, Glassgold said, is “not active.”

When stories are written under a pseudonym, with no known human attached to the project, what's stopping the work from being produced entirely by AI? Scott says that his production company steers clear of any AI-generated content. “We're hyper firewalled against any AI touching our stories,” he said. “When it comes to creating stories, I want nothing to do with it.”

In 2025, another avenue opened up for Glassgold: His production company opened an imprint within Simon & Schuster to publish horror books. Kliewer’s “The Caretaker” was the first release, and became a New York Times bestseller.

“I'm a very, very big believer in creator-driven IP,” Glassgold said. “Ultimately, what that means is creators are empowered to create intellectual property that can be grown into film and television and simultaneously grown into books… bifurcating the material.” 

Eventually, after Glassgold had notched a healthy number of sales, he realized that he didn’t need Reddit anymore. "Early days, when we're putting it on Reddit, we felt like that was this third-party objective platform," he said. But gradually it became clear that studios preferred to purchase ideas before they reached an audience — the early access they’d become accustomed to when buying pitches and specs.

So Glassgold shifted to producing unpublished short stories. “It allows us to control the material,” he said. “So rather than it being on a public-facing platform, we can dictate who gets it.”

The Pros Start Pivoting

Two others in the audience at the Kliewer Q&A were screenwriter Jonathan Marty and director Adam Stein. Stein is set to co-direct the film adaptation of Marty's short story "The Earthling" alongside Zach Lipovsky — another project produced by Glassgold. Lipovsky and Stein are best known for directing "Final Destination: Bloodlines." "We've actually never met in person," Marty said as he and Stein shook hands in front of a wall of cookbooks.

"I was in a rut," Marty said of his career prior to getting “The Earthling” sold. He’d been working as a writer in Hollywood for ten years, and while he initially had a string of successes — selling two TV shows in the mid-2010s — work had been drying up since then.

Selling “The Earthling” to Sony for six figures, on top of a book deal, stopped him from leaving the industry.  “Being where I was when I was agentless and contemplating a change of careers, going from that to being a huge priority at Verve… that's how quickly your career can turn around.” 

While Marty is a screenwriter himself, it isn’t likely he will be the one to adapt the short story into a film. “Sony made an offer and was upfront [that they] want to acquire this unencumbered. Meaning we want to acquire it without anyone attached to write it, meaning me,” he said. “At the end of the day, the financial upside was plenty substantial for me to be okay with that.”

Far from a former landscaper who saw a short story on a semi-democratized social media platform transform his life, Marty was one of an increasing number of working writers who started working in the format to revive their careers — forsaking Reddit and taking the work to market unpublished, as they would a spec.

But more recently, signs are pointing to the middle class of writers getting crowded out of the market, as screenwriters who are already in demand get into the game.

Last year, Deadline reported that writers Ben Queen and Jason Shuman sold their unpublished short story “Drift” to Skydance for over $2 million. The pair had sold “Cola Wars” as a pitch to Sony a year earlier, attaching Judd Apatow. Unlike Marty, Queen and Shuman will get the opportunity to adapt their own story for the screen.

Cody Behan, a buzzy writer with a script on the 2019 Black List of highly rated unproduced screenplays and a story credit on a feature that is currently filming, will also be adapting his own recent short story sale — an unpublished story called “The Decorator” that Deadline called a “psychosexual drama” — as a TV show. Netflix, which was one of 11 bidders for the story, has committed to a 20 week writers room.

As of today, none of the recent headline-making sales of short stories — whether written by undiscovered Reddit posters, workaday writers, or industry heavy hitters — has resulted in an actual movie or show. None, in fact, has even begun production.

The Next Chapter

After the Q&A, Maria Azmon and Chyna Ladage walked toward the escalator of the mazelike Barnes & Noble. The two friends are devotees of horror lit, following the trends on BookTok. Maria runs the Instagram account @unreliablebookreader: She handed me a sticker that read “I have no shelf control!” Ladage is a TV writer for “All American” on the CW.

Ladage says she learned about the popularity of short stories on r/NoSleep from TV writing circles, and started visiting the subreddit with the awareness that a lot of Hollywood producers were also scanning the threads. “It's part of our industry,” she said. “They're lurking. We are lurking.”

“All American” is on its last season, and Ladage is about to be back on the job market. “I actually just took a short story writing class,” she told me. “So that's my next venture.”