The short-story-to-Hollywood-deal pipeline

Good morning, it’s Monday, May 11 and you can expect blaring sunshine (high 70s).

The streaming boom has long since gone bust, ever-shrinking writers rooms continue to compress and many soundstages remain veritable ghost towns. It is, by all accounts, not a great moment in the Hollywood dream factory — or the ecosystem of prop houses and caterers and florists and dry cleaners that have long supported the industry. Sit a few minutes in the laptop section of any highbrow L.A. coffee shop and you’ll quickly start overhearing the gripes: No one is buying or greenlighting anything these days.

But as Hollywood scales back, a long-discounted literary genre has become a surprising conduit to industry success: the self-published short story. In a new L.A. Material report, Antonia Cereijido zeroes in on how short stories have improbably become the hottest format in town, and the role Reddit has played in all of this.