After romance and horror, streaming now explores business books

There was a time when business news was mostly found on the economics pages of newspapers. If these stories had any survival, chances are they would turn into a heavyweight business book rather than a movie, let alone a television series.

However, in the last five years stories about business triumphs or (more often) disasters have left newspapers and hardcover books and taken on sonic, television or film form. Streaming services proliferated, and with them the desire for new material in order to feed the audience’s appetite for the must-see new series. The popularity of fictional series like “Succession,” about a family-controlled media empire, and “Billions,” about the world of hedge funds, has fueled the boom in screen adaptations of long-form business reports.

“The streaming business has fueled demand for stories, and while that may contradict what intuition would suggest, it has also fueled demand for quality characters and believable, deep, rich stories,” says Elizabeth Wachtel, who works in Beverly Hills for the talent agency WME. “I believe that complex characters have become especially attractive and that there is a preponderance [deles] in the business world”.

Wachtel is an agent whose specialty is “literary packages”, which handle the media rights to non-fiction books that can be made into documentaries, dramatized adaptations or films. One of WME’s clients is Beth Macy, author of “Dopesick,” a book about the opioid crisis and the involvement of Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family in the case, which became a series on the streaming service Hulu, starring Michael Keaton.

Another series in development is based on “Billion Dollar Whale,” Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s account of the Malaysian 1MDB money laundering scandal, which was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year. Award in 2018 (The 2022 edition of the award starts today.) Dan McCrum, the Financial Times reporter who exposed the fraud at financial technology group Wirecard, will also release a new book, “Money Men,” in June, based on his investigation. The story is being turned into a documentary series by Netflix Germany.

Hope and Wright’s experience led former The Wall Street Journal reporters to create Project Brazen, which they describe as a “journalism studio” with the aim of “exposing exciting stories via podcasts, books, documentaries, TV shows and movies”.

“If you write a book, a Hollywood bigwig comes along with a big smile, shakes your hand and says he’s going to turn your work into a movie, and takes the story out of the writer’s control,” says Hope. The Brazen Project plans to allow authors to do original journalistic work and retain more control over what they create.

Podcasts are becoming an increasingly frequent gateway to television and film. The story of Theranos, the startup that produced blood-testing machines and whose charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was found guilty in January of conspiring to defraud its investors, became a series, “The Dropout.” A film based on “Bad Blood,” the award-winning book by John Carreyrou of the Financial Times about Holmes and Theranos, is also in production, directed by Adam McKay and starring Jennifer Lawrence. “The Dropout” is based on a popular podcast on the ABC television network. Likewise, the series “WeCrashed,” which is currently playing, is based on a Wondery podcast about Adam Neumann, the creator of co-working space operator WeWork, and his wife, Rebekah.

Hope’s Project Brazen plans to start with podcasts because they can be produced in-house, “they do a lot of the work needed” to establish a story, and they include the “original voices” that filmmakers often look for.

The loss of distinction between different media formats, and the payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars available to journalists who succeed in bringing their stories to Hollywood, have reordered the media world. Recognizing that there is money to be made from the contents of their reporters’ notebooks, media organizations such as Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker magazine, have established divisions to develop film projects based on their original reporting.

William Cohan, author of “The Last Tycoons”, a book about the bank Lazard Frères that won the FT award for best business book of the year in 2007, and “House of Cards”, about the bank Bear Stearns, which award in 2009, says that a decade ago business stories were not attractive to TV producers. The series had to be condensed into short episodes, each with a clear ending. Court, police, and medical dramas dominated. Today, he says, Hollywood “is willing to give audiences more credit and their ability to keep attention on events [de negócios] lasting longer than 35 minutes”.

Keeping audiences’ attention, however, requires some artistic sleight of hand, whether in fiction or non-fiction. Business scripts need to be plausible enough not to lose the audience of experts, but they cannot become technical enough to generate rejection from mass audiences. Cohan points out that “Billions,” while set in the world of hedge fund managers, rarely shows anyone in front of the ubiquitous operations screens of the financial sector. Adam McKay’s dramatization of “The Big Short,” based on the 2010 FT-winning book by Michael Lewis of the same name, tries to keep viewers interested by resorting to celebrity cameos to explain some of the technical issues.

By focusing their attention on scandals, the producers of series based on business narratives are not doing capitalism any favors. Hollywood bigwigs with their all-white smiles aren’t exactly rushing to order six-episode miniseries about healthy corporate cultures or helping small business financial executives. True stories about financial shenanigans are irresistible, on the other hand.

“The best business stories have an investigative phase where someone tries to uncover the scandal, and then the story becomes a drama, and maybe there’s nothing more Shakespearean than money,” says Hope.

Does the appetite for business stories herald the end of business books per se, as authors can choose to seek the spotlight and jump from reporting to podcasting and film?

Absolutely not, says Wachtel of WME. Instead, “the book is gaining even greater prominence.” Cohan says there is a risk that young journalists will seek Hollywood’s blessings “as some sort of affirmation of their brilliance.” Agents point out, however, that there is a long way to go between selling an option on a book to a studio and seeing the author’s name on movie theaters. Often, the promised movies just aren’t made.

Furthermore, in the media as in the business world, bubbles can form. “The next financial correction will likely put an end to this sort of thing,” Cohan warns. “No one will want to watch [a dramas sobre negócios] when you are suffering economically”.