“Just invented a new language for cinema.”
Simple enough, right?
This was a directive from the producer before we began our script on the GameStop short squeeze, a complex financial saga that rocked Wall Street in 2021.
The true-life story brought together thousands of ordinary people, isolated in the pandemic, and united by their desire to teach predatory billionaires a lesson — and make some money doing it. These people have never met. They were never in the same room with each other. Their leader, our hero, was a flamboyant eccentric who wore cat T-shirts and went by the online moniker Roaring Kitty. Their main opponent was a humble hedge fund manager named Gabe Plotkin, who never publicly acknowledged their existence.
Our mission was to create a dramatic ensemble that moved at the breakneck speed of social media, weaving these disparate stories together into a cohesive whole. To make it emotional. And do it quickly.
The result is our film “Dumb Money,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September and opened in theaters a week later. It’s a complex technical drama in the tradition of “Moneyball” and “The Big Short.” It’s a movie about Internet populism in the style of Frank Capra, if Mr. Smith goes by Reddit. It is a piece of art about a very recent period that no one would want to revisit. So, in addition to the challenge of filming a story that happened mostly between people and their computers, we had the added hurdle of the coronavirus, which meant that if we were true to the times, many of those people would be wearing masks.
Without cheating, how do we bring these distant characters together in high-stakes romances that lead to a dramatic showdown? How can we make the work moving, visceral and cinematic?
He invented a new language of cinema. Or, more accurately, studying the greats who came before us and combining their discoveries with a few of our own.
Paul Dano plays Roaring Kitty, the eccentric financial investor in Dumb Money.
(Claire Folger/Columbia Pictures)
Our first breakthrough came when we opened the film after many false starts. We wanted to find a way to bring our reluctant hero, Roaring Kitty, up against the “villain”, Plotkin. These two have never met in person, but their animosity is the primary relationship that drives our story. They have a parasocial relationship, no less intense than gender, but always mediated by the screen.
Our instinct was to open the film with the stark contrast between Gabe’s comfortable life during the pandemic, in side-by-side waterfront mansions in Miami, with Roaring Kitty’s working-class milieu in the frigid suburbs of Boston. Ideally, we wanted a showdown between the two men who remember John Ford best. Two gunslingers prepare for a duel.
We come up with a sequence in which the men’s distant beings are uncannily similar: Gabe, played by Seth Rogen, running uncannily between his mansions; Roaring Kitty, played by Paul Dano, runs around the high school track. We designed the on-page sequence for “WAP,” a horror thriller by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, which we felt set the right tone for the film, capturing the vulgar, high-energy attitude of social media. The sequence culminates when Gabe becomes aware of Roaring Kitty for the first time. He watches one of Roaring Kitty’s morbid investment videos, and freezes her in a key moment. Roaring Kitty, smiling, stares from Gabe’s computer screen. Gabe stares at him again: “Who is this idiot?” With that, they were ready to step into their stride, spin, and shoot.
When this worked on the page, we began to see how we could use the tools of cinema to thrust strangers into intense emotional relationships. To show their differences in relief, but also to show unexpected similarities. We used small moments, like the two men washing their children’s dinner dishes, to help us show the shared humanity of people who are complete opposites.
One effect of the social media age is that it flattens our enemies into two-dimensional stereotypes. We sought to capture this dynamic in all its chaos and show how restrictive and destructive it can be. In one scene, billionaires talk about burning GameStop because the company is worthless. We lead their conversation around scenes of Anthony Ramos, as a GameStop employee, working hard at this “worthless” business, which happens to be the center of his community and his life. In a different sequence, our group’s characters take turns reading a cartoon online ad depicting billionaires as yachting playboys. This audio plays during more intimate moments of Gabe, a devoted father, eating a family dinner and reading to his son.
Seth Rogen plays Gabe Plotkin, a hedge fund manager, in Dumb Money.
(Lacey Terrell/Columbia Pictures)
In our online lives, we reduce each other to crude stereotypes. Our goal with this project was to bring the camera back to that dynamic, inviting audiences to find human connections with each character on screen.
Our next task was to show the army starting to rally behind Roaring Kitty – something very unique A populist movement is taking shape on Reddit, TikTok, and other social media.
And for that, we had a little practice. The GameStop saga isn’t the first example of internet populism we’ve sought to capture on film, it’s just the first project to actually hit theaters. Inspired by Capra, as well as the greatest films of the Internet era like The Social Network, we used a variety of techniques to bring our characters together when we didn’t have the luxury of physical proximity.
We’ve studied how ideas spread online: through phrases, jokes, songs, photos, videos, and memes. The main rallying cries – “If he’s there, then I’m there,” for example – pass from one character to the next, turning into a kind of chant. We beat one scene into another, over and over, so one character finished another sentence, and continued with the lyrics of her song, based on her still-forming idea. This was our attempt to make those ephemeral spaces online where people find community in the modern age.
We also wanted to bring real voices from those spaces into our script and onto the screen. It seemed to us like a modern answer to Capra’s radical idea of raising the trials and tribulations of everyday life to the level of cinema.
GameStop’s move is based on complex financial concepts that defy easy explanation. These people didn’t need Margot Robbie in the bathtub explaining short selling (as she did so brilliantly in The Big Short) — they had each other. We obtained dozens of their actual TikTok videos and wrote them into our script, so they play alongside performances by Dano, Rogen, Shailene Woodley, Sebastian Stan, and the rest of our amazing crew.
In the end, it may not amount to a new language for cinema. But these elements helped us build a modern and unique story: strangers, united around an idea, engage in intense emotional relationships that build toward a strangely satisfying conclusion.
In real life, most of them have not met yet and will never meet.
But now we’ve heard from hundreds who have already met: in theaters, watching our film.
The term “dumb money” typically carries a negative connotation, implying a group of inexperienced or uninformed investors. However, in the world of online investing, this label has been turned on its head as a community of investors has emerged, bringing a vibrant and dynamic energy to the market. These individuals may not have the same level of expertise as traditional investors, but their enthusiasm and willingness to learn has created a lively and engaging environment that is reshaping the way we look at investing. This “dumb money” has become a force to be reckoned with, and their presence is injecting fresh life into the world of online investing.