They’ve been listed on Variety’s 2023 list of 10 Screenwriters to Watch, and with multiple projects in the works – including Cruella 2, the feature adaptation of Murder, She Wrote and the just-announced Wolf Man – that won’t be hard to do.

Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum first met while working as reporters for The Wall Street Journal. In 2012, they formed a creative partnership and began writing for film and television together, channeling their journalistic background into screenwriting. Their first feature was 2023’s Dumb Money, which tells the story of Keith Gill (played by Paul Dano) and the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. We spoke about the film, the learning curve in going from writing for print to screen, and what their overarching goal of radical empathy means when approaching a project.

Tell me about how you met and formed this writing partnership. What made you want to switch from journalism to screenwriting?

Lauren: When we met years and years ago in the Wall Street Journal newsroom, we were both reporters. Growing up, we had admired the greats like Nora Ephron…

Rebecca: …and Tom Wolfe and that whole generation of new journalists. We went into journalism under the illusion that we could maybe do that, but it would be a platform for us to tell stories in a deep way. The reality of life at the Wall Street Journal back in the aughts was not the Joan Didion fantasy.

Lauren: The internet and journalism had collided, and we were mostly writing 60-word stories. Packets of information. We really wanted to have more time to tell stories in a longer way.

Rebecca: It was also a moment where you were seeing the fundamental limitations of journalism to actually capture what was going on. I never want to paint with too broad a brush because there are so many journalists out there who are doing such extraordinary work… but in our little corner of it, it felt like we were filing daily stories that got an incremental kind of gamesmanship…style, news. We longed for the time and “canvas” to really step back and say something, tell a story that really said something about the world, about people. All those grandiose ambitions that young people go into storytelling with.

Lauren Schuker Blum & Rebecca Angelo. Photo by Emilio Madrid

So we got to be pals and were also on the same track personally. We started dating guys at the same time, got engaged at the same time, got married six days apart. In the course of that, we allowed ourselves to imagine the fantasy of being professional screenwriters. Lauren and I both grew up in pretty modest circumstances, her in Boston and me in Pittsburgh. While we both loved movies, it never seemed like a realistic goal. Screenwriting wasn’t a profession that we could aspire to. But we started to read scripts in our spare time, loads of them. And while we were both working full time as journalists, and I was also writing a book, we just started to try our hand at writing scripts… and that’s how we got our start eleven years ago.

How did journalism prepare you for a career in screenwriting?

Rebecca: The discipline of daily journalism forces a kind of rigor and a lack of preciousness that I think has served us pretty well. We wake up every morning and we write. We work all day and we’re not too precious because we’re used to editors slashing and burning our work.

Lauren: We love writing true stories, but we really like writing stories that are not our own. You’re always told, “Write your story.” We love doing research, we love getting behind the eyes of characters that are really different from us and we feel like the highest act in screenwriting is what we call radical empathy. Trying to understand the characters we’re writing. That’s what excites us, and every project we do really starts with a character that we’re incredibly excited to write.

Rebecca: Like with Keith Gill’s character. He’s so different from us in terms of background and orientation… but finding the shared humanity there and really putting ourselves behind his eyes and behind the eyes of every other character in the film was such a great challenge. You know that you’re never going to get it perfect. But your job is to do the work, to get it as close as you possibly can, and then open yourself up to criticism from people whose lived experience more closely aligns with the characters you’re depicting. To us, that’s the thrill of it – just to jump in the deep end and do our best to stay afloat.

How difficult was it to adapt your process to more of the “weeds” or technical side of screenwriting?

Lauren: Even though we’re writers, we were science and math kids. Rebecca will never say this, but she was a two-time space camp champion, which is awesome. We love technical stuff, and I think that’s part of screenwriting. It’s such an unforgiving medium… there are so few words on the page and if one line is bad, people can throw the script out and laugh at it. I think we’re drawn to the more technical challenges of it. To us, that was exciting and the limitations of the form inspired us.

Rebecca: There’s nothing we like more than an impossible adaptation…which is why I think that ten years into this, this is our first produced film. We worked on Orange is the New Black and we’ve sold a lot of films, but this is the first one that’s made it to theaters. I think it’s because we look for and are excited by challenges. This is a movie about obscure financial topics where all of the characters never meet each other and are never in the same room. Finding cinematic ways to tell complicated technical stories – our nerd math brains really like that. And journalism isn’t dissimilar, although I would say screenwriting is much more technical. But it was a natural transition, to some degree, going from the structure of a story and how you need to gather that information to the structure of a screenplay and how you need to develop the story and the characters.

In terms of entering the industry, journalism is such a cynical, ruthless business… at The Journal, there was this truism about how for every reporter, there were seven and a half editors. We found the editing process and path from story idea inception to actual printing in the newspaper to be so grueling. It would really wear you down. And then we came to Hollywood. People tease us for this because it sounds a little naïve, but it’s really true…we have found Hollywood to genuinely be a place with quite a bit of integrity and people who really care and who really want to dig in. Compared to daily journalism in 2008, this is a joy.

Lauren: In journalism, you work on a piece and most of the time it’s published, it’s out there in the world. You’re working in the public all the time. We have spent eleven years getting our first movie made and have so much work that’s never been seen and probably never will be. That’s an adjustment but I think we’ve learned through this phase that everything is cumulative. We learned a lot in the process of writing those projects and getting them to that one-yard line where they died. Everyone asks us how Dumb Money happened so fast and how the script was written so quickly. Really, we had been training for this marathon for a very long time and then just ran.

What were some of the research methods you used for this story and who, if anyone, were you able to speak with?

Rebecca: We weren’t able to speak to any of the main players, although the character that America Ferrera is based on (Jenny) is a wonderful woman named Kim who appears in Ben Mezrich’s book. We spoke with her and she came to our New York premiere.

Lauren: We did a lot of research. We lived on Wall Street bets and read through pretty much every post we could find, over the course of months and then years. And we interviewed a lot of people who became pieces of other characters. We spoke to people anonymously on Skype – they knew us, but we never got to see them. And many people working on Wall Street at that time who could give us an idea of what was going on inside these firms and who knew many of the key players. The same way you would report a story.

Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) & Gabe’s Lawyer (A.J. Tannen) Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures

Rebecca: It was also our job to find everything on the public record. We went to a board hearing where Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) was applying for a permit to tear down the house next door to build a tennis court. And social media is a great tool for us. Kevin Gill, Keith’s brother and the person that Pete Davidson plays, is very funny. He’s a Door Dasher and extremely good at it! He maintained a lot of social media accounts so we were able to access some bits and pieces of the family through that. And in addition to Wall Street and the other Reddit fora, X and Instagram, we followed a lot of people hooked into games that we were really interested in.

What makes a person who’s never traded a stock before hook into this story and put their money behind gaming?

Rebecca: To us, that just seemed like such a left field. We wanted to understand the impulse, the personal forces for a lot of different people that brought them into the movement. So we looked for them wherever we could find them and tried to talk to as many as we could.

Given your background in finance writing, this must have been a fascinating project to delve into.

Rebecca: Yes, especially the challenge of making it cinematic. We had plenty of experience taking concepts and translating them for a newspaper like WSJ, writing for a fairly financially literate audience.

But translating those concepts and making them visceral, emotional, cinematic and something to behold on screen that didn’t feel didactic or, worse, condescending to the audience… that was the part that was really challenging on a script level. And it continued to be challenging as we shot and edited the film. Our genius team did the editing and we had to find that Goldilocks spot that included just enough explaining; that was one of the biggest challenges of putting this together.

Lauren: Part of the magic of the story is that people who never bought a stock before bought GameStop. It brought people into Wall Street, and we wanted to preserve that in the movie. This isn’t a story about financial experts. It’s not Wolf of Wall Street – it’s really the opposite of The Big Short. It’s about regular, everyday people who came into this movement and were able to participate because they could learn how Wall Street worked on TikTok. These barriers to entry that have been there for decades are melting away in some ways now with social media.

Rebecca: And that’s why, in crafting this screenplay, we obviously looked to The Big Short and Wolf of Wall Street and the great financial movies. But we also looked to Frank Capra and the tradition of populist cinema, because really what we were doing was a ground-up kind of movement. It was about regular people in various circumstances who rose to the challenge.

Tell me about your writing process and how you work together.

Lauren: We have a bicoastal writing partnership. Rebecca lives in New York and I’m in LA. We’re the most successful long-distance relationship that we’ve ever had! We’re usually on the phone and have this sort of writers’ room between us that is running all the time. It stems from the joy of a partnership – you have this constant dialogue going that creates a safe space where there are no bad ideas. We can yell at each other and it’s nothing personal. We throw in a lot of ideas, but not in a formal way which I think is really helpful.

Rebecca: We try things on the page all the time. If it doesn’t work, we delete it. If it only half works, we delete it, start again and try to hit closer to the bullseye. They say writing is rewriting, but our process is extremely iterative. We’re constantly going from the big picture working down to the granular scene elements, like lines of dialogue.

Lauren: It’s something we took from journalism too – you’re always in dialogue with an editor and you can’t be too precious about your work. It gets rewritten. We’ve taken that process and are never precious about things. I think you could spend weeks and weeks on one version of something, and then you try something else that just clicks into place. All the work you did on the previous draft is what leads to the next one.

You mentioned radical empathy earlier. Tell me more about that and how you bring it into your work.

Rebecca: To a degree, it’s a controversial idea right now – whether people can and should endeavor to write stories that don’t align with their own lived experience. What moved us as kids and what moves us now as adults the most are dramatic works that allow us to see the shared humanity between us and people who are a little bit different from us… to people who are completely different, who we felt like we could never connect with at all. That is why we make art. It’s one of the great things that art can do that very few other things can, especially at a moment like this one, when things feel so fractured and maybe so irreparably broken. Our goal, with the knowledge that we are never going to be perfect, is to find characters who are fascinating to us and no matter how close or how far apart we are, truly find the shared humanity. And beyond that, root ourselves so firmly behind their eyes that even if we don’t agree with the choices we make, we understand the wounds and the longings and every other factor that leads them to that choice. And so for us, it is a kind of method or process of empathy, and the goal is a work that provides the same experience and the same journey for a viewer.

Lauren: This also comes from journalism. You have this privilege of getting to listen to people and tell their stories, and I think that’s what really informed us. Whether our audience likes our characters or not, that’s up to them… but we want them to really understand people better after watching.