Jennifer Lawrence was all set to play Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in new movie Bad Blood – the next film from Adam McKay, director of Don’t Look Up, which Lawrence also starred in. Then she caught The Dropout, on streaming service Hulu, where Amanda Seyfried plays, you’ve guessed it, Elizabeth Holmes. “I thought she was terrific. I was like, ‘Yeah, we don’t need to redo that.’ She did it,” said Lawrence and promptly exited Bad Blood.
But companies making “based on” series and films don’t share Lawrence’s sentiment. Once upon a time, broadcasters or streamers balked if they knew there was already a project in train about a particular subject. Now, they are positively encouraged: someone else thinks there’s a market for it too! The “true” prefix is such big business that it has become routine to see many TV series, films or podcasts all on the same subject.
Take the 1999 “Woodstock” festival. Dorothy St Pictures made feature documentary Burn it Down!; HBO put out Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage; then we had Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 on Netflix. Ditto two documentary takes on the Carlos Ghosn story within months: the BBC, then Netflix. As for celebrities such as Britney Spears, different versions of the same story are endless.
In some ways, this is great. If the previous execution has been below par or there’s a new way of telling a story – exclusive access to your subject, for example – why not? This is what happened with Netflix’s The Puppet Master, about the conman Robert Hendy-Freegard. There had been previous documentaries – there’s also a factual drama, Rogue Agent, starring James Norton – but this new telling from the point of view of a victim’s children was different.
In the movie world, there’s more scope to play with the parameters of narrative. The case against Roger Ailes, the notorious sexual harassment boss of Fox News, saw very different treatments in The Loudest Voice with Russell Crowe and Naomi Watts, then Bombshell with Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie. But the fact that there were two such high-profile movies about the same subject, regardless of their differences, highlights the weight of the “based on” genre.
As for the creator, if you’re the early adopter of the subject matter and then everyone else piles in, tough. You can’t claim dibs on something that happened in real life and rightly so. Take the story of John Stonehouse, a Labour minister, fraudster and Soviet bloc spy who faked his own death. I first came across it when I was working as a development producer, where your sole responsibility is to come up with new programme ideas – a lovely way to pass the time and get paid. I was looking at the concept of killing yourself off and, after finding out that the Philippines is the world capital should you wish to do it properly, I found a man who hadn’t done it properly at all.
Stonehouse disappeared from a beach in Miami Beach in 1974 after using a passport forged in the name of a dead constituent. But he was found after using a third identity – yes, another dead constituent; such a charmer – while reinventing himself in Melbourne, Australia. It’s a jaw-dropping, breathtaking story before you even start looking at the source material in the UK and Czech national archives.
In the death faker game, Stonehouse was a worse player than “Canoe Man” (life insurance scammer John Darwin and case-in-point, as he recently became the subject of an ITV drama and “companion” documentary). But there was no book on Stonehouse, let alone a documentary. It was still wide open.
I nurtured various treatments in various forms for years, knowing someone else was probably doing the same because it was such a great story. During this time, I met Julian Hayes, Stonehouse’s great-nephew, who said he was working on a book about him. I’d also found out that John Preston, author of A Very English Scandal about the Lib-Dem leader Jeremy Thorpe, had also started a book. And I spoke to Julia Stonehouse, the MP’s daughter, who was adamant that her father was the victim of a government stitch-up.
In the end, the Stonehouse story wasn’t seen as notorious enough for a multi-part documentary series. Commissioners agreed that it needed a dramatic treatment so that a big name could carry it, like Hugh Grant in Russell T Davies’s brilliant drama adaptation of A Very English Scandal. And so Preston’s Stonehouse book morphed into a drama script, with Succession star Matthew Macfadyen eventually revealed as the big name to carry it. He and real-life wife, Keeley Hawes, are on screens tomorrow in Stonehouse as Stonehouse and his wife, Barbara.
Meanwhile, my documentary treatment morphed into a book, Agent Twister: John Stonehouse and the Scandal That Gripped the Nation, co-written with Philip Augar. It was commissioned by Simon & Schuster after a bidding war at proposal stage. Book deals for Hayes and Julia Stonehouse followed this – and they’d already written theirs. To top it off, I finally got a documentary version commissioned as a single film. The Spy Who Died Twice, about Stonehouse’s disappearance and his career as an agent, aired on Channel 4 in May 2022 – and we went from no tellings of the Stonehouse story at the beginning of 2021 to numerous ones by the beginning of 2023.
So far, there seems to be enough story to go round. It’s always amazing to see how different people see such things so differently. In this case, the fact that the other two books are written by family members with their own agendas, and the drama is “inspired by” rather than “based on”, will differentiate everyone’s treatment from the start.
Meanwhile, different writers, content creators and scouts will continue to swim in the same pool, trying to catch the next big scandal ready for a retrospective telling, no longer put off by alternative takes. Happily, we decided not to sell the rights to our book to the ITV drama, so Agent Twister, the movie, could still be coming to a cinema near you!
Agent Twister: John Stonehouse and the Scandal That Gripped the Nation by Philip Augar and Keely Winstone, published by Simon & Schuster, is on sale now
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