Stranger than fiction
How a Twitter feed morphed into a Syfy movie
E
ACH writer’s path to getting their work onscreen is different — but few cases are as bizarre as Sam Sykes and Chuck Wendig and the making of Syfy’s movie “You Might Be the Killer.”
Sykes and Wendig, both prolific sci-fi/fantasy authors, earned their first Hollywood credit thanks to an hour-long, back-andforth Twitter exchange with each other on July 27, 2017. Those tweets resulted in a contract to produce “You Might Be the Killer,” airing Saturday (7 p.m.) on Syfy and starring Fran Kranz (“Major Crimes”) and Alyson Hannigan (“How I Met Your Mother”).
“That was one of the weirder [aspects of the story],” says Sykes, 34 (“The City Stained Red”). “Oh wow, good news — our work is finally going to be on the big screen! Bad news, it’s Twitter bullsh-t!”
In the Twitter exchange, Sykes pretends he’s a counselor at a sleepaway camp beset by a psy- cho killer, while Wendig offers advice. (“it was going super well but now there’s some kind of crazed serial killer roaming the grounds right now,” Sykes writes. Wendig responds, “oh sh-t that sometimes happens.”)
The thread currently has over 12,000 likes. The two have been friends for years, initially online. When they met at a convention in Phoenix, they discovered they had a similar sense of humor.
“For the most part I think [the thread’s purpose] is us trying to amuse each other, more than anyone else,” says Wendig, 42 (“Star Wars: Aftermath.”) “It’s like an improv game, in terms of narrative and story.”
Both authors estimate that they got 5,000 new followers overnight after posting the thread. Soon enough, that led to movie offers.
“I woke up and had a [message] from Chuck saying, ‘Hey, has anyone reached out to you about making a movie on this?’ ” says Sykes. “And I was like, ‘A tweet? Obviously not!’ ”
The movie follows Sam (Kranz) and Chuck (Hannigan, also known for “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer”) in an expanded version of the scenario Sykes and Wendig covered on Twitter: Sam is a camp counselor who calls his friend Chuck when a killer is on the loose.
Sykes and Wendig, who are producers on the film, gave notes on the casting and wrote an initial treatment for the script, but neither were on set while it filmed (Sykes is based in Arizona; Wendig is based in Pennsylvania).
“It was a fast filming, and they did it in Louisiana,” says Wendig. “So we had reports from set and we sent them a couple of our books to be judiciously placed throughout the comic store [where Hannigan’s character works].”
Both Sykes and Wendig say it’s impossible to tell how the attention they’ve received from the Twitter thread and movie adaptation has impacted their novels.
“The way book sales go, we probably won’t know if the movie affected sales for like 10 years,” says Wendig. “For me it’s not the direct sales, but more about overall career impact.”
As much as Twitter has been a surprise boon, Sykes says they take “You Might Be The Killer” for what it is: a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. His mother, Diana Gabaldon, is a fellow novelist whose work has been adapted (“Outlander”), but that didn’t help, in this case.
“I don’t really ask my mom for any career-related [advice], since our trajectories are so different,” he says. “Plus, there’s pretty much no precedent for this sort of thing. This was a completely freak accident. There’s no way you could replicate this.
“It would be like trying to base a business around where lightning strikes.”