“Why don’t you use a pen name?” — a brief answer to this Frequently Asked Question.
Since my shaming, I get the same question a lot, both from my remaining fans online, and my friends in real life. Why don’t you use a pen name?
It’s an interesting question, because it exposes how little most people understand the job of a screenwriter. Screenwriting is, fundamentally, a collaborative job. When we’re on our own, writing our own idea, we are alone. But if we ever want to make money, selling that idea, in the form of a script or a pitch, is the first necessary step to actually getting a movie made. In the course of trying to sell a script, it has to “go out,” ie be sent to producers, executives, financiers, etc. Oftentimes, in order to sell a script, it has to be “packaged,” in other words, paired with a director, or actor, or both, so the “package” is ultimately what drives the price.
Screenwriters are not simply hired based on the quality of their writing. Instead, the “prose” of screenwriting is usually secondary to how easy to work with and collaborative the writer is. This is an arts industry where the products have no objective value; therefore, the relationship portion of the industry is vital in making connections. At the end of the day, the sale of a script is often as much a show of trust in the writer as it is about the quality of the work, if not moreso.
Once a script is sold, the collaborative portion begins. This portion, “development,” is a tightrope act of re-writing, meeting, discussing, re-writing, and occasionally completely changing the script as it’s modified to fit the perceived subjective needs of the various elements involved, who represent the money. In order to functionally use a pen name, you are asking not just one person to lie on your behalf, but many. You would require a complicit producer, complicit representation, complicit financiers and very probably a complicit director and actors. This is, in the current form of cancel culture, not a workable model, due to the fear and terrorism element.
Often times, I hear the current blacklist compared to the Hollywood Blacklisting of accused communists during the McCarthy era. People often cite Robert Rich, the award winning alias of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, as an example of a successful pen name in Hollywood. But that era was fundamentally different; that was about political persecution of a group with a degree of internal solidarity. There is no such solidarity among the Canceled; even us associating with each other is treated publicly as a sort of horror-movie team-up. It doesn’t help that we’re accused of such a wide variety of things that interrelating our experiences is impossible to do in a safe way. And the arbitrary nature of Cancel Culture means certain celebrities with histories of horrendous abuse are seemingly Uncancellable, while others are viciously destroyed and persecuted for years after their initial shaming.
Blacklisting in old Hollywood generated tighter bonds between people, with stronger integrity. The modern form of public shaming, based primarily in interpersonal interactions, does the opposite; it isolates, and destroys, and spreads like wildfire via the voices of the craziest people on the internet. It’s about attacking and destroying the individual, rather than a war between ideologies. No one is interested in helping you because no one believes in anything anymore, certainly not enough to risk their own neck.
I personally am not interested in lying. I am not interested in faking or deceiving anyone to continue existing as an artist. It’s also not something possible, and not something I’d ever ask for. Because the problem isn’t my career; a “pen name” can’t protect me in real life, either.
The fact that someone came to my home to murder me, that I’ve been assaulted and attacked publicly multiple times, that it’s been three years since the shaming and five years since the last allegation, that I have made it very public that my friends and family have been attacked and intimidated doesn’t seem to matter. The horde online insist me sharing any of the frightening and traumatic incidents that have occurred since the shaming is simply “playing the victim.” At this point, again, after someone came to my house with a wooden spike to stab me and was arrested by the LAPD, I don’t quite understand which part of my victimization is a “play.”
My name is now a weird problem, generally. Imagine, if every new person you met, as soon as you told them your name, a large group of people from your past who admit they deeply hate you for various reasons get to talk to them about you for twenty minutes. That is my experience every time I meet a new person, no matter where I am in the world. It extends well beyond the realm of “Hollywood” to creep up on me even in other countries. If I mention that I am a writer, eventually it’s “what have you written,” and if I recommend any of the things I’m proud of, it comes with the inherent automatic disclosure that a large group of people believe I am (in perpetuity) a subhuman monster unworthy of compassion and incapable of growth.
For three years, five really, I have been attacked, I have been threatened, and beaten down in public and private, and yet people involved in my shaming, and hundreds and thousands of people I’ve never met continue to become enraged at any mention of me. They continue to feel a need to react to anything I do, to engage publicly in my “narrative,” and continue to involve themselves in my life, even as I do my best to ignore them, and do what I personally believe to be healthy: move on. But it’s hard to move on when your name is permanently attached to a Google search result, and the hatred is calcified into a jagged, unmoving digital iceberg.
My essays about my experience of being cancelled are softly treated like Hannibal Lecter speaking from behind the glass. Some still urge me to “take accountability,” as though human emotional accountability is meant to be a public performance for millions of strangers who’ve already made it crystal clear they’d be delighted if I killed myself. If it seems incoherent, that’s because it is; shamings do not reform, they punish, and punish endlessly.
This is often nakedly evident in the tone of the people who push and platform shamings online; you can often see the rage and anger in the wording they use. It almost always feels personal, and yet has been indulged culturally to a massive degree.
I still have many friends in the business. All of them at the very least trust that I am not a dangerous person. All of them behind closed doors say they wish they could help me somehow. But most are simply terrified. What, are they terrified of, exactly? Why not indulge a pen name? Because A-list directors I’ve never met and people who haven’t spoken to me in years still regularly kick me while I’m down.
An easy example of this is Glass Planet. When I started a free creative consulting company, and offered to meet with anyone for 25 minutes to an hour to talk about their scripts or story ideas, I thought I was doing something really good. And I must say, it turned out incredible; for five months during a global pandemic I gave away around 300 hours of my life to other people, all over the world. It was one of the most healing and powerful things I’ve ever experienced, and I am deeply proud of my work on the project.
On the day I announced it, several celebrities shat all over it on Twitter, and a British tabloid essentially called me a pathetic con-artist. I did it anyway. You can go read the reviews on the Glass Planet instagram. They’re on the pic of me with the rainbow door in my head. I just don’t get it. How is it worth shitting all over me and leading to a a billionth tidal wave of harassment because I was giving away free writing advice to people who asked for it?
If you’re reading this, and you had a Glass Planet, just know that I appreciate you as much as you appreciate me. I’m grateful we could do that together. But if Twitter comes after people for supporting me in any way, even on personal projects I don’t do for money…See what I’m saying? It’s not me my friends in the industry are scared of. It’s Them. It’s the hatred. It’s the tweets from big bully accounts calling them “terrible people” for even knowing me, sometimes coming from people who’ve never met me, always coming from people they’ve never met. They wish they could help. They just don’t want to catch my disease.
If I go back to work, it will be because society has again remembered collectively that people can grow and change, that time heals, that continuing to hate someone endlessly isn’t helpful to you or them, that mass dehumanization is wrong, and that there are about forty million ways to address your issues without involving hundreds of thousands of angry, anonymous strangers.
I want, I need as an artist, for my work to be about trust, not deception. People always make exceptions when they talk about cancel culture. “Oh, all cancel culture is bad, but this person should be canceled.” The moment you say public shaming is okay, you are putting the fate of the target of the public shaming in the hands of the craziest people who read it. The evidence is right out in the open that this system doesn’t work, and that no one “deserves” it. I wouldn’t wish this weird creepy shit on my worst enemies.
Actually, in my darkest moments, I do. But I feel gross afterwards.
So if and when I work again, it will be as myself, Max Landis. A pen name is impractical, and impossible, and something I really don’t have any interest in ever trying. I’ve made mistakes in my life I regret, but they remain none of your business, to be honest. I have worked hard in my life to be better, to make better decisions, and everyone who actually knows me knows that, and no one who meets me doubts it. I don’t know what will make my career come back, so I don’t think about that much. I just want the torture to stop.
Until then I’ll just keep making my art and spending time with my friends and continuing to injure myself at Crossfit.
