What Vice President J.D. Vance did in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, when he picked a fight with embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and emboldened President Trump to angrily call off an agreement that was expected to be signed that afternoon, is what I have always called “The Stranger in the Room.” I was a screenwriter for 30 years, and I became well-aware of the role of The Stranger in the Room. The Stranger in the Room is anyone in a meeting who is just there “as a friend,” someone who has no creative authority on, and no stake in, the project being discussed, anyone in the room who is a last-minute addition. Sometimes it’s a 20-something intern, sometimes it’s an executive from a sister office, sometimes it’s someone from marketing, sometimes it’s an older, more experienced producer who’s lending a hand for a day.
The purpose of The Stranger in the Room is to destroy the project. The Stranger in the Room is the person who, after the writer and producer and director and executive have all agreed on the direction of the story, says “How will that play in China?” or “This sounds a lot like [movie X]” or “But isn’t this movie really about love?” I was once pitching a legacy reboot project to a legendary producer, a real lion of the industry. His 22-year-old daughter was also in the room. She interrupted my pitch to say “Right, but we don’t want any, like, conflict in the movie.”
The Stranger in the Room is always, always there at the behest of the most powerful person in the room, usually the executive. Whether the Stranger understands it or not, they are acting on the behalf of the studio, and it is the studio’s natural desire to say “no,” because no one has ever gotten fired for saying “no,” and Hollywood executives, more than anything else, spend their entire careers terrified they’re going to lose their jobs for saying “yes.”
But they don’t want to be disliked by creatives because creatives are the people who bring in the ideas. So instead of saying “no,” they bring in a friend, either a protege or an ally from another department, or just grab someone from the hallway, a producer on another project, and ask them to sit in on the meeting. The executive doesn’t know what they’re looking for, they hear a hundred pitches a day, they don’t know what will be a hit, they don’t know what will save the studio, and they don’t know what, if anything, will please their bosses, so they bring in an ally to get another viewpoint, any viewpoint, on the project, so that they can then say “no” without alienating the creatives. Instead, they can say “Yes, that’s a good point, we do need to keep in mind the China market,” or “Yeah, this does sound a lot like [movie X] now that I hear it out loud,” or “Yeah, what about love? We’re forgetting all about love, why isn’t your action movie pitch really about love?”
And then, suddenly, the balance in the room shifts. Suddenly, a collaboration, a negotiation as it were, becomes an argument. Where, just moments earlier, everyone was agreeing on how awesome the project sounded, now, suddenly, the creatives are on one side and the suits are on the other, and the meeting becomes a power struggle, one the creatives can only lose, because the suits have the money and the creatives only have the art. The creatives will try to salvage the project, they’ll try to make compromises, they’ll try to meet the suits halfway, but the decision has already been made.
So, in Hollywood terms, Zelensky was the writer/director/producer, Trump was studio executive terrified of losing his job, and Vance was the theoretically-powerless ally brought in to bring up some random point that would turn the negotiation into an argument that the writer/director/producer cannot possibly win. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out who studio head is.
Todd Alcott is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles.
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