This is a bad book. Somebody should make it into a movie.
Twenty years ago, I had just published my first novel — a book called
Threshold that none of you have ever heard of because it sold about 12 copies, most to people with my last name — and I’d just opened the
New York Times to see my very first review. A full page, I might add — and there, under the headline, the very first line:
This is a bad book. Somebody should make it into a movie.
Call it what you will — a vicious shot, a backhanded compliment — but I was thrilled. See, it takes a certain level of optimism, narcissism, and out and out delusion to make it in the writing business, and at 27, I’d already learned the first rule about being a writer: if you do it right, it’s probably going to be controversial. Some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it, but if you’re lucky, at least it will get noticed.
My books have always been that way — especially since I accidentally first fell into the world of nonfiction with my 2002 book,
Bringing Down the House, about the MIT kids who beat Vegas for millions. I never intended to write a true story; I just ran into a group of college kids at a bar who seemed to have too damn much money, and all of it in $100 bills. I followed them to Vegas, and found out they were part of an underground cabal earning millions through math, applied to blackjack. That book was indeed turned into a movie,
21, and launched my career in a new direction — telling true stories that often defied belief, that also, as that first prescient reviewer prognosticated, leant themselves to easy adaptation to the big screen.
Bringing Down the House was followed up, a few years later, by
The Accidental Billionaires — which became the movie
The Social Network. This book, too, I fell into accidentally; it began with a two in the morning email from a Harvard student, saying “my best friend created Facebook, and nobody has ever heard of him” — which lead to a boozy meeting with Eduardo Saverin, who started the conversation with the unforgettable words: “Mark Zuckerberg fucked me.” From there, I was just two Winklevie twins away from a handful of Oscars, which brings me to today, and another accidental story.
I never set out to write about UFOs. I especially never set out to start believing in UFOs — but that’s exactly where I am, and where I’ve come, through the research that has led to my new book,
The 37th Parallel. It’s the story of Chuck Zukowski, a former reserve Sheriff’s Deputy from Colorado who was fired from the department after investigating a cattle mutilation. Turns out, cattle mutilations are a huge, mysterious phenomenon: over 10,000 cattle have been found lying on their left sides, their organs cut out, the wounds all circular and precise — and worse yet, the bodies are found completely drained of blood.
Chuck immediately thought UFOs — and got himself fired. He launched himself into the world of Ufology, putting his family into the back of an RV so he could go from UFO hotspot to UFO hotspot. I went down that rabbit hole with him — and discovered that there is an immense amount of evidence that at the very least, something crashed down about 75 years ago, the government covered it up, and for some reason, is still covering it up. The story gets crazy from there: secret underground bases, skinwalkers on a ranch in Utah, and a reclusive billionaire who runs a major private aerospace company that builds pieces for the international space station, who has also been secretly funding UFO investigations for decades.
And yes, this one, too, is going to be a movie. Beau Flynn, the producer behind
San Andreas, is making the film for Newline. I don’t know if the
New York Times will review it, but hopefully they’ll be at least as kind as they were with my first book, 20 years ago…
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Ben Mezrich graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. He has published 15 books, including the
New York Times bestsellers
The Accidental Billionaires, which was adapted into the Academy Award–winning film
The Social Network, and
Bringing Down the House, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies in 12 languages and was the basis for the hit movie
21, the national bestseller
Once Upon a Time in Russia, and most recently
The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway. He lives in Boston.