Jonah hill

Tuesday

Bethany Mandel

Lessons for young daters from the Jonah Hill saga

There was a viral tweet last year that read, “do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam?” The answer is a resounding yes. As bad as regular modern dating is, it’s that much worse for celebrities. In early June, actor Jonah Hill had a baby with his girlfriend Olivia Millar. About a month later, seemingly out of nowhere, his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady posted screenshots of text messages from Hill from back when they were dating, accusing him of emotional abuse. Hill has moved on but twenty-six-year-old Brady has quite clearly been unwilling and unable to do so. The couple met when the actor slid into the direct messages of the surfer on Instagram, striking up a conversation.

jonah hill

Thursday

John Phipps

The importance of sadism in writing a great screenplay

From our UK edition

How do you tell a great story? According to Craig Mazin, you have to be a sadist. ‘As a writer, you are not the New Testament God who turns water into wine,’ Mazin chuckles on his long-running podcast Scriptnotes. ‘You are the Old Testament God who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun.’ Mazin wrote HBO’s horrifying, incandescent miniseries Chernobyl, and so knows of what he speaks. In the episode of this podcast titled ‘How to Write a Movie’, he describes how screenwriters build plot out of suffering. He outlines a scenario, making the stakes higher each time. Suppose our main character is a single father desperate to protect his child. Not good enough.