{"id":800677,"date":"2026-10-12T23:40:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T23:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/800677\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T23:40:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T23:40:16","slug":"primetime-nobody-would-read-the-script-then-robert-pattinson-called","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/800677\/","title":{"rendered":"Primetime: Nobody Would Read the Script, Then Robert Pattinson Called"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA few years ago, Ajon Singh<\/a> found himself in Robert Pattinson<\/a>\u2019s bathroom, furiously typing notes into his iPhone.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe screenwriter was enjoying a wine-infused night at Pattinson\u2019s Los Angeles home to discuss Primetime<\/a>, a spec script that everyone in town had declined to read, but had somehow landed in the hands of the A-list actor. <\/p>\n

\n\tPattinson was already on board to produce, but had declined to star as Chris Hansen, the former Dateline NBC journalist who birthed the 2000s sensation To Catch a Predator.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that night, as the drinks flowed, Pattinson couldn\u2019t help but riff on what an actor might do with the character. A gonzo portrait of Hansen emerged, a more mystical take on the character than Singh\u2019s original draft, which was more of a political thriller.<\/p>\n

\n\tEvery so often, Singh would excuse himself to the bathroom and jot down Pattinson\u2019s ideas.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI eventually started to put together a picture of how he envisioned this character \u2014 and I loved it, because it was not philosophically at odds with what I had already written,\u201d Singh tells The Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Singh and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim left Pattinson\u2019s house, it seemed there was an opening. Maybe they could convince him to play the part. \u201cWe felt him leaning in,\u201d says Singh. <\/p>\n

\n\tSingh and Oppenheim spent the next few days working on the script in a Mid-City office, then Singh spent five days alone rewriting the character of Hansen, infusing a mystical, avenging-angel undertone to his character. <\/p>\n

\n\tThey sent it off to Pattinson, who took a weekend to give his answer: Yes, he would star in the movie. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMerritt Wever and Robert Pattinson in Primetime.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA24<\/p>\n

\n\tA24<\/a> released the $15 million film on Sept. 24, and it has grossed $42 million domestically to date, with Gen Z flocking to to theaters. (69 percent of the opening weekend audience was under age 30<\/a>.) The film has been praised as a dreamy exploration of the lines between justice and exploitation, even as its real-life subject Hansen has threatened action against the studio.<\/p>\n

\n\tBeing at the center of a zeitgeisty movie is all part of a stunning turn of events for Singh, 31, who spent years hitting roadblocks as he supported himself driving Uber and working assistant jobs.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was really struggling with this label \u2018left of center.\u2019 I thought that was a really cool label. Like, \u2018Your niche,\u2019 or, \u2018You have taste,\u201d says Singh. \u201cBut it means, \u2018Not commercial. Not bankable. Unmarketable.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, he always felt there was an audience for his scripts, if someone would give them a shot.<\/p>\n

\n\tSingh grew up in southern California, and majored in economics at USC. He always loved movies, and rather than keep on a path towards an econ PhD, instead started writing screenplays after graduation. He drove the graveyard shift at Uber, 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. and spent his days in a tiny, roach-infested Hollywood apartment writing.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was really scary. You would have people in the back just kind of staring at you like this,\u201d he says with a dead-eyed stare, of his time with Uber. \u201cI was like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m just going to die tonight.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUber didn\u2019t last long. Neither did a stint in the CAA mail room, where he worked with hopes of meeting industry folks who would read his stuff.<\/p>\n

\n\tEventually, he found mentors in TV scribes Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, who hired him as a writer\u2019s assistant for the Netflix limited series Painkiller. More writer\u2019s assistant jobs followed, including work with a showrunner who was so cruel that Singh thought about moving to San Luis Obispo to become a docent for its famous elephant seal congregation. (He never did that.)<\/p>\n

\n\tYears into his screenwriting odyssey, he finally wrote something that got traction: a TV pilot called Belly.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe script was about a last draft-pick NFL player who gets injured on his very first play and returns home to Alaska to become a fisherman. At first, it seems like a show about a Deadliest Catch-style character. But in the final moments of the pilot, its high concept is revealed: the protagonist falls off a fishing boat and is swallowed by a whale. The rest of the series takes place inside the belly of the beast. (Unlike the realistic upcoming movie Whalefall,<\/a> starring Singh\u2019s friend Austin Abrams, this was a fantastical take, ala Pinocchio \u2014 complete with chandeliers providing lighting inside the whale.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show never happened, but it was Singh\u2019s first script to get passed around Hollywood. \u201cI started getting calls incoming rather than me sort of groveling,\u201d Singh says. One of those calls was Erick Mendoza, now his manager at Untitled.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2023, Singh met up with Aj Bourscheid, an old friend from CAA and now at Range Media Partners. In walked producer William Iannaccone, who knew Bourscheid. Iannaccone mentioned he\u2019d optioned a 2007 Esquire article<\/a> about the most famous operation in To Catch a Predator history, which ended in the suicide of a Texas district attorney.<\/p>\n

\n\tSingh was instantly intrigued. He grew up watching To Catch a Predator, memorizing the ridiculous screen names of the perpetrators, including that of a man who touted his talented tongue. He was confident he could do something special with this concept.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe did months of research, watching every Hansen video and listening to every Hansen podcast he could find. It was hundreds of hours in all. He rigorously outlined the story, so that when it came time to write, the script flowed out in two weeks.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis producer and his manager both liked it enough to start taking it out. But nobody in Hollywood would read it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was really devastating,\u201d says Singh. \u201cRead it \u2014 and then pass. If you don\u2019t read it, that hurts my feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMonths went by, and he was losing hope that Primetime would gain traction. <\/p>\n

\n\tThen, a miracle: Robert Patinson somehow got ahold of the script and wanted to Zoom with Singh. (He is still unsure how Pattinson got the script, but heard that Almost Friday filmmaker Tyler Falbo passed it along to Pattinson or his producing partner Brighton McCloskey at a party.)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPattinson and Skyler Gisondo in Primetime.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA24<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey got the script,\u201d says Singh of the Zoom with Pattinson and McCloskey. \u201cIt was the most validating thing, maybe in my whole career. They were just responding to it specifically and thematically.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the end of the Zoom, Singh was so moved by their reaction that he took his shot: \u201cI was like, \u2018Rob, if you had some free time in your life, I think you and I could do something really special with this movie, with you as Chris Hansen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPattinson went silent. Finally, he admitted he\u2019d been pondering that too, but no, the role wasn\u2019t for him.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, he agreed to produce, which was a major win for Singh and the team, who now had a viable path to get the movie going.<\/p>\n

\n\tNot long after, Singh got an email from someone named Oppenheim. It was an effusive review of the Primetime script, which Oppenheim had read at Pattinson\u2019s birthday party the night before.<\/p>\n

\n\tSingh recalls thinking: \u201cWow, this is the nicest thing. Who is Lance Oppenheim?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOppenheim, it turned out, was the hot young filmmaker behind documentaries like Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld. He sent Singh a not-yet released cut of his HBO docuseries Ren Faire, and Singh binged it in a day. He was hooked on Oppenheim, and the two formed a close bond. They felt like creative soulmates.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven though more bankable directors were in the mix for Primetime, Singh was convinced Oppenheim was the person for the job. The team agreed, and Oppenheim joined as director. Suddenly the project became red hot, with A24 agreeing to finance the movie and giving it a production start date \u2014 even without a lead in place.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is like truly a psychedelic experience, because I went from having no traction on the script \u2014 nobody\u2019s reading it \u2014 to having a financing deal in what feels like a two-week period,\u201d recalls Singh.<\/p>\n

\n\tPattinson eventually boarded to star, and Singh, his girlfriend and his dog packed into his car and drove to New York in late 2024. There, he spent long nights in an office with Oppenheim and Pattinson hashing out the script, sometimes not emerging into the brutally cold winter until until 2 a.m.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s sort of this feedback loop when you work with Lance and Rob. Things are constantly alive and changing,\u201d says Singh. \u201cThe only way to survive that process is to be fluid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAjon Singh attends the Primetime Photocall during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tElisabetta A. Villa\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tFor most screenwriters, the job ends long before production starts. But Singh had the rare opportunity stay with the project through production and serve as an executive producer. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe lived in a house in New Orleans with Oppenheim, cinematographer David Bolen, editor Daniel Garber, and producer Christian Vazquez during the shoot. They\u2019d have movie nights after work, while during the day, part of his job was recalling old versions of the script, as Oppenheim might bring back something they\u2019d scrapped months earlier.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong the moments resurrected for the movie was a monologue in which Hansen explained his pitch for the show to a fan on an airplane. (Without spoiling it, it involves talk of a front porch, a man and his penis.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Singh recalls, Oppenheim asked Pattinson to do the monologue, but the actor hadn\u2019t read that draft of the scene in months. Oppenheim persisted, and somehow Pattinson came through.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe just let it come out of him,\u201d says Singh. \u201cSo many things about this process are just so alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film had a splashy premiere at Venice and arrived amid the biggest year of Pattinson\u2019s career, coming after The Drama and The Odyssey, and before December\u2019s Dune: Part 3.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt also sparked the ire of its subject, Hansen, who ahead of its release threatened legal action and told THR<\/a> it was \u201can insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators.\u201d After seeing the film, he said<\/a> it was \u201cdetached from reality or anything I\u2019ve ever experienced then or now \u2026 I\u2019m not sure what the point of it was.\u201d He also took issue with the production not reaching out to him for his input. Still, he has also encouraged people to see the movie for themselves and make up their minds.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe have no interest in villainizing him,\u201d says Singh, who read essentially every piece of journalism Hansen produced to prepare for the movie. \u201cWho am I to be like, \u2018This show is wrong,\u2019 or \u2018this show is right\u2019? I don\u2019t think that\u2019s my job as a writer. It\u2019s not my job as an artist.\u201d He also points out that the film shines a light on the fact that powerful people and community leaders get away with abuse, and that Hansen used his platform to expose some of them.<\/p>\n

\n\tYears after that fateful night in Pattinson\u2019s bathroom, Singh\u2019s Primetime story isn\u2019t quite over. He was in London this weekend for the U.K. premiere, and lined up plenty of work based on the strength of the movie.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPrimetime<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of A24<\/p>\n

\n\tLong before the film opened, he learned that Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya wanted to call him. Kaluuya had read the Primetime script, and Singh (slipping into a solid British accent) recalls the Osar winner saying, \u201cI can tell you like to misbehave.\u201d Singh got a kick out of that assessment.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen, Kaluuya hit him with a surprise. Sony was developing a movie centering on his Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse character Spider-Punk, and he wanted Singh to write it with him. It was an instant yes, as like many in Hollywood, Spider-Verse is perhaps the one superhero property the scribe deeply likes.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve basically gone from being not viable in the marketplace to being viable in the marketplace. And I haven\u2019t really changed all that much,\u201d notes Singh. \u201cEven with Primetime, everyone was like, \u2018This is not a commercial product.\u2019 And I always believed that it was.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few years ago, Ajon Singh found himself in Robert Pattinson\u2019s bathroom, furiously typing notes into his iPhone.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[36317,263164,6491,96,206780,35588,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-800677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-a24","tag-ajon-singh","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-primetime","tag-robert-pattinson","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}