WOULD YOU WORK WITH NATALIA GRACE'S ADOPTIVE MOTHER?

Emily Schultz on why you shouldn't take every meeting

The view in our neighborhood this month.

In 2017 Kristine Barnett was only known as the author of The Spark, a questionable bestseller about raising her special needs son. Emily Schultz was a then out-of-work writer and mother to a recently diagnosed autistic child. A cold call from a producer aimed to put them together on a feature development. There was no way to know what was to come in the saga of Barnett and her adoptive daughter Natalia Grace, now covered by both an HBO documentary and a dramatized Hulu series premiering this month. But enough felt wrong about Barnett’s book—and the producer’s intentions—that Schultz could not get out of that meeting fast enough.

Most agents preach to their clients, “Take every meeting.” We’re telling this story for the first time to present a more realistic response: Maybe not every meeting?

BRIAN J DAVIS: I’m going to start with 2019, two years after the meeting. I think people should know that in this household if there’s any true crime news that’s happening, I’m kind of on it first.

EMILY SCHULTZ: Hey, every once in a while I see the articles before you do!

BJD: I remember seeing the first articles about the Natalia Grace case and being so shocked that I was kind of stammering out the complexity of it. Okay, there’s this movie, Orphan. From 2009. With Vera Farmiga? You don’t remember it? It’s not bad. Anyway. This couple claimed it really happened to them—an adult with dwarfism impersonating an adoptive child. Then they left her alone in an apartment! They were arrested for neglect!

ES: I remember thinking, they sound like horrible people.

BJD: But then I saw the names of the parents and shouted, “Holy shit. It’s The Spark woman!” And that’s when you grabbed my arm and then stared at the screen. I think the first thing we did was make sure you weren’t still following her on social media.

ES: I was clean.

BJD: So let’s go back to 2017, when none of this is known by the public, and you couldn’t have known. For us, this is right after an agonizing film development crashed, and the year-long process of getting our son into a therapeutic school. We had two lawyers on retainer and were broke. So broke.

ES: If I recall anything about the time, it’s just pure defeat.

BJD: We really needed something and you got this email from a Canadian film producer looking for a writer to adapt a mother’s bestselling memoir about her son: The Spark, by Kristine Barnett.

ES: It seemed legit, at first.

BJD: And I did the quick due diligence research. The producer had made one of our favorite horror films. Not Orphan. That would be a little much.

ES: And the contact came from a mutual friend—a very solid person—and he had met this producer at his synagogue.

BJD: And you’re going to be in Toronto in a couple of weeks so you book a meeting with the producer. Everything’s working out perfectly, but as I do a little more digging…

ES: So many Spidey senses going off.

BJD: It turns out only a year before this, The Spark was a major Relativity Media package that was going to star Rosamund Pike and be adapted by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours. And without knocking us…

ES: Without knocking us, how does a project like this end up at our doorstep?

BJD: We’ve come far since. But I really suspect the original studio found out about some things before the public did. It looks like this got dropped or put into turnaround fast. At this point, it’s with this indie Canadian producer, and it turns out the Barnett family has moved to Canada from Indiana. But we don’t know why…

ES: Yet!

BJD: For the record, you never met with Kristine Barnett, only this producer representing her book.

ES: Correct.

BJD: Now, as you’re reading her book on the plane, you’re starting to doubt…

ES: The entire premise? I remember saying to you, “I don’t know if her son is autistic. There’s something kind of odd here.”

BJD: I say this with all awe and respect to the autism spectrum, which can be staggering in its range. But if a child is diagnosed at the level of disability Barnett claimed, no matter the interventions, the result is not commonly going to be: going to university at 15.

ES: What I noticed when we were fact checking for this talk, the word “autism” is replaced with “Asperger’s” in her later media appearances.

BJD: Hustles have a learning curve. The narrative she was really invoking in The Spark was savantism, which is rare, but overly connected to autism because of Rain Man. And stealing the plots of films seems to be this person’s main problem in life. Allegedly!

ES: Again, looking at the subtitle— “A mother’s story of nurturing, genius and autism” —it’s about her journey as a magical mother, and almost that she’s “curing” autism. When I watched clips of them I saw a child who looked very media coached to say certain things.

BJD: It’s like seeing the backstory of a parent-child relationship in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

ES: But… I had to take the meeting. Especially because sometimes you take a meeting like that, and you’re offered a job, and maybe you’ll make some money, and you can relax a little bit. So I flew into Toronto and had to immediately meet right after landing.

BJD: And you had some awareness that your personal experience was going to be part of this meeting?

ES: I had written about Henry a little bit. For Slate and Today’s Parent. So yes. I have put myself out there. But not many people knew that at the time our son was in the same school as the child of a Very Famous Celebrity. And during the meeting the producer was leaning on me about that. Did I know this actor? Had we interacted? And that was suspicious.

BJD: The finality of this meeting was made easy for you because of some pretty standard bullshit.

ES: What the producer wanted me to do, and it became fairly obvious, was that they wanted me to write something on spec. And I could immediately see that there’s not going to be payment for me and that made it really easy to say, “Thanks for the coffee and croissant. I’ll never talk to you again.” I didn’t say that, but that was my feeling.

BJD: Now, I always tell people, don’t be totally afraid of spec work. It’s about the only way to generate your own projects. But when you’re meeting with a producer on a project that was, until very recently, a buzzy studio package and they’re now saying “Spec?” in a little squeaky voice. Yeah, you should run.

ES: I had reservations, but I also wanted a job! I mean, that’s how you go into most meetings. You hope it’s going to be something great.

BJD: And not to go down to the rabbit hole here, but you didn’t meet with Kristine Barnett. You met with a producer. There’s no saying this producer even legitimately held the rights to this book. [Laughs in evil voice.]

ES: I have no idea what’s real anymore.

BJD: And that’s just what the industry will do to your brain after a while. Okay, I found the emails from this producer and actually THIS is where it gets crazy.

ES: I was uncomfortable, for several reasons, but I did genuinely like the producer, until the follow-up email, two months after I had totally moved on.

BJD: Where the producer directly asked you to ambush this Very Famous Celebrity at school, or get a personal contact through the school office, and pitch the project.

ES: It was very gross.

BJD: I’ll give the producer credit for this. They apologized.

ES: After I reprimanded them.

BJD: Right! In your response I see you literally advised them to contact the actor through official channels should they wish to reach out.

ES: Because I don’t help other people stalk people.

BJD: Now to talk about Barnett in general, and all the revelations about what went on in her family—and we have no more real insight than anyone reading this does. But I do see someone who really wanted to be a famous mother…and now she is!

ES: A Munchausen by proxy narrative runs through all of this story. She really wanted to find some kind of notoriety through her children. And the media really loves a good mother story. They also really love a bad mother story.

BJD: She got an adaptation. Not the one she wanted.

ES: I think this has all stayed with me because I had this concern when writing even just a couple of articles about Henry. That the struggles that we have as parents shouldn’t outweigh his.

BJD: I think this encounter did force us to figure out who we needed to be as parents. That for Henry we were going to be his advocates, and make him heard in this world. Not us.

ES: Sometimes I will identify myself as the parent of an autistic child. And I think it’s important because it helps you find others in your community. But when I do it, I also sometimes feel like, should I do that? Because there are so many things about my child and that’s only one element, right?

BJD: As a writer, I am fond of the saying: just because it happened to you doesn’t make it a story. There are parts of life that you can’t spin into narrative. Becoming a parent to Henry broke me down and put me back together as a different person. I am not the same person I was before and how do you turn that into a 90-page screenplay? I wouldn’t know how, and nor do I want to.

ES: This is all a reminder that at any given moment you can come really close to putting a spotlight on a very bad person.

BJD: Well, they sure do have a spotlight on them now!

ES: I’m glad that I didn’t help.