The Best Story I Never Wrote

This is relevant because Guy Pearce is in the news, Oscar-nominated for The Brutalist. I can’t watch this because it’ll remind me of one of my great regrets: I was shot down in 2009 on a pitch about Guy Pearce stealing someone’s life.

This came about when I was approached to adapt the story of Nicael Holt, a 24-year old surfer from Wollongong who one day decided to sell his life on eBay. This is an actual true story. Nicael offered up everything he owned—including some CDs, a broken bicycle, and a backpack—his friends (“they will treat you exactly as they treated me”), eight potential lovers (“I have been flirting with them”), and he even threw in a four-week course to learn his job (he delivered fruit), fashion sense, and other skills, such as skate-boarding and doing handstands.

This got a lot of attention, because the internet was new and not saturated with people doing things for attention, and bidding reached around A$20,000, although I believe the winning bidder never paid up and the whole thing fizzled from there.

Anyway these producers bought the rights to Nicael’s story. They thought I might be a suitable screenwriter since I’d done a couple of novels on humans intersecting with capitalism in unusual ways. We had a meeting or two, then I went away and came up with a story. A great story. The more I thought about this freaking story, the more I fell in love with it.

But it wasn’t what the producers were expecting. Nicael was writing a book about his experiences at the same time, although I don’t think that went anywhere, and the producers had in mind that I would follow it, depicting Nicael as a charming slacker who, despite not having much in the way of possessions, career, or purpose, did have a lot to teach the world about life’s simple pleasures, such as sleeping on other people’s sofas and finding free meals in dumpsters. The story, they imagined, might go something like this: A rich buyer purchases Nicael’s life as a joke, but over the course of the film comes to realize Nicael is richer than himself in ways that truly matter, and they teach each other things and wind up better people.

I had a different take. In my version, Nicael is a desperate loser who puts up his life on eBay because he thinks it’s worthless. His job is a dead end, his family and friends are unsupportive, he doesn’t like his girlfriend. When bids start to come, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot; he thinks he’s scamming people. When the Buyer (played! by! Guy! Pearce!) comes to town, Nicael worries he’ll pull out, because the Buyer is so handsome and put-together, why would he want Nicael’s terrible job, loser friends, and annoying girlfriend.

But! The Buyer takes it all very seriously; he does the lessons, he hands over the twenty grand. Then he starts living Nicael’s life better than Nicael ever did. He wins over friends and family, most of whom didn’t want any part of this; he fixes broken relationships; he’s promoted at work; he reconciles an old family hurt. Things are going so well, Nicael starts to feel cheated, especially since his new life is not turning out to be the fresh start he imagined—the $20k, previously an unimaginable sum, is quickly dwindling, and a girl he’d thought might prove to be a romantic upgrade doesn’t want anything to do with him. Somehow all his problems have come with him, while his old life looks better than ever. So he asks the Buyer to cancel the deal.

But the Buyer refuses. It’s still unclear why he’s here; he’s hard to read, existing on the border between charm and creepy intensity, just like the real Guy Pearce. Everyone else thinks he’s wonderful, much better than the old Nicael, even as Nicael has grown to hate him. Nicael demands to know: What does the Buyer want, wasn’t he successful before? The Buyer confesses he has indeed left a life of wealth and privilege, but he wanted to see if he could do it again—start as a pathetic loser and turn it around. The Buyer is a psychopath with zero interest in other people except as a manipulative game. Just like the real Guy Pearce. (Joke. That was a joke.)

For the last third of the movie, Nicael tries to expose the Buyer, but fails until he contrives a plan to expose him in a shocking confrontation the Buyer didn’t realize was public. Everyone sees the Buyer’s true colors at last, and that Nicael has grown to become a better person who genuinely values them, and they reconnect.

So that’s it.

Sadly, the producers chose not to go in this direction, either because they didn’t like it or because it would have been a tough sell to real-life Nicael. Or maybe because quite a few people sold their lives on eBay around this time, and some were also shopping movies, and the rights were messy. I don’t know. My relationship with the film ended there and I don’t think it ever got made.

But every time I see Guy Pearce, I think how perfect he would have been.