I wanted to love I Love LA

Plus, what I know about Mike Flanagan's Carrie series, and my thoughts on Bravo's Surviving Mormonism docu-series.

Photograph by Morgan Maher/HBO

Announcements

Hi! I know I originally said this is a biweekly newsletter but it’s turning into something closer to weekly-ish. There’s just too much going on! I even delayed this week’s dispatch by one day to include my review of HBO’s highly anticipated comedy, I Love LA. So let’s call it a biweeklyish newsletter, for now. And hey, this Saturday will mark one month since I left my full-time day job and pivoted to writing! You can read about that here, if you missed it.

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What I learned at Mike Flanagan’s Carrie (1976) screening

I love living in Vancouver but despite it being a major production hub, I find I’m often on the outside of it — casts fly in, and they fly out the moment production wraps, and I have no idea how I would facilitate set visits or interviews during production. I was super thrilled to hear The Rio, an independent movie theatre in East Vancouver, was hosting a screening of Carrie (1976) with the cast and crew of Prime Video’s upcoming miniseries reboot. I’m a huge fan of Mike Flanagan’s work, having seen most of his Netflix series (The Haunting of Hill House, etc.) and films (I didn’t get a chance to tell him Ouija: Origin of Evil, his 2016 film, is one of the scariest things I’ve seen).

He introduced some of the Carrie cast on stage before the screening of the 1976 film, noting the rest had already flown out for other projects. He was also crowned The Rio’s Homecoming King for having played a role in creating a funding coalition (alongside Sean Baker, Osgood Perkins, and others) to save The Park, a historic movie theatre that Cineplex had just announced was closing in the city. It was the only movie theatre in Vancouver with a 70mm projector, although Cineplex did say they plan to move the projector to another one of their theatres.

There was no Q&A beyond Flanagan’s few words but here’s what I learned:

• Prime Video approached Flanagan directly to showrun this Carrie adaptation — but like any one of his adaptations, he took quite some time to think through whether or not he could do it justice. Here’s what he said on stage:

“I firmly believe that there’s no point in stepping in to tell a story that’s already been told beautifully, unless you can bring something very new to it. I had a similar feeling with this as I did when I sat down to look at The Haunting of Hill House, which had also been done several times, and had been done, I would argue, perfectly by Robert Wise in 1963. But something leapt out at me then and said: This could be a great series for right now.

A similar thing happened with Carrie, where we were looking at a story about bullying, which I think has taken on a very different dimension in the decades since Stephen King wrote this. We look at the state of the world we are in, and suddenly the story felt very, very relevant, but it would require an enormous amount of creative liberty, because there’s no point in retreading.”

• The Carrie series adaptation has wrapped production and is slated for 2026, 50 years since the original film. I would guess it’ll be out in the fall, for spooky season programming.

• A few members of the cast hadn’t seen the original film!

• Flanagan told the story of how Stephen King originally threw away his unfinished Carrie manuscript, only for his wife Tabitha to fish it out of the trash, read it, and encourage him to finish writing it (to which Kate Siegel, seated in the audience, yelled “YEAH WIVES!”).

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Two stand-out shows I’m watching in October

Between my Yahoo column, Appointment Viewing in The Cut, and my Instagram, I don’t know how useful it is to report back on everything I’m watching, but I know these (I Love LA and Surviving Mormonism) are highly anticipated, so let’s dive in. Honourable mentions (It: Welcome to Derry, Down Cemetery Road, and uh…Taylor Sheridan) included at the end. Upgrade to paid to read!

Photograph by Kenny Laubbacher/HBO

I Love LA (HBO) - premieres on Sunday November 2
Grade: B