The web has gone right into a frenzy over Argylle, a forthcoming spy film, and its supposed supply materials, a yet-to-be-published novel by one Elly Conway. The writer’s id is a buzzy thriller much more gripping than novel itself: Is Elly Conway really Taylor Swift?
The factor is, Elly Conway doesn’t appear to exist. She does seem as a (suspiciously Swiftian) character performed by Bryce Dallas Howard within the trailer for Argylle, however there’s no hint of her in actual life besides for nearly comically fake-looking profiles on Twitter and Instagram. Somebody, clearly, has determined to make it look as if Elly Conway is an precise individual — and why try this (folks on the web have demanded) if she will not be a globally famend famous person who desires to maintain her head down on her enjoyable writing pastime?
Permit me to current my very own, a lot much less scintillating and far more mundane idea. What we’re coping with right here seems to be at worst a great old style film tie-in novel with a intelligent advertising and marketing plan, and at greatest a enjoyable metafictional sport within the spirit of The Princess Bride.
Let’s get into the small print.
What’s the massive thriller right here?
Argylle the film is directed by Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman, and it stars Henry Cavill, Ariana DeBose, Bryan Cranston, Dua Lipa, and Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway herself. It comes with a hefty price ticket. In accordance with the Hollywood Reporter, Apple paid $200 million for the deal — though nobody has reported on whether or not Apple was paying for the guide’s movie rights, simply that the film could be primarily based on the guide.
Within the movie, writer Conway is a central character, a author thrust into the all-too-real world of her personal spy novels. As Vaughn instructed the Glad Unhappy Confused podcast in October, “I like the thought of what would occur if J.Ok. Rowling met a wizard and was actual.”
Vaughn defined on that podcast that his Argylle film could be primarily based on the as-yet-unwritten fourth quantity in Conway’s Argylle sequence, saying, “I learn the guide, they purchased the manuscript of the guide, and met with [writer Jason] Fuchs, and we simply got here up with this.” Vaughn went on to elucidate that “E book 4, which is what the film’s primarily based round, was the one that might work for it. Mr. Lucas was intelligent sufficient to start out Star Wars with Episode 4, so why not us?”
The factor is: These first three books haven’t been revealed both. Solely the primary quantity has even been written, and it didn’t come out till this February. Vaughn appears to be implying right here that he noticed descriptions of the deliberate later volumes and thought the fourth would go well with his functions.
It will be an enormous deal for a first-time writer to land a $200 million film cope with this type of star energy in it. But when reporters tried to trace down Conway, she proved elusive. She had virtually no web presence. When the Hollywood Reporter first went in search of Conway in September, all that was linked to her was an empty Instagram account with 9 followers, one in every of them a Bryce Dallas Howard fan account.
In December, Conway began to place her Instagram account to make use of. “How do you fluster an introvert?” she wrote in an early put up. “Publish her first novel, have Matthew Vaughn purchase the film rights, then inform her she has to start out utilizing social media for ‘visibility.’”
“One thing’s fishy,” an nameless Hollywood producer who has labored with Vaughn instructed the New York Put up in January.
How did Taylor Swift get dragged into this?
Within the trailer for Vaughn’s film, Bryce Dallas Howard’s portrayal of Elly Conway has what I can solely name a Swiftian aesthetic.
Howard’s wavy purple hair is harking back to the purple wig Swift donned to play a author in All Too Properly: The Brief Movie, and her massive cozy cardigan might simply be a nod to, effectively, “Cardigan.” For a lot of Swifties, although, the smoking gun was the cat. Within the trailer, Elly totes her cat round in a specifically designed backpack with a window, precisely just like the one Swift wears in her Netflix documentary Miss Americana. Furthermore, Elly’s cat is a Scottish Fold, the identical squishy-faced breed as Swift’s two famously doted-upon kitties. For some Swift followers, the coincidences appeared to be too many to bear.
“I’m sorry to place it this manner, however it actually has the Swiftie erogenous zone coated,” Ringer employees author Nora Princiotti stated within the Washington Put up.
“think about if that is only a random author and never TS I’ll die useless,” wrote one Swift fan on Conway’s Instagram.
Swift is famously one of many hardest-working ladies in present enterprise, however it takes a good quantity of willful suspension of disbelief to think about that, whereas she was in the course of a record-breaking world tour, she additionally discovered the time to jot down one guide in a thriller sequence and plot out the small print of all its sequels. Nonetheless, if you create a thriller, it calls the mystery-minded. Swifties are a few of our most devoted detectives.
Who actually wrote the guide?
Argylle the guide, not like the film, has no metafictional components. It’s an easy spy novel, and it was virtually actually written by the British thriller author Tammy Cohen.
Washington Put up author Sophia Nguyen did the legwork right here. Within the acknowledgments for Argylle, Conway thanks Robert Massey, a British astronomer who she says defined star charts to her. Nguyen referred to as Massey up, and Massey instructed her that whereas he talked to “a novelist writing a contracted spy thriller for Penguin Random Home,” her title wasn’t Elly Conway. It was Tammy Cohen.
Tammy Cohen has stayed mum on the difficulty of whether or not or not she is Elly Conway. Nonetheless, she suits the profile. She’s written a number of midlist spy novels, like Argylle, most just lately When She Was Dangerous (2016) and They All Fall Down (2017). Whereas Conway is meant to be from upstate New York, Argylle is laced with Britishisms, and Cohen is British. She even has a connection to Vaughn. Her agent, Felicity Blunt, is married to Stanley Tucci, who appeared in Vaughn’s The King’s Man.
Cohen doesn’t seem to have a Scottish Fold cat. Vaughn, nonetheless, does. He instructed Vainness Honest he used his daughter’s pet cat for the shoot after the skilled performing cat he employed “was ineffective.” As well as, the Argylle novel is copyrighted to Marv Quinn Holdings Restricted, an organization registered to Vaughn and his spouse.
Right here’s what I believe occurred: Matthew Vaughn needed to make a metafictional spy film that poked mild enjoyable on the spy tropes he’s utilized in his earlier films. He determined it needs to be a few author of spy novels who finds that her books are extra correct than she might have guessed, and he got here up with the Elly Conway character to serve that function. As a cute film tie-in, Vaughn or somebody at his studio determined to publish a model of the guide Elly Conway is writing within the film, so Vaughn poked round via his Hollywood connections to discover a profession thriller author who might put collectively a stable midlist spy novel. Cohen match the invoice.
Why preserve the true Argylle writer’s id a secret?
If I’m proper, this might not be the primary time {that a} fictional writer revealed a guide.
You should buy mysteries written by Richard Fortress of Fortress, and Jessica Fletcher of Homicide She Wrote. You should buy a romance novel by Mia Thermopolis of The Princess Diaries. You should buy Ant-Man’s memoir.
In these instances, although, nobody pretended that Richard Fortress et al have been actual folks. The names on the covers of the books have been the names of fictional characters, however the publishers made it clear that the books themselves have been ghostwritten by actual folks.
So why is Vaughn being so coy about Argylle?
I believe the perfect analogue to show to right here is the unique novel model of The Princess Bride. That guide, which predated the movie, was written by the nice screenwriter William Goldman in a loving homage to and satire of the journey novels he’d grown up studying.
As a part of the story of The Princess Bride, Goldman developed a witty body narrative. The true Princess Bride, he knowledgeable readers in a prolonged introduction, was an amazing Nineteenth-century novel by the immortal Florinese writer S. Morgenstern. (Florin, you’ll notice, will not be an actual nation.) The true Princess Bride was additionally, in keeping with Goldman, unspeakably uninteresting — a whole lot of pages of impenetrable social commentary and political satire, periodically interspersed with good chapters of romance and journey.
To avoid wasting us all from Morgenstern’s intellectual story-killing methods, Goldman concluded, he’d lower the entire thing all the way down to dimension, and annotated the textual content helpfully at any time when one in every of his cuts affected the plot. He’d given us simply the pure story, the great things.
The entire thing was so convincing that readers usually stroll away satisfied that there’s an unabridged Princess Bride on the market, and that they will discover it in the event that they solely work exhausting sufficient. Goldman managed to do the factor writers dream of: make the world he created really feel so actual that you would nonetheless consider in it after you closed the guide. That’s a part of what made the guide magic.
Vaughn is, I believe, aiming to do one thing related right here. He’s making the body story of his film true, lifting one in every of his characters off the display screen and into actual life. He’s not telling anybody who wrote Argylle as a result of admitting Elly Conway isn’t actual means killing the magic.
If nothing else, the Elly Conway trick is a becoming maneuver for our age of limitless Hollywood IP grabs.
“This [Argylle the movie] will not be primarily based on any IP that I’m conscious of,” stated Josh Horowitz, host of Glad Unhappy Confused, as he interviewed Vaughn in October.
“Outline IP,” shot again Vaughn.
Proper now, films are left for useless on the field workplace in the event that they’re not primarily based on present supply materials. If you wish to enhance your unique film’s modifications, what’s a greater wager than manufacturing your individual IP for it out of entire material? And if a bunch of devoted Swifties need to go in search of their fave in it, all the higher.
