One crafty writer’s never-say-die quest to tell a story for the screen.

Hey! I’m that guy trying to collect a Hollywood bag as a storyteller or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape is really like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we examine who the real deviant is in the hit film Primetime.

In 10 days, we assign blame.

In 10 days, we have an election.

High gas prices, dumb wars, rampant corruption in the Epstein & Associates class.

In 10 days, we fill in the ballot bubbles and determine which deviants have caused this cratering in American society.

Elections decide truth and consequences.

But what if there is no objective truth?

What if we, the jury, are the deviants as mere spectators?

The hit A24 film Primetime, written by Ajon Singh and directed by Lance Oppenheim, is high entertainment that asks and is nearly torpedoed by these postmodern carnival-of-mirrors questions.

Primetime is the rise and fall of the early 2000s To Catch a Predator reality TV phenom hosted by crusading broadcast journalist Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), where pedos preying on underage children are lured into sting operations and busted for the consumption and entertainment of the American public.

The movie opens with Divorced Guy lured into a home and offered cookies by a teen decoy who is actually in her early 20s. A vamping Pattinson as Hansen glides down a staircase and delivers the verdict to the sadsack pedo who cowers on the ground, begging for forgiveness as cameras swarm.

We see the scene play out on multiple cameras simultaneously. The grainy surveillance video, the high-definition God-like “movie” camera, and the TV camera blasting the sordid affair to broadcast news feed monitors.

Later, Hansen, triumphant in his show hitting primetime TV to compete against the scripted sensation Lost, pleads with his wife that he will be a better husband after waking up his young children and showing the finished edit of the sting to his yawning, impressionable tots.

The whole thing is scummy. Hansen hovers beyond his wife in bed in a shirt, tie and boxers after forcing his young kids to stay awake and witness a pedo get busted.

Singh and Oppenheim ask who really is the deviant?

Are we sure it’s just the Divorced Guy predator?

Is it the exploitative TV journalist, his unscrupulous producer and staff?

Is it the audience watching cubist, multi-point-of-view filmed entertainment about an actor performing as a newsman, a morally gray arbiter of justice for ratings, in an age of media saturation?

Are we the predators?

Justice and truth are fragmented formally and thematically by Singh and Oppenheim.

The film loses this critical punch, though, in the origin story of Hansen’s crusader star turn. Years past, he did a story about Indian children disappearing and the village adults turned on each other, leading to lynchings.

A young girl gave Hansen a bracelet, and we see her wander into a cave where the evil figure lurks in the shadows, wearing goggles or something.

It’s Adam and Eve's original evil.

But it’s kinda campy. The colors, acting, camera work and editing are shrill and over the top.

At the end of the film, Hansen witnesses the tragedy of a “whale” of a predator, meant to raise the stakes for the audience and deliver unbelievable spectacle that can compete in primetime against Lost.

Hansen, blood on his hands, watches a dark figure slink away in the Texas brush.

Satan gets away, and the fallen TV newsman is left to cry, reciting incantations and smutty chat logs between the high-value target and his apparent victim.

We never really learn what drives Hansen beyond a jump-scare, horror-adjacent red herring.

Who’s the deviant?

It’s us for wanting more from a film that starts as a serious indictment but fizzles into scrambled, postmodern camp.

If you’re reading this because you write, read, develop or sell scripts:

Are we catching predators in the upcoming midterms, or catching another volley and wave in an endless round of ping-pong with two sides of ourselves?

I wanna know!

—Michael