Two Writers Pretended To Be Seth Rogen To Sell A Jewish Mafia Movie

Image by Getty

By Thea Glassman March 29, 2017

You can’t make stuff like this up.

According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Witz and Jeremy Spektor, two twenty-something screenwriters, were having a really hard time getting their Jewish mafia screenplay “The Kosher Nostra” produced. The script, which they wrote with the hopes that Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, James Franco and Aziz Ansari would star, had made it past a few assistants and Creative Executives, but never into the hands of Rogen.

So, Witz and Spektor decided to do the next best thing. The two repackaged the script, crediting Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg as the authors, and sent it out to producers, studio executives, and Will Farrell (you know, just for good measure).

Rogen’s team got wind of all this, and sent out a legal letter warning the duo to stop sending out the script under the actor’s name.

For Witz and Spektor, it was all in the name of art.

“We’ve all heard the myth about a young Spielberg slipping onto the Universal lot,” Witz told The Hollywood Reporter. “This was about getting our script past the ‘gatekeepers’ and into the right hands.”

Thea Glassman is an Associate Editor at the Forward. Reach her at glassman@forward.com

Thea Glassman was an associate editor for the Forward. Follow her on twitter @theakglassman.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO