A few years ago, Ajon Singh found himself in Robert Pattinson’s bathroom, furiously typing notes into his iPhone.
The screenwriter was enjoying a wine-infused night at Pattinson’s Los Angeles home to discuss Primetime, a spec script that everyone in town had declined to read, but had somehow landed in the hands of the A-list actor.
Pattinson was already on board to produce, but had declined to star as Chris Hansen, the former Dateline NBC journalist who birthed the 2000s sensation To Catch a Predator.
But that night, as the drinks flowed, Pattinson couldn’t help but riff on what an actor might do with the character. A gonzo portrait of Hansen emerged, a more mystical take on the character than Singh’s original draft, which was more of a political thriller.
Every so often, Singh would excuse himself to the bathroom and jot down Pattinson’s ideas.
“I eventually started to put together a picture of how he envisioned this character — and I loved it, because it was not philosophically at odds with what I had already written,” Singh tells The Hollywood Reporter.
As Singh and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim left Pattinson’s house, it seemed there was an opening. Maybe they could convince him to play the part. “We felt him leaning in,” says Singh.
Singh and Oppenheim spent the next few days working on the script in a Mid-City office, then Singh spent five days alone rewriting the character of Hansen, infusing a mystical, avenging-angel undertone to his character.
They sent it off to Pattinson, who took a weekend to give his answer: Yes, he would star in the movie.
A24 released the $15 million film on Sept. 24, and it has grossed $42 million domestically to date, with Gen Z flocking to to theaters. (69 percent of the opening weekend audience was under age 30.) The film has been praised as a dreamy exploration of the lines between justice and exploitation, even as its real-life subject Hansen has threatened action against the studio.
Being at the center of a zeitgeisty movie is all part of a stunning turn of events for Singh, 31, who spent years hitting roadblocks as he supported himself driving Uber and working assistant jobs.
“I was really struggling with this label ‘left of center.’ I thought that was a really cool label. Like, ‘Your niche,’ or, ‘You have taste,” says Singh. “But it means, ‘Not commercial. Not bankable. Unmarketable.’”
Still, he always felt there was an audience for his scripts, if someone would give them a shot.
Singh grew up in southern California, and majored in economics at USC. He always loved movies, and rather than keep on a path towards an econ PhD, instead started writing screenplays after graduation. He drove the graveyard shift at Uber, 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. and spent his days in a tiny, roach-infested Hollywood apartment writing.
“It was really scary. You would have people in the back just kind of staring at you like this,” he says with a dead-eyed stare, of his time with Uber. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to die tonight.’”
Uber didn’t last long. Neither did a stint in the CAA mail room, where he worked with hopes of meeting industry folks who would read his stuff.
Eventually, he found mentors in TV scribes Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, who hired him as a writer’s assistant for the Netflix limited series Painkiller. More writer’s assistant jobs followed, including work with a showrunner who was so cruel that Singh thought about moving to San Luis Obispo to become a docent for its famous elephant seal congregation. (He never did that.)
Years into his screenwriting odyssey, he finally wrote something that got traction: a TV pilot called Belly.
The script was about a last draft-pick NFL player who gets injured on his very first play and returns home to Alaska to become a fisherman. At first, it seems like a show about a Deadliest Catch-style character. But in the final moments of the pilot, its high concept is revealed: the protagonist falls off a fishing boat and is swallowed by a whale. The rest of the series takes place inside the belly of the beast. (Unlike the realistic upcoming movie Whalefall, starring Singh’s friend Austin Abrams, this was a fantastical take, ala Pinocchio — complete with chandeliers providing lighting inside the whale.)
The show never happened, but it was Singh’s first script to get passed around Hollywood. “I started getting calls incoming rather than me sort of groveling,” Singh says. One of those calls was Erick Mendoza, now his manager at Untitled.
In 2023, Singh met up with Aj Bourscheid, an old friend from CAA and now at Range Media Partners. In walked producer William Iannaccone, who knew Bourscheid. Iannaccone mentioned he’d optioned a 2007 Esquire article about the most famous operation in To Catch a Predator history, which ended in the suicide of a Texas district attorney.
Singh was instantly intrigued. He grew up watching To Catch a Predator, memorizing the ridiculous screennames of the perpetrators, like Jeremy’s Talented Tongue. He was confident he could do something special with this concept.
He did months of research, watching every Hansen video and listening to every Hansen podcast he could find. It was hundreds of hours in all. He rigorously outlined the story, so that when it came time to write, the script flowed out in two weeks.
His producer and his manager both liked it enough to start taking it out. But nobody in Hollywood would read it.
“It was really devastating,” says Singh. “Read it — and then pass. If you don’t read it, that hurts my feelings.”
Months went by, and he was losing hope that Primetime would gain traction.
Then, a miracle: Robert Patinson somehow got ahold of the script and wanted to Zoom with Singh. (He is still unsure how Pattinson got the script, but heard that Almost Friday filmmaker Tyler Falbo passed it along to Pattinson or his producing partner Brighton McCloskey at a party.)
“They got the script,” says Singh of the Zoom with Pattinson and McCloskey. “It was the most validating thing, maybe in my whole career. They were just responding to it specifically and thematically.”
By the end of the Zoom, Singh was so moved by their reaction that he took his shot: “I was like, ‘Rob, if you had some free time in your life, I think you and I could do something really special with this movie, with you as Chris Hansen.”
Pattinson went silent. Finally, he admitted he’d been pondering that too, but no, the role wasn’t for him.
Still, he agreed to produce, which was a major win for Singh and the team, who now had a viable path to get the movie going.
Not long after, Singh got an email from someone named Oppenheim. It was an effusive review of the Primetime script, which Oppenheim had read at Pattinson’s birthday party the night before.
Singh recalls thinking: “Wow, this is the nicest thing. Who is Lance Oppenheim?’”
Oppenheim, it turned out, was the hot young filmmaker behind documentaries like Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld. He sent Singh a not-yet released cut of his HBO docuseries Ren Faire, and Singh binged it in a day. He was hooked on Oppenheim, and the two formed a close bond. They felt like creative soulmates.
Even though more bankable directors were in the mix for Primetime, Singh was convinced Oppenheim was the person for the job. The team agreed, and Oppenheim joined as director. Suddenly the project became red hot, with A24 agreeing to finance the movie and giving it a production start date — even without a lead in place.
“This is like truly a psychedelic experience, because I went from having no traction on the script — nobody’s reading it — to having a financing deal in what feels like a two-week period,” recalls Singh.
Pattinson eventually boarded to star, and Singh, his girlfriend and his dog packed into his car and drove to New York in late 2024. There, he spent long nights in an office with Oppenheim and Pattinson hashing out the script, sometimes not emerging into the brutally cold winter until until 2 a.m.
“There’s sort of this feedback loop when you work with Lance and Rob. Things are constantly alive and changing,” says Singh. “The only way to survive that process is to be fluid.”
For most screenwriters, the job ends long before production starts. But Singh had the rare opportunity stay with the project through production and serve as an executive producer.
He lived in a house in New Orleans with Oppenheim, cinematographer David Bolen, editor Daniel Garber, and producer Christian Vazquez during the shoot. They’d have movie nights after work, while during the day, part of his job was recalling old versions of the script, as Oppenheim might bring back something they’d scrapped months earlier.
Among the moments resurrected for the movie was a monologue in which Hansen explained his pitch for the show to a fan on an airplane. (Without spoiling it, it involves talk of a front porch, a man and his penis.)
As Singh recalls, Oppenheim asked Pattinson to do the monologue, but the actor hadn’t read that draft of the scene in months. Oppenheim persisted, and somehow Pattinson came through.
“He just let it come out of him,” says Singh. “So many things about this process are just so alive.”
The film had a splashy premiere at Venice and arrived amid the biggest year of Pattinson’s career, coming after The Drama and The Odyssey, and before December’s Dune: Part 3.
It also sparked the ire of its subject, Hansen, who ahead of its release threatened legal action and told THR it was “an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators.” After seeing the film, he said it was “detached from reality or anything I’ve ever experienced then or now … I’m not sure what the point of it was.” He also took issue with the production not reaching out to him for his input. Still, he has also encouraged people to see the movie for themselves and make up their minds.
“We have no interest in villainizing him,” says Singh, who read essentially every piece of journalism Hansen produced to prepare for the movie. “Who am I to be like, ‘This show is wrong,’ or ‘this show is right’? I don’t think that’s my job as a writer. It’s not my job as an artist.” He also points out that the film shines a light on the fact that powerful people and community leaders get away with abuse, and that Hansen used his platform to expose some of them.
Years after that fateful night in Pattinson’s bathroom, Singh’s Primetime story isn’t quite over. He was in London this weekend for the U.K. premiere, and lined up plenty of work based on the strength of the movie.
Long before the film opened, he learned that Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya wanted to call him. Kaluuya had read the Primetime script, and Singh (slipping into a solid British accent) recalls the Osar winner saying, “I can tell you like to misbehave.” Singh got a kick out of that assessment.
Then, Kaluuya hit him with a surprise. Sony was developing a movie centering on his Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse character Spider-Punk, and he wanted Singh to write it with him. It was an instant yes, as like many in Hollywood, Spider-Verse is perhaps the one superhero property the scribe deeply likes.
“I’ve basically gone from being not viable in the marketplace to being viable in the marketplace. And I haven’t really changed all that much,” notes Singh. “Even with Primetime, everyone was like, ‘This is not a commercial product.’ And I always believed that it was.”