Bret Easton Ellis and the Internet

Photo by Sarah Soquel Morhaim.

Bret Easton Ellis has been known to stir up trouble with just a tap of his keyboard. The author and screenwriter has been making headlines from his first novel, Less than Zero, through to his latest project, a screenplay, The Canyons.

Lately, Ellis and his peers have been tapping into the Internet—or rather, just tapping it—to finance their creative pursuits through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. For example, The Canyons itself, which caught the public’s attention when it promised Lindsay Lohan and adult film star James Deen in its leading roles, successfully met its stated goal of raising $100,000 to produce the film, which will be released this August. (In fact, the project raised over $150,000.)

More recently, it was announced that American Psycho the Musical, a stage adaptation of Ellis’s famed thriller, will actualize a debut at the Almeida Theatre in London in December. After campaigning for yet another $150,000 through Kickstarter, the public will finally have Patrick Bateman thrashing and slashing, and singing, in front of a live audience.

The success of these endeavours is thanks in no small part to the fact that Ellis is a prolific, controversial tweeter. As writer Joshua David Stein points out in NUVO’s summer 2013 cover story, “Bret Easton Ellis trolls the Internet ruthlessly. He has more than 400,000 Twitter followers and often takes to the feed to be outrageous and sensationalist (to such an extent that, as he admitted recently, ‘I’ve found out that many followers of the Official and Verified @BretEastonEllis enjoy it mainly because they think it is a parody account’).”

Stein continues: “Like most of the projects in which Ellis is involved, his Twitter is shimmering between fiction and reality. But unlike in a novel or a film, Ellis has only his handle to shield him. Handles, of course, are meant to be grabbed. They don’t shield anything at all. Ellis blames the furor each of his Twitter-based trespasses has incited on what he calls ‘the oversensitive nature that has blossomed around everything’—but he admits that Twitter may have become more trouble than it’s worth.”

Here, a few examples culled from Ellis’s salacious feed:

Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is what “On Golden Pond” would have been if it was directed by Hitler.
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) October 3, 2012

I want popcorn banned from movie theaters.
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) October 18, 2012

Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 6, 2012

Not thrilled with this minor piece but told NUVO Magazine I’d mention it anyway: nuvomagazine.com/magazine/summe… Oh, Canada. Really?
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) May 28, 2013