‘Swimming With Sharks’: How Roku Series Survived Quibi Collapse

Backstabbing. Ruthless. Two-faced. Revenge.

Those words appear in a towering font on the poster for the 1994 film “Swimming With Sharks,” behind an image of (now disgraced) actor Kevin Spacey screaming directly into the face of his co-star, Frank Whaley. The film gave audiences an unflinching look at Hollywood’s workplace culture — as it was then, before current efforts to eradicate toxic and inexcusable behavior.

Verbal and physical abuse, staplers and phones hurled at employees, 20-hour workdays, sexual harassment and rampant degradation all play out in the film, which was reportedly based on writer-director George Huang’s experiences under producers Joel Silver and Scott Rudin. “Swimming With Sharks” has become a touchstone for industry survivors, and Roku will unveil a TV series adaptation of the film on April 15.

In the nearly two decades since it was released, a subgenre has sprung up surrounding these backlot stories, especially in the post-#MeToo era. The list includes a comedic look at a superstar aide in Dakota Johnson-starrer “The High Note,” as well as Jim Cummings’ recent talent agency thriller “The Beta Test” and “The Assistant,” starring Julie Garner, which was directly inspired by the scores of unfortunate underlings who endured Harvey Weinstein’s bullying.

To revisit “Swimming With Sharks” could be seen as pandering and dated, especially as show business institutions have promised transparency and reform. Luckily, the project found a home with first-time showrunner Kathleen Robertson, a veteran actor and screenwriter whose experiences on set and off breathed new, realistic life into the story. Not only has she updated the material for the present day, but she’s gender-swapped the leads: Diane Kruger stars as Joyce, a stone-cold executive looking to oust her corporate overlord and revive her failing movie studio. A shadowy young intern named Lou (Kiernan Shipka) upends Joyce’s home and work life when she joins the team, navigating the C-suite with deception.

Robertson, 48, started working as a 10-year-old child actor in Canada, and by 19 had landed the plum role of privileged teen Clare Arnold on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” She appeared in almost 100 episodes of the seminal primetime soap, and it was there she encountered her first outsize creative personality in Aaron Spelling. But he was certainly not her last.

“I’ve definitely worked with some of the most-known, biggest-of-the-biggest players. You see and hear a lot of stuff you can’t even believe,” says Robertson, whose credits include “The Expanse” and “Bates Motel.” After growing from teen star to leading lady, she married her producing partner Chris Cowles, a former employee of Rudin and the late “Seven” producer Arnold Kopelson.

“I remember being on our honeymoon and him getting calls from his boss telling him he needed to read a bunch of books and scripts,” she recalls, without revealing the identity of the person who barked such orders. “In my husband’s office at Paramount, there was a big hole in the wall from his throwing the phone” out of frustration over how he was being treated.

Despite stockpiling true Hollywood horror stories, she did not immediately spark to the idea of rebooting “Sharks” when she was approached by Lionsgate in 2016. Only when the studio approved her women-centered revision did she start writing. The following year, Robertson and Lionsgate met with potential buyers as the concept took on an eerie timeliness thanks to the shifting winds due to #MeToo.

“I remember going into meetings and talking about the specificity of what was happening with Harvey and the fact that my husband and producer had worked for Scott Rudin,” Robertson says. “The original movie was kind of inspired by Scott. I thought, if we weren’t making this show now, when are we making it?”

The ripped-from-the-headlines plot points are recognizable enough. In one scene, Kruger’s character stops her car in highway traffic to eject a development executive for not delivering on a promise, a moment “based on a famous Rudin story,” Robertson says.

One of the show’s most graphic scenes of abuse is also based on a tale Robertson heard for years on set: Kruger’s Joyce visits her mentor and abuser Redmond, played by Donald Sutherland. He’s a media mogul clinging to his last days of life, propped up in a hospital bed in a Bel-Air mansion (sound familiar?). As Joyce attempts to steal his studio from underneath him, he demands she perform one final service — a sex act on a young female companion sitting at his bedside. Joyce obliges, staring him down with an icy hatred until the encounter is over.

“Let me smell your fingers,” Sutherland asks of her when it’s done. Robertson declines to name the real-life mogul the story is based on, but says, “I couldn’t even believe that was real.”

As she was developing the idea, “Swimming With Sharks” sold but was put into turnaround several times. Robertson had all but given up hope when, in 2019, her phone rang. “Jeffrey Katzenberg just read your script; he freaked. They want to make it at Quibi,” Robertson recalls hearing.

Katzenberg’s now-defunct OTT service, built to offer mobile content in 10-minute “quick bites,” had been hoarding content and riding high on investments from every major media company in town. Nascent streaming players such as HBO Max, Peacock and Apple TV Plus were barely off the ground at the time, and the Quibi offer was attractive and came with the Katzenberg pedigree.

Robertson fought for and won the right to shoot “Swimming With Sharks” in Los Angeles, which, without tax incentives, can be a costly endeavor. The show travels from the palaces of Malibu to the grimy apartments of Hollywood (Shipka’s character lives in one of the shoeboxes occupied by Marilyn Monroe before she made it big). The pieces had finally fallen into place when, as for so many productions, filming shut down for nearly eight months due to the pandemic.

Subsequent events piled on misfortune. “It was a comedy of errors,” Robertson says. She did not see the final laugh coming. After principal photography wrapped, Robertson and her stars gathered to shoot their marketing materials.

She remembers “sitting at the monitor, completing this huge gallery shoot, and an email alert comes in on my phone. Quibi had gone under.” Defeated, some suggested the creative team edit the entire series from its quick-bite form into a feature film. Robertson begged for the chance to hire freelance editors and morph the show into a half-hour drama. From there, Roku arrived on a white horse and ordered the show as one of its flagship original series (and no, you don’t need a Roku device to stream it, just the company’s app). Thus ended “the longest thing that I’ve personally ever worked on,” Robertson says.

The path to rebooting existing IP with a gender-swapped cast is treacherous — just ask the unfairly maligned stars of Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters.” But in the case of “Swimming With Sharks,” focusing on two women is far from a novelty: It’s an examination of an industry that swears it is now correcting institutional sexism and misogyny.

“I was really inspired by how different this industry is,” Robertson says. “The way I was treated, and the way stuff went down, would never be able to happen nowadays. You’d be fired. Thank God.”