No one was reading his script, then he got a call from Robert Pattinson

Primetime author Ajun Singh was told for years that his work had no commercial appeal. Now, with a hit movie, he finds himself an in-demand scribe, with a Spider-Verse spinoff among his projects.

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A few years ago, Ajun Singh found himself in Robert Pattinson's bathroom, furiously typing notes on his iPhone.

The screenwriter was enjoying a night of booze at Pattinson's Los Angeles home to talk about Primetime, a script that everyone in town refused to read but somehow ended up in the A-list actor's hands.

Pattinson was previously attached to produce but turned down the role of Chris Hansen, the former Dateline NBC journalist who created the story of To Catch a Predator in the 2000s.

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But that night, as the drinks flowed, Pattinson couldn't stop talking about what an actor could do with the character. A gonzo portrait of Hansen emerged, a more mystical take on Singh's original draft, which was more of a political thriller.

Every so often, Singh excused himself to the bathroom and jotted down Pattinson's ideas.

"Eventually I started to put together a picture of how he envisioned the character — and I liked it because it didn't conflict philosophically with what I had already written," Singh tells The Hollywood Reporter .

As Singh and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim left Pattinson's house, there seemed to be an opening. Maybe they can convince him to play the role. "We felt he was leaning in," Singh says.

Singh and Oppenheim spent the next few days working on the script in an office in Midtown, then Singh spent five days alone rewriting Hansen's character, infusing her with a mystical, vengeful tone.

They sent it to Pattinson, who took a weekend to respond: Yes, he will be in the movie.

A24 released the $15 million film on September 24th, and to date it has grossed $42 million domestically, and Gen Z has flocked to theaters. (69 percent of opening weekend audiences were under 30.) The film has been hailed as a visionary exploration of the lines between justice and exploitation, even as its real-life subject, Hansen, threatens the studio.

Being at the center of a thriller is all part of a stunning turn of events for Singh, 31, who spent years driving Uber and working as an assistant.

I really struggled with this "left of center" label. I thought this was a really cool sticker. Like, 'your place' or 'you have taste,' says Singh, but it means 'not commercial. not bankable, not salable.'

However, he always felt that there was an audience for his scripts if someone tapped into them.

Singh grew up in Southern California and studied economics at USC. He had always loved films, and instead of pursuing a PhD in economics, he instead began writing screenplays after graduation. He drove the graveyard shift in Uber, at 11 p.m. He was writing until 4 in the morning and spent his days in a small apartment full of cockroaches in Hollywood.

"It was really scary. "You have to have people behind you staring at you like that." "I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to die tonight,'" he says, looking back on his time with Uber.

Uber didn't last long. Nor was he present in the CAA mailroom, where he worked with the hope of meeting the artisans who would read his material.

Eventually, he found mentors in television writers Micah Fitzerman Blue and Noah Harpster, who hired him as an assistant writer for the Netflix limited series Painkiller. More writing assistant jobs including working with a showrunner who was so cruel that Singh considered moving to San Luis Obispo to become a Ph.D. (He never did.)

Years into his screenwriting odyssey, he finally wrote something that got noticed: a TV pilot called Belly.

The script was about the last NFL player to be picked in the draft who, at the moment of his injury, plays Bindwell and returns home to Alaska to become a fisherman. At first, it seems like a show about a character in the style of Deadliest Catch. But in the final moments of the pilot, the great concept is revealed: the protagonist falls from a fishing boat and is swallowed by a whale. The rest of the series takes place inside the monster's belly. (Unlike the realistic future of the whale, starring Singh's friend Austin Abrams, this was a fantastic take, a la Pinocchio — with chandeliers illuminating the whale.)

The show never came to fruition, but it was Singh's first screenplay to play in Hollywood. "I started getting calls before I kind of grumbled," Singh says. One of those contacts was Eric Mendoza, who is now his manager at Untitled.

In 2023, Singh met Aj Bourscheid, an old friend from CAA and now at Range Media Partners. Producer William Iannacone, who knew Burscheid. Iannacone noted that he chose a 2007 Esquire article about the most famous sting operation in hunter history, which ended in the suicide of a Texas district attorney.

Singh was instantly captivated. He grew up watching To Catch a Predator and memorized the criminals' ridiculous names, like Jeremy's Talented Tongue. He was sure he could do something special with this concept.

He researched for months, watched every Hansen video and listened to every Hansen podcast he could. Hundreds of hours into it, he painstakingly sketched out the story, so that when it came to writing, the script was finished in two weeks.

"It was really devastating," says Singh. "Read it—and then pass. It will hurt my feelings if you don't."

Months passed and he was losing hope that Primetime would become more attractive.

Then, a miracle: Robert Pattinson somehow mastered the script and wanted to zoom in on Singh. (He's still not sure how Pattinson got the script, but he's heard Almost Friday filmmaker Tyler Falbo gave it to Pattinson or his producing partner Brayton McCloskey at a party.)

"They got the script," says Singh of Zoom with Pattinson and McCloskey. "It was the most authentic thing, maybe in my entire career. They were just responding to it specifically and topically."

At the end of Zoom, Singh was so moved by their reaction that he took his picture: "I said, Rob, if you had any free time in your life, I think you and I could do something very special with this movie, with you as Chris Hensen."

Pattinson fell silent. Finally, he admitted that he thought about it too, but no, it wasn't the role for him.

However, he agreed to the production, which was a big win for Singh and the team, who now had a proper direction to start the film.

Shortly thereafter, Singh received an email from Oppenheim. It was a rave review of the Primetime script, which Oppenheim had read at Pattinson's birthday party the night before.

Singh remembers thinking, "Wow, this is the best thing. Who is Lance Oppenheim?"

Oppenheim turned out to be the hot young filmmaker behind documentaries like Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld. He sent an unreleased piece to Singh, who devoured it within a day. He was tied to Oppenheim and the two formed a close bond. They felt like they were creative souls.