Kal Penn went to Warner Brothers to audition for a Superman film. He spent an hour with three young assistants he thought were junior staff, not realizing they were the writers. He left convinced he'd bombed, but the writers loved his genuine enthusiasm about comic-book history and offered him the role on the spot.
So this audition comes through, and my manager at the time said, you're, you're going in to meet for the new Superman movie. You have to go into Warner Brothers. You'll meet with the assistants in this outside office. You'll sign an NDA, and then you'll wait, and they'll probably either give you the script or bring you in to meet with the writers and the director to really talk about what they've envisioned. It's one of those two things. I'm like, okay, cool. So I drive to Warner Brothers. I I go into this office, there are 3 super young guys in the, you know, in the assistant room. I signed an NDA and then these 3 guys start just casually asking me about comic books. For an hour I'm talking to these guys and I'm thinking like at some point the writers are gonna come in, right? And then the meeting wraps up and I'm like, oh, you guys were the writers. I didn't like IMDb what these guys looked like, which was stupid. Like you should always do your research before a big meeting. And I walk out to the car and I just call my manager and he goes, "What just happened?" I was like, "I'm so sorry. I really screwed this up. I didn't even— I spent an hour talking to them about comic book history and like my love of Superman and the earlier movies from when we were kids. I didn't look up what they looked like." And he goes, "Okay, well, in the future you should do exactly this because they just immediately called with an offer for this movie as you walked out the door." I was like, "What? That's not possible. I screwed this thing up." So coming back to this book,
