Jonathan Alpers is a screenwriter who began his career with a "strategy" not taught in film school — "Prank Phone Calling & Spy Tactics": trawling the back of the Hollywood Reporter for films in production, then cold-calling the producers with a fabricated reason they had to read his first script. It mostly didn't work. One of those calls went to legendary producer Ben Barenholtz, champion of the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, and John Woo. Barenholtz read his work and mentored him for years, writing Alpers his first checks as a screenwriter. Alpers was hired to write two films about Barenholtz's life — his Holocaust survival story Azav, and Revival, about how Ben started the first midnight movies in the late 1960s. Ben and Coen-alum producer John Lyons (Boogie Nights, Austin Powers) developed Alpers's dark comedy Zombie Squad, and Barenholtz and Alpers went on to set up and sell the comic-book adaptation of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's Astro City, first with Johnny Depp's Infinitum Nihil and later with Working Title Films. Alpers returned to Depp's company for another comic-book adaptation, Mysterius the Unfathomable. He has since written, produced, and directed with many other collaborators — among them producer Joshua Astrachan, a force behind It Follows and Robert Altman's producer for the better part of a decade. His last screenplay, The Odd Symphony, was picked up by Three Six Zero. His latest, and maybe his most ambitious, is Being.