By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-22 15:21:20 | Updated at 2025-03-23 14:22:17
23 hours ago
It felt 'almost quite literally unbelievable' as Massachusetts teacher Joe Cote handed out bathroom passes on Friday to high school students and wandered familiar halls ... while his name blared from Hollywood headlines alongside heavyweights like Sydney Sweeney.
News had broken the day before that Cote's Gone Girl-style short story, written in his kitchen during the pandemic and casually posted on Reddit, had not only been discovered by Tinseltown but would also now be made into a Warner Bros feature.
Sweeney is attached to produce and star in the project through her Fifty-Fifty Films, with an Oscar-winning screenwriter reportedly on board for the script adaptation.
‘It’s surreal, and it’s so funny – just having the night that I had, the day that I had yesterday, and then this morning waking up and just, “All right, now I’ve got to go in and write bathroom passes and get these kids to do their study guides,”’ Cote, 34, told the DailyMail.com on Friday night.
‘My phone hasn’t stopped. It’s probably overheated. I can’t keep up with all the support that’s coming in,’ he said. ‘It’s been incredible. People that I haven’t spoken to since high school, people that I barely even spoke to in high school, have been super supportive and nice – and my head is still spinning.’
The teacher had been more than a little skeptical when he saw a Reddit message last spring from an alleged LA talent manager about a short story he’d posted four years earlier.
He ignored that first query about ‘I pretended to be a missing girl,’ which he’d written in November 2020 in the apartment he shared with his cousin outside of Boston. But the manager followed up.
‘I remember checking with my girlfriend saying, “All right, well, I guess as long as I don’t give him too much personal information or give him my credit card information, I think I could maybe reply,”’ Cote said.
Massachuetts teacher Joe Cote, 34, posted a short story he wrote on Reddit in 2020 - and received a message on the platform four years later from an LA manager looking to represent him. Cote initially ignored the message, then declined the offer
It was announced this week that Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney would produce and star in a Warner Brothers feature based on Cote's short story
He told Folbe that he was a public school teacher and not interested in representation. But the manager persisted, and Cote verified that Folbe and his company existed.
‘But that doesn’t prove that it’s legitimate,’ Cote said, and he still thought: ‘There’s no way.’
But the teacher finally agreed to a Zoom meeting.
‘It was almost exactly a year ago from now,’ Cote said on Friday. ‘We were on the phone for a couple of hours, and I don’t think I breathed. I think I got off the phone call and I took a breath, like, “Holy crap. What is happening?”’
What was happening was the start of a veritable fairytale for the writer and teacher.
It's almost hard for him to reconcile the journey he’s had since sitting down in that kitchen during Covid, his Shiba Inu at his feet, to write a story about a protagonist who pretended to be missing teen in order to rob the family of the real 18-year-old.
Cote had always loved telling stories, putting on performances as a child for his little sister and attempting with middle school friends to write their own fifth Harry Potter book before a new one actually came out in the series.
After becoming a teacher in 2019, his middle school employer offered Cote an elective ‘fun’ class to teach and design during remote learning. He chose creative writing.
Cote sat down to write in November 2020 in the kitchen of the apartment he shared with his cousin, the teacher's Shiba Inu, Leo, at his feet as he penned 'I pretended to be a missing girl'
Cote had always loved writing and storytelling and decided to try his hand at the mystery/thriller genre after devouring works by authors such as Gillian Flynn, which left him feeling 'blown away ... and I just so badly wanted to make other people feel the way that I felt'
‘I would read and act out my stories for them, and it was kind of a hit,’ he told the DailyMail.com. ‘And then when school got back to normal, they just kept the class.’
The audience for his breakout short story would not be a classroom, however; it would be the wild west online forum of Reddit.
And his inspiration for the plot came after devouring thrillers and mysteries by authors like Gillian Flynn and Anthony Horowitz.
‘I was blown away,’ he said of their work. ‘And I just so badly wanted to make other people feel the way that I felt.’
When he wrote ‘I pretended to be a missing girl’ over several intense days typing from morning until dark in 2020, Cote didn’t feel the same doubt or ‘imposter syndrome’ he often did after writing.
‘I remember just being like, all right, this is good,’ he said. ‘I think I actually feel good about this one.’
He’d never really posted his work online before – but this story, he felt, was Reddit-worthy.
‘The comments came in, the likes came in, and even as of right now, it’s still sitting at the top of that short story subreddit,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the top posts of all time. If you had told me then that it would have been anywhere close to where we are now, I just never would have believed it.’
Cote had rarely posted his writing online before the decision to post the 2020 story on Reddit - where it took off. But he said this week: 'If you had told me then that it would have been anywhere close to where we are now, I just never would have believed it’
He kept writing and posting, but it wasn’t until spring of last year that Folbe spotted Cote’s mystery masterpiece.
‘I don’t know how I came across it, but the title was so hyper-specific, so on the nose … that I was like, I should read this,’ Folbe told the DailyMail.com.
‘”I pretended to be a missing girl:” That’s crazy. And then I read it … and the writing was very sharp and really, you can tell how great of a writer he was right away.”
On top of that, Folbe says, ‘It’s very rare that you find a short story that is so simple, but then there’s a twist in the middle that completely flips … anytime that you think that you’re trying to get ahead of the plot, you can’t.
‘I was like, “Holy s***. I think I just found gold.’
He was right; there was great appetite for the story in Hollywood.
‘It got really exciting when there [were] significant attachments that were exited about this thing that we knew, to a degree, with those people involved, and with those people creatively passionate about it like that, this was going to likely do well in the marketplace,’ Folbe said.
Warner Brothers 'won the rights ... in a competitive situation,' according to The Hollywood Reporter.
As all of this was brewing, however, Cote was barely telling anyone in his life.
‘It was such a hard thing to talk about, because it’s so special and unbelievable – I mean almost quite literally unbelievable,’ Cote says. ‘Because if someone had said it to me, you know, even I’d be like, “I don’t know …”
‘Honestly, I did, for the most part, keep it to myself – because it’s so hard,’ he says. ‘How do you even organically bring that up?’
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, however, with major Hollywood players attached, Cote is looking forward to even more projects.
‘He’s got a great career ahead of him, beyond just this short story,’ said Folbe.
‘We’re not done,’ added the teacher. ‘There are more stories to tell … where I’m going to make people feel that thrill again and again.’
