Dedi Felman

Writer/Director
Take Good Care:

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

@johnzaozirny THANK YOU. SO, so hard to read..... ;)

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

Such a genius scene.

[Vashi Nedomansky, ACE @vashikoo]

HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)
I love it when the film's title is dropped during a critical scene. Two brothers rob only the branches of the bank that screwed over their mother to make things right. Stakes are raised. Character is revealed. Great film!

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

The man was made for Hollywood!

[Jeremy @Jeremybtc]

A man invented a $2.5 MILLION crime spree, sold it to Hollywood and charged $30,000 per speech to explain how he did it. It was all lies.

> Frank Abagnale claimed he spent 5 years as a teenage fugitive.

> Impersonating a Pan Am pilot, a Harvard trained doctor and a Louisiana attorney general while forging $2.5 MILLION in bad checks across 26 countries.

> Steven Spielberg turned it into a 2002 blockbuster starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.

> It became one of the highest grossing films of that year.

> Broadway turned it into a musical.

> The FBI hired him as a consultant.

> AARP named him their official Fraud Watch Ambassador.

> He charged between $20,000 and $30,000 per speaking engagement for decades telling audiences how he pulled it all off.

> For 40 years nobody seriously questioned any of it.

> Then in 2020 a journalist named Alan Logan spent three years pulling every public record prison document newspaper archive and court file he could find.

> Pan Am's own security department told a journalist as early as 1978 "This never happened. You don't forget $2.5 MILLION in bad checks."

> Prison records showed Abagnale was behind bars for most of the years he claimed to be a fugitive.

> The Georgia hospital had no record of him.

> The Louisiana attorney general's office had no record of him.

> His only confirmed crime was check fraud totalling less than $1,500.

> Logan's conclusion the entire story was not embellished but fabricated.

> Abagnale had not committed the con by impersonating pilots and doctors.

> He committed it by convincing Hollywood, the FBI and the entire world that he had.

The most valuable skill Frank Abagnale ever had was the ability to make people so entertained by a story that they forgot to verify it. That skill made him MILLIONS legally.

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

What a weekend for Jose Ortiz. Wins the KY Oaks on Always a Runner--AND the Derby on Golden Tempo. Ah-mazing.

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

Billie Eilish movie premiere at the Village Theater. Things are moving! https://t.co/SkwutyMpEn

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

Some good news for indie filmmakers. (I know, could be more, but at least things are going in the right direction!) https://t.co/efNiy39Hof #filmmaking #indiefilm #director #producer #filmmaker

[Robert King @RKing618]

An excellent quote from Steven Sorderbergh in Slate:
"The hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear, because sometimes in order to be clear, you become obvious. And when you’re obvious, you’re not good. So that is a lifelong sort of process, figuring out on each project, given its intentions and its demands, how to make it good and clear. Being obscure is easy. It’s easy to make something that is elliptical and sort of difficult to grasp and sort of fob it off on being artistic, and if you don’t understand it, that’s your problem."

Anyone writing genre deals with this every day-- especially if it's trying to be more. Very well put.

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

@TheJoeMenendez @EricDeanSeaton Yes, looking forward to luxury days! I also wonder how much of Spielberg's process was shaped by doing film as much as TV, esp film in that era, when many auteurs designed & storyboarded even non-stunt shots in advance. Does his hybrid approach stem from coming from TV+Film?

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

@TheJoeMenendez @EricDeanSeaton True, but also if you're low-budget there's no second team. You have to get blocking ideas even on your scout. (And use pix from the scout & blocking software to prep.) It's a luxury to wait for shoot-day rehearsal. We go in w/ideas & adjust on the fly & per actor feedback.

[Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙‍♀️🦉🐈‍⬛ 🦖 @babybeginner]

Some days you can’t love social media enough. This is one of those days. It began like this. Someone stole 12 tons of KitKats.

And then the replies started coming in. Scroll down.

[Charles Duhigg @cduhigg]

A few years ago, my wife I endowed a scholarship for book sellers hoping to write their first book. Applications for the 2026 awards - totaling $50,000 - are now open! You can apply at https://t.co/fl0i3TGEwL

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

On point. #screenwriting #adaptation #books #theme #getpersonal #characterfirst

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

2 more days til spring, 91 days to the 🌹🌹🌹🐎!

[Churchill Downs @ChurchillDowns]

The first horses arrived at Churchill Downs this morning! 🐎

[Anaïs @MorriganReading]

Ryan Coogler telling his cast to stand up during his acceptance speech, signing I love you, running to grab that baby so he could see his mama win the first Oscar for a woman in her category, hugging Chloe Zhao when Jessie Buckley won. A good man, a beautiful human being.

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

Thrilling, thrilling, thrilling!! YAAS AUTUMN!!

[The Hollywood Reporter @THR]

Autumn Durald Arkapaw makes history as the first woman to win the #Oscar for Best Cinematography for #Sinners 

Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2026

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

The timing of all this....I'm not crying....

[Casey Loving @CaseyMLoving]

In the wake of this week’s titanic Warner Bros. news, Paul Thomas Anderson shouts out Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy for protecting ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, SINNERS and WEAPONS in his #PGAAwards acceptance speech @TheWrap

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

I'm looking forward to the Short Drama Forum. Scott Brown's talk last time was an eye opener. If you're interested in learning more about what's actually going on in verticals, highly recommend. https://t.co/hDsEcZMhbG

[Dedi Felman @dediaf]

Of interest. Noticeable at Ralph's on Super Bowl Sunday (prices were all inflated), ride share apps during the holidays (no surprise), and, of course, the airlines do it consistently to frequent flyers who sign in.

[Ronan Farrow @RonanFarrow]

Since so many of you responded to my thread about surveillance pricing—here's a full breakdown, with visuals, on how companies use your personal data to manipulate prices in real-time:

[Tim Layden @ByTimLayden]

What a sad day. John Shirreffs was a beacon of kindness, dignity and good humor -- backside or front side. Godspeed. You were a joy to be around, every single time. 📷@JayHovdey