Women Tell Man Not To Mansplain "Men In Black" To Them, Turns Out He's The Writer

Amuse me for a second. Let's say you've written one of the biggest blockbusters. It becomes a cult classic and you've boosted Will Smith's career. Your movie is so popular, people still talk about it 23 years after its release. You overhear one of these conversations and it turns out, two women are arguing over the story. You politely swoop in, offer to settle the disagreement but in a plot twist, they not only reject you but accuse you of mansplaining as well. Sounds surreal. Sounds like this could be a whole new movie script. Maybe a short one, but still. However, this is exactly what happened to Ed Solomon, the writer of Men In Black. Continue scrolling and learn how everything unfolded in Ed's own words!

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“They were saying that someone from where one of them works looked like ‘the old guy from Men In Black’ and the other said she didn't know it 'cause she didn't watch comic book movies and the first girl said it wasn't a comic book movie,” Solomon told Bored Panda.

In reality, the iconic movie was adapted from The Men In Black comic book series, created by Lowell Cunningham and Sandy Carruthers. The original storyline revolved around a secret government organization that policed various alien and supernatural threats to Earth. Only six issues were published between 1990 and 1991 before Hollywood picked it up and turned the cool story into a popular movie.

“I meant to introduce myself and tell them - but as soon as the first girl made a joke to her friend about being mansplained to (it was a joke she made, not really an admonition to me), I got a phone call and stepped away,” he explained. “When my call was over, one girl had left and the other was coming out of the bathroom.”

But that wasn't the end of it. “The girl was a kid. In high school. She reached out to me after seeing my tweet on Reddit. She was very sweet. We had several very lovely exchanges and laughed about it. And she felt bad about her joke. Honestly, if I hadn't have gotten the phone call, we would have continued the conversation there and that would have been that.”

The screenwriter almost never runs into similar situations. “Maybe once or twice a year, I overhear someone talking about something I worked on. I see it on Twitter more - where people will comment on something (positive or negative) without knowing I'm seeing it.”

With the script for Men In Black, Solomon entered the A-list of Hollywood writers and the hall of fame of the pop culture, setting his signature style of visually innovative, intelligent, character-based comedy. And he's been keeping himself busy ever since. But in 2016, after decades of writing mega-budget studio science fiction, action, and comedy, Ed immersed himself in drama, teaming up with director Steven Soderbergh and HBO for the original interactive long-form branching narrative Mosaic, starring Sharon Stone.

Now, he's writing a second project in the branching narrative format for producers Steven Soderbergh and Casey Silver.