10 Movies Inspired By Things NOBODY Expected
7. A Fake Classified Ad From 1997 - Safety Not Guaranteed
2012's indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed revolves around three magazine employees who head out to interview a man (Mark Duplass) who placed a classified newspaper ad seeking a time travel companion.
It's a perfectly adorable concept for the sort of quirky indie movie that typically premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, as this film did, but it wasn't actually an original idea from writer Derek Connolly.
Rather, in 2007 Connolly stumbled across a famous ad that was published in a 1997 edition of Backwoods Home magazine, where someone indeed put out an ad for someone to travel back in time with them, insisting that it wasn't a joke and adding that, yes, safety wasn't guaranteed.
Despite being a fake classified written for the mag by Senior Editor John Silveira, it became something of a phenomenon at the time, with Silveira receiving thousands of letters in response.
Connolly went on to write a character-driven drama propelled by the very concept, which received rave reviews and won Sundance's coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.