Something weird is going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, and it actually has nothing to do with the big NASCAR heist that the movie centers around. Actually, it has a lot to do with that big NASCAR heist, because it’s all about the person who wrote the movie. A first-time screenwriter named Rebecca Blunt is credited with the Logan Lucky script, but according to a Hollywood Reporter story, there’s a very good chance she doesn’t actually exist.
Blunt is supposedly “a beauty” who lives in England and is “brimming with humor and life,” but she never visited the film’s set, hasn’t given any interviews, and she—along with the rest of the cast and crew—only received a barebones bio in the credits list given to the press. In theory, a real first-time screenwriter who penned a Soderbergh movie that’s getting some good buzz would at least be thrust into the spotlight a little bit, since that on its own is a pretty good story.
Insiders are convinced that Blunt isn’t real, though, and that her name is just a pseudonym for someone else. The three most popular candidates are Soderbergh himself (who often uses fake names for film credits when he does work as a cinematographer or editor), his wife and E! host Jules Asner, or Asner’s E! colleague John Henson (who was supposedly working on a screenplay with Soderbergh a few years ago). However, there are a number of reasons why each of those don’t make sense, with THR noting that Soderbergh isn’t using a pseudonym for his editing work on Logan Lucky and hasn’t written a screenplay for a movie he directed since Solaris, while Asner has never written a screenplay and rarely works in film at all.
If Rebecca Blunt isn’t real, Soderbergh won’t give it away. In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, he said that the revelation that she’s fake is “going to be news to Rebecca Blunt,” implying that she’s not fake at all. He also added that people “should be very careful” making statements like this, “especially when it’s a woman screenwriter who is having her first screenplay produced.”