Schoenbrun’s ‘Secretary’ live read claims a 2002 taboo romance as Camp Miasma’s bloodline

A director’s taste is never more legible than in what they choose to revive. Jane Schoenbrun has built a career treating pop culture as haunted material — the cathode dread of I Saw the TV Glow, the creepypasta unease of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair — so it is telling that they are now reaching back to one of the least likely ancestors imaginable: Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, the 2002 romance that turned a workplace power game into the decade’s tenderest film about submission. Restaging it as a live read is less a novelty booking than an act of genealogy.

As Deadline first reported, Schoenbrun will direct the cast of their Mubi-backed slasher in a one-night reading of Shainberg’s script, part of Film Independent’s long-running Live Read series and mounted in partnership with Mubi itself. The casting is the thesis: Gillian Anderson takes the role James Spader originated, the exacting attorney E. Edward Grey, while Hannah Einbinder reads Lee Holloway, the part that made Maggie Gyllenhaal a star. Schoenbrun reads the stage directions — describing the desire rather than performing it.

It is a canny pairing, because Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is itself a study in charged, unequal fascination. Anderson plays a reclusive former Final Girl; Einbinder, the eager young filmmaker sent to resurrect her decaying horror franchise, who grows fixated on the very woman she has been hired to reboot. Swap the law office for the campground and Secretary’s engine — obsession curdling into intimacy, control that both parties quietly negotiate — is already humming. Schoenbrun is drawing a line from Shainberg’s pastel-lit fable to their own blood-soaked one.

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The actors inherit that lineage in public. Anderson has spent years playing women who weaponize composure, from The Fall to Sex Education, and Spader’s clipped menace sits squarely in her register. Einbinder, the wounded striver of Hacks, draws the harder assignment: Gyllenhaal’s Lee is shame remade as agency, a performance that helped define a strain of early-2000s indie eroticism that mainstream cinema has since misplaced.

The timing is not incidental. Camp Miasma opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May and left with the Queer Palm, and Mubi has been shaping it into one of the summer’s more talked-about specialty titles. A live read of a cult favorite, staged in the city where the industry actually lives, is precisely the low-cost, high-affection event that turns a festival prize into a conversation — the distributor renting the past to sell the present.

The reading arrives at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills on July 28, ten days before Camp Miasma reaches theaters on August 7. For one night, the film that made submission feel like grace will be read aloud by the cast of a movie about how monstrously desire can misfire — the same coin, both faces up.

Tags: Gillian Anderson, Camp Miasma, Hannah Einbinder, Jane Schoenbrun, live reading, Mubi

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