04 / Writing + Culture
How culture teaches people what to perform, value, fear, and laugh at. Screenplays, essays, criticism, and comedy research.
Book / Author / 2025 / Kendall Hunt
The book connects comedy history, writing, production, and cultural analysis. It follows how comedy is made, how it reaches an audience, and what it reveals about the culture making it.
The book at Kendall HuntAfter years of addiction and estrangement, a woman returns to her college town for a friend’s wedding, only to find her group chat of misfit friends dragging her into the same reckless patterns she is desperate to escape.
Role: Writer / Director / Producer
A status-obsessed Chicagoan’s plans to inherit his father’s empire derail when a surprise half-sister claims half the estate, leaving him stuck navigating sibling rivalry, identity crises, and the business of growing up.
Role: Writer
When a recovering addict returns to her Iowa hometown after her long-missing brother is found alive under mysterious circumstances, she and her twin sister uncover a family legacy of psychological experiments, buried trauma, and a sinister cult that blurs memory, dream, and reality.
Role: Writer
A disgraced journalism student seeks a fresh start in Hollywood with her estranged college friends, but their lives spiral toward one wrong move that could leave them and everything they know up in flames.
Role: Co-writer
Co-written with Jesse Riback
After getting dumped and losing his estranged uncle in the same night, a directionless military veteran and NYU finance student inherits his uncle’s independent punk recording studio in Brooklyn along with a chaotic indie band that expects him to manage its future.
Role: Writer
Written by Kai Swanson; story by Lucas McKeown
When an 18-year-old skater-influencer becomes the unlikely breakout star of a chaotic prestige reboot set against a rapidly changing Los Angeles, the older sister who raised and manages him follows him west, where sudden fame, sex, anxiety, ambition and a volatile found family begin dismantling the sibling relationship that has defined both of their lives.
Role: Creator / Director
Film criticism
For screenwriting, book projects, essays, cultural criticism, and commissioned writing, send me a note about what you have in mind.
swansonkai0@gmail.com