Jane Schoenbrun reunites cast from upcoming film for a one-night ‘Secretary’ reading
The director of ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ will lead Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson through a live-script staging of the 2002 Maggie Gyllenhaal–James Spader film at NeueHouse in Los Angeles.
On the evening of 8 July 2026, Indiewire reported that Jane Schoenbrun, the writer-director behind the forthcoming feature “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” will direct a one-night-only live script reading of the 2002 film “Secretary” at NeueHouse in Los Angeles, with “Teenage Sex and Death” stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson attached to perform. The reading, scheduled for 18 July 2026 at 7 p.m. PT, is staged as a benefit for the nonprofit CineCares Foundation, an organisation that pairs trauma-informed therapy with film-education programmes for at-risk youth in Los Angeles County.
The pairing is deliberate. Schoenbrun’s breakout “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021) and the follow-up “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024) established them as a director fluent in the textures of adolescent interiority — the ways young women process shame, desire and dissociation through screens and stories. A live reading of “Secretary,” the Steven Shainberg film that used a consensual power-exchange relationship as a vehicle for the same emotional terrain, places Schoenbrun inside a lineage of filmmakers who treat submission and self-discovery as adjacent rather than opposed.
The event itself
According to Indiewire’s 8 July exclusive, the production will be a stripped-down staging: actors at music stands, no sets, no costumes, the screenplay read straight through. Einbinder, the “Hacks” star whose presence in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” was announced earlier this year, is set to read the Maggie Gyllenhaal role. Anderson, who plays her mother in the same film, will voice a role originally drawn for James Spader. The arrangement inverts the film’s original dynamic — where a young woman’s desire is mediated by an older male authority figure — by routing the older voice through another woman. The reading will be followed by a moderated conversation between Schoenbrun and the two actors.
Why “Secretary,” and why now
The 2002 film was a critical inflection point: a Sundance success that drew mainstream distribution and an Academy Award nomination for Maggie Gyllenhaal, but also a divisive text whose mixture of romance and explicit kink left some reviewers uneasy. Two decades on, the cultural ground has shifted. The reading comes as a cluster of recent studio features — most prominently “The Substance” (2024) and “Babygirl” (2024) — has re-opened a mainstream appetite for stories that take female interiority and bodily autonomy seriously without sanding off the strangeness. Staging “Secretary” as a benefit, in a members’ club rather than a festival, leans into that lineage while reclaiming the film from the cycle of moral panics that has historically greeted it.
A new festival economy
The reading is one of a growing wave of “script-in-hand” productions — stagings where actors read from bound screenplays, with minimal blocking, often for charity or labour-organising causes. SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 contract fight normalised the format as a fundraising and organising tool, and live-cinema events have become a revenue stream for venues that cannot sustain multi-week theatrical runs. NeueHouse, the Sunset Boulevard members’ club that has hosted several high-profile screenings since its 2016 expansion into Los Angeles, is a natural site: it offers tiered seating and broadcast infrastructure without the overheads of a traditional cinema. The model also gives independent filmmakers a controlled environment in which to test material, develop tone, or simply generate goodwill among press and donors before a project’s release.
What is and isn’t clear
Indiewire’s 8 July report is the only public source for the event at this point; the CineCares Foundation has not yet posted its own announcement, and NeueHouse has not confirmed the venue booking on its public calendar. Ticket availability, capacity and the panel’s moderator are not specified in the reporting available. Readers looking to attend should treat the 18 July 7 p.m. PT slot as provisional until either the foundation or NeueHouse publishes independent confirmation.
The Monexus desk framed this as a benefit-driven piece of live cinema rather than as a marketing stunt for “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” on the reading that the most newsworthy detail is the inversion of the original film’s gender dynamic, not the rehearsal effect for Schoenbrun’s upcoming feature.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/indiewire/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_(2002_film)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Saw_the_TV_Glow
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeueHouse