Abhiroop Das
Helmed by Michael Showalter, ‘Spoiler Alert’ tells the story of journalist Michael Ausiello and photographer Christopher ‘Kit” Cowan, who meet, fall in love, and start a life together. In a relationship that unfolds over more than a decade, the couple navigates several highs and lows. embracing uncertainties along the way. However, there soon comes a hurdle neither of them can overcome as easily, and it alters their future forever. When Kit is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, he and Michael come together to learn the true value of the present moment and how love is the key to living it to the fullest. The film finds much of its emotional weight in charting their shared journeys, especially when they are at their most honest and vulnerable, as it’s there that the human core of this story is revealed.
Spoiler Alert is a Dramatization of Michael Ausiello’s Memoir About Kit Cowan
‘Spoiler Alert’ is an adaptation of Michael Ausiello’s memoir named ‘Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies,’ which recounts his real-life relationship with Kit Cowan. As the title implies, the book also focuses on Cowan’s tragic death in 2015, following a long battle with neuroendocrine cancer. The film, written by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage, uses Michael’s memoir as its creative basis, maintaining a high degree of biographical realism as it adapts their journey for the screen. Before penning this deeply personal work, Michael had already become a recognizable voice in the world of television. Following early success in Soaps In Depth as a senior news editor, he built a reputation working with magazines like Entertainment Tonight and later TV Guide, where he worked for eight years, starting in 2000. It is around this point in his life that Michael met Kit Cowan.
Michael and Kit’s first meeting was in New York City in 2001, after mutual friends encouraged them to meet at a gay nightclub. Kit had modeled before establishing himself as a professional photographer, and Michael admitted in his book that he initially struggled to believe that someone he found so effortlessly confident would genuinely be interested in him. He was soon proven wrong, though, and their chemistry turned into a committed relationship. Over the following months and years, Kit came out to his parents and moved in with Michael. Many chapters from this beautiful journey have been adapted for the screen in a largely faithful fashion.
Where the movie shines the most is in recreating some of the most visually evocative sequences from the book, such as the smurfs scene. In a conversation with Today, Michael confirmed that the Smurfs featured in the movie are actually from his own collection. He also revealed the backstory behind this collection, fondly recalling that his mother used to reward him with one Smurf toy every time they went shopping. After she died of cancer when he was little, Michael started buying Smurf collectibles for himself as a way of remembering her. According to him, the Smurfs we see in the movie are only a small part of his real, massive collection.
Michael Ausiello and Kit Cowan Navigated Many Challenges in Their Lives
As the years went on, Michael Ausiello’s career progressed from TV Guide to Entertainment Weekly, following which he decided to launch his own website, TVLine. On the personal front, though, his relationship with Kit Cowan was starting to enter a difficult phase. In his memoir, he wrote about how the couple’s sex life had changed in the 12 years they had been together, and how it led him to rely on alcohol. The couple attended therapy, and briefly lived apart, in what Michael describes as a “soft-breakup.” While writing these pages down, Michael Ausiello made a conscious effort not to depict his relationship as absolutely perfect, believing that honesty was essential to preserving its meaning.
Michael and Kit’s life took a tragic turn in 2014, when Kit began experiencing symptoms that ultimately led to a diagnosis of an aggressive neuroendocrine cancer. In his Audible interview, Michael talked about how surreal it was to interview actors for work while privately waiting for updates from Kit’s medical appointments. One such day, he found himself on the set of ‘The Americans,’ where he spent much of the visit checking his phone and waiting to hear from his partner. Michael mentioned that he sent an advance copy to all the celebrities named in the memoir, with a note that read, “Hey, you’re in this. FYI, this was going on in my life when I interviewed you on that day.”
Kit Cowan’s Cancer Diagnosis Reshaped His Relationship With Michael Ausiello
In the conversation with Audible, Michael Ausiello recalled that following Kit Cowan’s cancer diagnosis, doctors said that Kit had a year or less to live, and that revelation changed just about every aspect of their lives. In his interview with Today, Michael brought attention to the scene where his and Kit’s on-screen renditions discuss their future, and described it as “very faithful to the actual experience, and also a pure joy to watch being shot.” One of the first things the two of them decided on was getting married, and following that, they tied the knot on March 21, 2014. “It became something like, ‘We need to do this. I want to be married to him. I want to go through this process—whatever it’s going to be—as his husband,’” Michael remembered during his interview with Audible.
As Kit’s illness progressed, Michael said that both of them tried to preserve as much normalcy as possible, even as hospital visits and treatments became part of everyday life. One particular moment in the film, where Michael, Kit, and his parents go on a weekend trip to Ocean City, New Jersey, is in fact referenced from a real video Michael has of the trip. However, there is also a difficult side to this journey, and Michael has often described this year as including “some of the worst moments” of his life. Nonetheless, he remained by Kit’s side throughout, providing him with the love and care he needed.
Michael Ausiello Began Writing About Kit as a Way of Processing His Loss
Kit Cowan died on February 5, 2015, at the age of 42 after living with neuroendocrine cancer for nearly a year. Following his death, his funeral and memorial were held in Pennsylvania, where his family lived, and Michael Ausiello later scattered Kit’s ashes into the Susquehanna River. Met with a loss so profound, Michael began managing his grief the best way he could: by pouring his emotions into writing. Thus, his account of Kit’s journey began on Facebook, and from there he was convinced to turn it into a book.
“When I wrote the book, I was at the start and in the middle of grieving his loss, which made it an emotionally torturous process,” Michael said, describing the writing process as intensely isolating. Having to immerse himself in different moments from his past while writing the memoir and later while lending his voice for the audiobook proved to be an emotionally challenging experience, but it never stopped him from telling this story. In particular, he believed their thirteen-year relationship deserved to be remembered in its entirety, in all of its ebbs and flows.
‘Spoiler Alert,’ as a movie, brings a lot of the written material to life, but in many ways, it is a different, more dramatized retelling. Michael aptly described it as a version of his life, rather than his life itself, and added that being involved in its production was a lot more enjoyable than writing the memoir. He largely attributed this to how several years have passed since Kit’s passing, and while the initial feeling of grief has passed, Kit continues to live in his heart. Michael has expressed that he is “absolutely open to love again,” and while he doesn’t know if he will ever love someone as much as he loves Kit, his memoir’s message of cherishing the present remains strong as ever.
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