There’s now a name for what’s driving my algorithm: money dysmorphia. It’s exactly what it sounds like, the financial version of never being thin enough or successful enough. You look at your bank account and no matter what’s actually there, it doesn’t feel like enough. You’re convinced you’re broke even when you’re not, or you’re certain the rug is about to be pulled out from under you at any moment. Which, if you work in Hollywood, you know that feeling all too well.

Money dysmorphia is hitting Gen Z and Millennials the hardest. According to a study conducted by Qualtrics on behalf of Credit Karma, nearly half of Gen Z (44%) and almost half of millennials (46%) say they are obsessed with the idea of being rich. At the same time, 48% of Gen Z and 59% of millennials say they feel behind financially, even when in many cases, they aren’t. And into that psychological gap between where you are and where you believe you should be, the digital hustle economy has been very happy to sell a solution. It all reminds me of the family I babysat for in high school and the mom who sold Herbalife supplements thinking she was going to be a millionaire rather than seeing the company for what it was, a pyramid scheme.

I understand the anxiety that makes these get-rich-quick schemes so appealing. Obviously, if they’re showing up in my algorithm, it means I’m watching them. Deloitte’s 2025 survey of Gen Z found that 48% of respondents don’t feel financially secure, up significantly from 30% in 2024. More than half are living paycheck to paycheck and the cost of housing in cities where the creative industries thrive has made pursuing a life as an artist feel like something only certain people can afford.

In pondering all of this as I strive to find meaning in my own work, while also keeping an eye on my nearly empty retirement account, I keep coming back to the phrase “an honest living” and wonder if it means anything anymore? I think about Jake Gittes in Chinatown who says, “Listen, pal. I make an honest living. People only come to me when they’re in a desperate situation. I help ‘em out. I don’t kick families out of their houses like you bums down at the bank do.” He’s drawing a line in how far he’ll go to make money. The word “honest” comes from the Latin honestus, honorable, worthy of respect. An honest living then is one you can stand behind. One that says something about who you are.

As a creative person, an honest living can be translated to work that is identifiably yours. Work where your name on it means something. Work where a human being with a specific life experience and passion put a story into the world and stood behind it. That kind of work does something that no algorithm can replicate: it creates a relationship between the maker and the person on the other end. It says, I made this, and I made it for you, and somewhere in it you can find me.

Now, I’m not here to pretend that meaningful work is a substitute for a paycheck. It isn’t. I have friends who are working corporate jobs during the day and writing their screenplays at night despite being exhausted. I have other friends who left LA because they couldn’t justify the rent anymore, who are now trying to convince themselves that leaving wasn’t giving up. I have friends who are still here, still grinding, wondering how much longer they can do this. Questioning at what point does perseverance become delusion.

When it feels like the industry has stopped rewarding the creative integrity that used to lead to a stable career, the appeal of a faceless AI YouTube channel isn’t hard to understand. If the system isn’t going to reward your carefully crafted, soul-searching work anyway, why not just build a machine and let it run? Why not take the shortcut when the long road doesn’t seem to lead anywhere anymore? The financial fear is real, and anyone who tells a young person to just “follow their dream” without acknowledging the industry they’re entering - corporate consolidation, algorithmic dominance, stockholders being prioritized over creatives - is being dishonest in a different way. An honest living has to be a living.

But there’s a version of financial pragmatism that slips into something else, which is a willingness to remove yourself from your own work so completely that the work stops being yours at all. I do think there’s a difference between doing whatever it takes to keep the lights on while you make your work versus letting something meaningless fill the space where your real work used to be. One is surviving, the other is letting go of your creative identity, and that’s the harder loss to come back from. I’m not saying the choice is easy. I’m not even saying it’s always clear which one you’re doing. But I do think it matters.

In the end, an honest living is not about sacrifice. It’s not a rejection of money or a refusal to engage with the realities of the industry. It is simply the choice to make work that is yours. Work that is driven by your specific way of seeing the world. By your voice. That choice is harder right now than it has been in a while. But it is still a choice. And I’d argue it’s the only one that compounds (financial pun intended), the only one where the work you did five years ago is still working for you, not because an algorithm is running in the background, but because somewhere out there, someone still thinks about it.

I’m in the middle of conducting admissions interviews for the AFI Producing program so I’ll start with the question I ask of all the applicants: What does the role of the producer mean to you?

I’ve had a core guiding philosophy for producing for a while now; my job as a producer is to provide the best possible environment for everyone around me to succeed. I very much see it as a leadership role, but I also see it as a role of service. It’s my responsibility to make sure that the director, the DP, the production designer, the talent, every single department, can do their best job and be the most creative. I’ve always seen a producer as a jack of all trades. You have to understand every aspect of every department, everything that goes into making a movie, because you are the person that people come to with questions. The director is the one we’re all following creatively, but in order to make things happen, you have to have a great producer. You have to understand every single cog in the machine to make a movie, and be willing to really get your hands dirty.

What do you love about producing?

I was pre-med in undergrad for three years. Both my parents are oncologists and cancer researchers. For a very long time I thought I was going to go into medicine, I always found it fascinating, but it wasn’t something that I loved. I found it so isolating. I remember being at an internship junior year and thinking, “This is not for me.”

When I switched over to film, I immediately fell in love with being around creative people, with the collaboration. The people that work in the film industry are just so rare and special. The unique energy and experience of being on set with such a wonderfully creative group of individuals is unlike anything else in the world. When I’m on set, I love making sure that things are going smoothly. I know that so many creatives are just not wired the way producers are. They don’t think about budgets, scheduling, and all the logistical things. But I do, and I know I can help make their lives easier, make filmmaking and art easier. My personality and how my brain works can take care of that business side, that logistical side of moviemaking. But I also love storytelling. I am so fulfilled when I see the creative vision come to life and know that I contribute to that. There are so many stories I’m drawn to. At the end of the day, ​​I know just how hard everyone works on independent films. These chances for filmmakers to make their movies are so rare these days, and knowing that, I am driven to work twice as hard so everybody else has that much easier of a time on set to perform to the best of their ability. I am truly so grateful for every opportunity to continue to do what I love, and to do it with people I cherish.

That’s a pretty big jump from medicine to film school. What was pulling you to filmmaking?

Growing up, my entire family actually loved movies and going to the movie theater all the time. There’s something about movies that energizes me, that brings out my emotions in untold ways and come alive. There’s a repression in Asian culture where you don’t talk about feelings, but going to the movies allowed me to tap into my emotions in an accepted way. When I was thinking about what I actually want to study that was going to make me happy, that is going to allow me to experience life to the fullest, I knew it was filmmaking, because of how movies make me feel. From there, I thought about what I could actually do well within the industry, and with the way I’m wired, producing made the most sense.

How did your parents feel about the switch?

They could tell I was unhappy studying medicine and it wasn’t an easy conversation. But as soon as I said producers take care of the business side of things—literally the second I said “business”—they were like, “Okay, got it.” I think if I said I want to be a director or an actor, they would have pushed back, but they understood producers raise money and that made it alright in their minds.

You went to Columbia for your master’s degree and there’s about a five-year window on your IMDb from 2017 to BLUE SUN PALACE where you produced so many short films. Could you talk about that period of your life?

I moved to New York in 2016 and started out as a production assistant on different sets trying to get as much experience as I could. But I knew I wanted to learn about story, and that’s where Columbia’s program really thrives. I started my master’s in creative producing in 2017. What’s really great about the Columbia program is that every single student—producing students, writing students, and directing students—have a shared curriculum in the first year. I took directing, I took screenwriting, I took directing actors. They want to give everyone the same fundamental baseline. We all had the same requirements: all 75 students in the first year have to direct, produce, and write a short film twice. We did a five-minute short film in the first semester, then an eight-to-twelve-minute short film in the second semester. That’s 150 short films being made. I was on at least 20 different sets and not just as a producer. I was a DP, a first AD, a gaffer, a grip, a first AC. I wanted to expand my horizons in all aspects of filmmaking because film school offers a safe environment for you to fail. One of my professors really drilled into our heads: this is the time when you can focus on your craft. I took that to heart. I wanted to be on as many short films as possible to gain experience, but also to meet directors and other collaborators.

Constance (Connie) Tsang, who directed BLUE SUN PALACE, was one of my first collaborators. I was her first AC on her first five-minute short film at Columbia, and then I was the DP on every single one of her directing exercises before also producing for her. I found so many different collaborators that I still work with. There are producers in China who helped me on BLUE SUN PALACE. There’s a producer in London I go to when I want to do something in Europe. I’m talking to a friend from my class about potentially shooting in Spain and she’s going to do a budget for us. I saw Columbia as one of the greatest opportunities to get experience and meet people. That’s why there are so many shorts on my IMDb from 2017 to 2023. Even after I graduated in 2020, I came back and worked on so many thesis films for directors.

I realized something when I was working on so many shorts: these ideas and the creativity for so many of the directors lives in them, it sits with them. There’s a part of me that feels so protective of all the directors and filmmakers putting so much of their heart and energy into their projects. I will work twice as hard so everyone’s jobs can be a little bit easier. I’m so lucky to do what I do, and I want to spend every single minute making sure that everyone on my set is taken care of, that they feel like they can do their best job, and that this creative baby they have is coming into the world as protected and as loved as possible.

How did BLUE SUN PALACE come about? When did you get involved?

Connie had written the script in 2019, and then the pandemic happened, so she focused on developing the script. I’d say 2022 is when we really started to focus on trying to make it happen. We continued to develop the story and eventually got into the Tribeca Creators Market.

What really started pushing us forward was talking about talent. BLUE SUN PALACE is entirely in Mandarin and Connie’s first feature, which made it a hard sell to investors without talent attached. We needed to get someone on board. Connie’s dream actor for this role was Lee Kang-Sheng, so we went to multiple agencies for help, but no one knew how to contact him because he’s primarily based in Asia. I reached out to my friend who I went to Columbia with who was working in China and asked if she knew how to get to him. Coincidentally, she had just made a short film with him. My friend said that the easiest way to reach Kang-Sheng was to just have Connie DM him on Instagram and he will respond. So, Connie messaged him on Instagram and sent him our thesis film that we did together. He responded, intrigued, and gave us his WeChat and we started talking. We had the script translated for him and he said he really liked it and likes working with first-time feature filmmakers. He said if we could find a window when he is available, he would do it.

Once he was attached, it suddenly became a very legitimate project in the eyes of Asian investors—Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, even Singapore. Eventually, we found a group of Hong Kong investors that financed the film fully. From there, we were able to get the other talent attached because they wanted to work with Lee Kang-Sheng. He was the first big stepping stone into making that feature.

Once we got him attached and got financed, I found my other producers, Sally Sujin Oh and Eli Raskin, and from there it was just a regular filmmaking process of figuring out pre-production, production, when to shoot, and hiring the right people. What was really cool is I got to hire a lot of the people I made short films with.

When did Lucky Lu start? Was there overlap?

There was definitely overlap. During that period between 2021 and 2023 when I was doing short after short, I produced a short called SAME OLD with the director of LUCKY LU, Lloyd Lee Choi. In 2021, we made SAME OLD, which was one the main inspirations for LUCKY LU. It was basically just me, Lloyd, DP Norm Li, an AC, a sound guy, and the actors running around New York City. I was also the first AD. Norm was changing film on top of garbage cans. Somehow miraculously, we got into Cannes in 2022 and that was the short that inspired the feature. While I was trying to finance and package BLUE SUN PALACE, Lloyd was developing the script for the feature version of LUCKY LU.

There are a lot of credited producers on LUCKY LU. How did you amass and manage the producing team?

When we premiered at Cannes in 2022, Lloyd immediately got signed by an agent at WME, and that agent then sent the short to Ron Najor and Asher Goldstein at Destin Daniel Cretton’s company, Hisako. The two of them showed it to Destin, and all of them loved it. The project was in development with them for the first couple years. Jeyun Munford, another partner at Hisako, joined Destin’s company shortly afterward and also became a producer on the film. So that was the core producing team initially: Destin, Asher, Ron, Jeyun, and myself. Destin had been long time friends with Nina Yang Bongiovi, and he told her that she had to meet Lloyd and read the script. Once she met him, she fell in love with the story, also boarded the project, and her involvement really kickstarted the financing.

Nina and Destin helped make an introduction to our lead actor in LUCKY LU, Chang Chen, who is an absolute legend in Asia. He’s pretty much Matt Damon over there. His manager made us have three meetings with her before she ever let us talk to him because she wanted to make sure we were legitimate. Then Lloyd flew to Taiwan for the Sundance Asia festival and met Chang Chen for a six hour dinner. The timing worked out well because Chen told us he would not have said yes to the project five years ago, but now his daughter is the same age as the daughter in the script. Once he was on board, we became fully financed because Taiwanese investors want to do anything he’s in.

I will admit that I initially felt a little bit like an outsider on the producing team. Just a few years prior to the production of LUCKY LU, I was watching the films the rest of the producing team made while sitting in class at Columbia. So, I really felt a sense of responsibility to prove myself and prove that I could keep up with such experienced producers. I felt like all the paperwork, all the emails, everything that came through communication wise, and everything that was on the ground had to be taken care of by me. I quickly learned however, that every other producer on the team wanted to be as involved and as helpful as possible. Even though they all had so many other movies on their plate, they made it clear that LUCKY LU was their priority and that I shouldn’t try to shoulder every producing burden. It was then that I finally felt like I was a peer and equal to all these other incredible career producers. Every producing team is unique, and it can take time to find a comfortable groove of working together, but the team understood how to divide and conquer.

What was the distribution path for BLUE SUN PALACE?

We made BLUE SUN PALACE for just under a million net. We didn’t have a sales agent until we got into Cannes, and then WME signed on and Charades became our international sales agent. They pushed as much as they could out of Cannes, but the appetite for a foreign language first-time feature in the US is very small. That’s just the market, even in a healthy economy.

We ended up working with Dekanalog, who have been wonderful. In their initial offer, Dekanalog’s commitment was limited to the major cities and covered a relatively small number of screens, which was truly the best they could safely promise. Other offers were similar, but it was clear Dekanalog cared the most about the film, and so we partnered with them. However, Dekanalog is a small company, they can only do so much, so as producers, we also put in the work to make sure we had a strong turnout. This is a film about immigrants in a foreign language that so many people in New York and LA can relate to, so we reached out to pretty much every AAPI organization that we knew to help us promote the film.

We premiered at Metrograph and were originally programmed for just one week and we sold out every single screening through word of mouth, social media, and community support. We were extended for another week which sold out again and then had a third and fourth week because the film continued to perform well. The same happened in Los Angeles. It was originally going to be one theater, then we sold out the first week and kept selling out. We expanded to two more theaters. We far exceeded that initial estimate of only 10 cities.

It was a team effort between Dekanalog and the film team putting in the time, reaching out and pushing social media. As much as we would have liked to hand off the film to a distributor and move on to the next project, on these indie films, you have to take things into your own hands to ensure success.

What lessons did you learn on these two films that you’re taking with you into your next projects?

As much as I hate to admit it, one of the biggest lessons learned is that as much as I want to just focus on art and the creativity of it all, every single filmmaker these days has to think about their audience. They have to write their stories, especially their first features, to consider: Who am I writing this for? Is there an audience for this?

As beautiful as BLUE SUN PALACE and LUCKY LU are, I think we overestimated the audience in the US. To get your films made, you have to think about fitting into a specific genre. You can’t balance 10 different genres. A professor once told me: your personal story is not interesting unless people can relate to it and can actually take something away. That stuck with me. On future projects, I really have to consider that the attention economy of the entire world is divided between so many different things. The projects we put out there have to be that much better, that much more specific, that much more cognizant of their audience.

I’ve also learned that I have to be so much more selective with my time. That’s something every producer eventually learns: your time is so valuable. You can’t take it all on at once. You are one singular person. There are so many projects I would love to be on the ground for this year, but I have to focus on the projects that mean something to me, with directors I believe in completely. I can’t jump on every short that excites me anymore. I can’t as easily join a feature film and be a co-producer or a line producer because that takes time away from the projects where I am one of the lead producers. That’s probably one of the biggest lessons.

Producers have a habit of saying they’re “helping” a project and when I hear that, I remind producers that they’re not helping, they are producing. They are filling an actual job with a real function.

There was a recent clip I saw where Ethan Hawke was talking about Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams and he explains how everything magical you saw them put up on the screen is not free. The industry assumes that everything producers get up on the screen is “helping” but there wouldn’t be a film without the labor of a producer. We are putting just as much of ourselves into everything that we touch. The idea that “I’m helping out” needs to be demolished. Whether I’m producing for you, co-producing, associate producing, whatever the role, I’m putting so much of my time and energy and skills into your project. Even if it doesn’t show up in a tangible way on screen like costume design or cinematography work, it’s still so much work.

A lot of people still ask, “What does a producer do?” It’s everything that you don’t necessarily see. What I love about the filmmakers I’m working with is they love producers, they appreciate producers. I’m still getting into the bigger industry as a whole, and I don’t know if that’s true across the board.

Producing is a real job, but it is still grossly underpaid. How are you sustaining a living?

With BLUE SUN PALACE we barely paid ourselves. On LUCKY LU, I came in acknowledging I was the youngest producer on the team and had an ‘I’ll take what I can get’ attitude in terms of pay, but Nina insisted that we all got paid equally. I really appreciated this. It was a substantial paycheck compared to anything else I had done in the past.

I also make a living by working on commercials and as a UPM. As a producer, you have a very transferable skill set to every production. I look back at Columbia and I’m so thankful I was on set all the time and did so many different things. I know how sets run and can fill many positions and have options.

You were on Variety’s 10 Producers to Watch list in 2025 and nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Awards Producers Award - how are you using this moment to boost your career?

The award is a sign of legitimacy that helps open doors. I take as many meetings as possible with whoever will meet with me. You never know in this industry who’s going to help you. If someone wants to send me a script or a deck or introduce me to an interesting filmmaker, I always say yes. I’m going to give you my time for at least a meeting so that we get to know each other. There are agents who would have never reached out to me before these awards, but now we’re acquainted. Now they know who I am. We’ve had a meeting. If I reach out to six months from now asking about one of their clients, they can’t pretend we’ve never met. There’s a face to the email now. I think that’s one of the biggest things in this industry: providing a face to an email. I want to show you who I am, that I’m authentic. If I come to you, I’m not coming for a free favor. I’m here to help you, and you’re here to help me. We can do business together.

With all the doom and gloom headlines, what is something you’re looking forward to?

I’m excited about the variety of different films that are being exposed to audiences these days. There are so many people you can talk to about amazing foreign language films like NO OTHER CHOICE or THE SECRET AGENT and they’ve actually seen it. I don’t know if even 10 years ago the general audience would have seen a single international feature film. The projects I work on and the filmmakers I work with have an international element. We’re reaching audiences that have taste and want to see so many different types of films. I know that space can be harder to break into, but I am excited about the future knowing projects like these will get made. I do think there will be a lot more variety and diversity in terms of the types of films that audiences will be exposed to. Their taste will change, and that will continue to grow and blossom. With the expansion of filmmakers on the international scene, that’s something to be excited about, for sure.

Gabrielle discusses with Dear Producer the decade-long journey to make HEDDA and how she’s invested in partnerships that elevated her career. She also opens up about running a film financing company while still producing and what keeps her hopeful in an industry increasingly driven by mergers and quarterly reports.

At what point did you start working on HEDDA?

I produced LITTLE WOODS in 2017, Nia DaCosta’s debut feature, and we actually started talking about it back at that time. It’s based on the play by Henrik Ibsen, but I wasn’t familiar with the story. Nia pitched it to me and I thought it sounded intriguing. After LITTLE WOODS premiered, Nia was inspired to finally put pen to paper and write the thing she had been thinking about for so long, which was HEDDA. She wrote it in like a week in December 2017. But then LITTLE WOODS was so well received out of the Tribeca Film Festival and Nia got quickly sucked up into writing and directing CANDYMAN and then went on to direct THE MARVELS. She was a very busy woman, so HEDDA was on the backburner for awhile, but I knew the right time would come for us. Eventually, when Nia was in the UK in the second year of THE MARVELS, we had a big conversation about what we wanted to do together next, and we wanted it to be HEDDA. Her team at CAA brought it to Plan B and we were suddenly off and running.

I was not familiar with the play either. Is it in the public domain?

Yes, it’s from the 1890s, so a public-domain piece. It’s been reworked as a movie and revived as a play many times. It’s one of those plays that has been performed somewhere in the world for the last 150 years. At its core, it’s about a woman struggling against being put in a cage, which is timeless. That struggle, unfortunately, has never gone away. Actresses gravitate towards these kinds of complicated characters and Ibsen writes complicated women so well. This felt, and still feels, incredibly relevant.

I read in an interview with Nia that the character of Eileen was originally a male role in the play. Was switching that role to a woman an idea Nia had from the beginning?

If you’re not familiar with the original play, it’s a love triangle with Hedda at the center. She’s married to George and there is another man, Eilert, with whom she used to be involved. However, you don’t really get a sense of why Hedda would choose Eilbert over George. Changing Eilert to Eileen made it so much more interesting. Hedda could not be with the Eilert character because she’s a woman. She has to pick a man because that’s the societal norm at the time and it creates a more realistic picture of how Hedda cannot be true to herself in any shape or form and has to adhere to the social restrictions imposed upon her.

I read Nia’s script before I read the play and thought it was so much fun. It’s delicious, sexy and scary. Her writing reads like a sexy thriller. Then I went back and read the play, and I immediately saw how Nia fixed all of the things I would have had a problem with in the original text.

Were you thinking of this as a return to the indie space after Nia had been in the Marvel world or did you see this as a big movie?

It was 2021 when the project was really picking up steam and with both the period aspect and COVID protocols in full swing, it didn’t feel like this could be a low budget film. In my head, I originally thought we could land in the $10 million range. When it became clear that we were going to partner with Orion, it became bigger, just by the nature of it being a studio movie versus an independent film.

Tessa Thompason starred in LITTLE WOODS so you have a long standing relationship with her, when did she become involved in HEDDA?

Nia had written HEDDA with Tessa in mind, it was her role for the taking. But as we were trying to set up the film, Tessa’s profile was really on the rise. The concern was that by the time we would be ready to shoot, she wouldn’t be available. Thankfully, the stars aligned and she was available and wanted to do it and wanted to produce it with us. We were happy to have her.

You also partnered with Plan B as producers. How did that come together and how did you balance having a team of producers?

I love Plan B. I think Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner are incredible at what they do and I am so truly honored to have had the chance to work with them. When they came onboard, Nia and I felt like we had landed the best possible partners. They knew the films I had produced and respected my relationship with Nia. They were really inclusive and it all felt seamless.

We delineated producer responsibility based on each other’s strengths but I was really happy how empowering they were to me. They let me run with the ball but brought incredible ideas and problem solving skills when needed. They are incredibly collaborative and give really thoughtful notes and guidance.

Plan B has a long track record of partnering with the next generation of producers to get these more challenging movies made. I wish more producers at their level would follow suit and use their talent and leverage to support the next class.

I agree and before Plan B did that for me, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones generously did that for me. When Nia moved into the bigger budget space, I was worried I was going to be left behind. I wouldn’t be able to work with her again because of the optics of my indie resume compared to her studio credits. At the time, I called Brian and he helped me get onto a $20 million movie so I could prove I was capable of it. By the time we were doing HEDDA, there would be no question that I could produce at that level because I had already done it. I’m eternally grateful to BKJ for that opportunity.

You and Nia made LITTLE WOODS together, which was in the sub million dollar level and then she jumped to CANDYMAN and then Marvel. What were you doing during these years to maintain your relationship knowing you wanted to work together again?

Nia and I are friends, but more importantly, we’re a professional partnership. We weren’t friends before we worked together. We’re friends through our professional work together and we enjoy collaborating. At this point, I think she’s worked with a lot of other producers, and I’ve worked with a lot of other directors, and we continuously gravitate back towards each other because we know how deep the respect and the trust go.

I’ve watched a few of my producer colleagues go through the experience where they lose their creative collaborator when that person gets sucked into Marvel or whatever other big studio franchise and I didn’t want that to happen. I was proactive and had a frank conversation with Nia about how I had helped launch her career with LITTLE WOODS before anyone knew who she was. I did it because I loved her vision and her talent and wanted to bring it to life for her. I told her I didn’t want to get stuck making million dollar films and would need her to go to bat for me as well if she wanted to continue working with me. She saw my value and wanted to produce HEDDA with me. She made sure I was her producer and now we’re partnered on many other things together.

To your other question about what I was doing in the meantime? If there was a project I thought she would like, I’d bring it to her. Or I’m tracking the books I know she would like. I’m always in the background thinking about her no matter what she’s up to. And I’m a sounding board for her. I’m here for emotional support at all times, whatever she needs. We work on the basis of full trust and respect, and we see the value of working together.

I appreciate you sharing this. There are so many producers who have launched careers and then have been left behind. You kill yourself on the low budget film and then a flashy producer sweeps in with more relationships or money and they get that filmmaker’s next project. It’s heartbreaking.

What you’re describing, working on someone’s debut but then not moving up with them for the next bigger film, that had already happened to me before I worked with Nia and it was hard to take. I had worked with that director for years but I realized it wasn’t a creative partnership and there wasn’t respect for me or the craft of producing there. I chose not to wallow in that experience and was fortunate to work with Nia on LITTLE WOODS right away. With Nia, I saw what a real producer/director collaboration should look like. She understands my value and knows I’m there to help her make the best film possible. And through her, I learned what a great director really looked like.

Going back to what we were talking about with Plan B, I do think it’s also incumbent on us as producers to lift up the next generation. Plan B could have easily said, ‘We’ve got it, we don’t need Gabrielle.’ But like Nia, they also saw your value. This is a very opportunistic industry where the scarcity mindset is strong. People get caught up in that and don’t necessarily take care of each other the way we need to.

I agree with you completely. I now run a film financing company and we get pitched projects all the time. When it’s not a director’s debut film, chances are I know the producer on their first film, so I call that producer up and ask if they’re on the project. And if they’re not, I want to know why. I see it as a red flag.

Has running a financing company changed how you consider potential projects?

I think the reason why I was a good producer in the first place was that I really cared equally about the creative and about the money. I cared about the people who were giving their money to me. I cared about what I had promised them, what I was going to give them, and how I was going to fulfill that promise. Even on HEDDA, with MGM/Amazon, I don’t want to let them down. I really care about the executives there, and I want to show them that we can do what we said we’d do. I don’t want to come in over budget. I want to come in on time and on budget, barring catastrophes like strikes. I need to make sure everyone who said yes to this project financially is getting what they wanted out of it.

On the independent film side and financing, I feel like I’m bringing the same thing. I want to make wonderful things, but in a realistic market. I want to make sure my financier is around for 10+ years to make all these movies. If I am irresponsible or don’t treat the money with respect, it will go away. I feel that way for all of our independent financiers.

When we did LITTLE WOODS, 10 investors contributed very small amounts. Some of them were really professional companies like Tango, but others were just privately wealthy individuals. It’s likely they will not make their money back. I told them all that very directly upfront, which I’m sure they hated. But what I ask them is - what, besides money does success look like for you? Do you want to be at Sundance? Do you want to walk the red carpet? Do you want to meet the actors? Do you want to come to the set? What is the measure of success that’s not just financial? I do that with my partner now. Yes, I want financial success, but I also want to make things we’re proud of. I want to make things that launch people’s careers, and I can balance those things without being irresponsible with money.

You are currently sucked into the awards circus. I feel like every morning there’s a new nominations list and HEDDA is on it. What are your feelings on it all? Is it too much? Is it rewarding?

Listen, I’ve never been a part of a movie that has made it this far. I’m having a blast. I love it. I’m so happy to be included. Especially with HEDDA, which had a direct-to-streaming release, the awards campaign and the buzz around it have made more people see it than would have otherwise. It’s great. I can’t complain about it at all. It’s really wonderful that Amazon is supporting it so much. If it goes straight to streaming, without this awards buzz, who would be seeing it?

We’re talking at the end of 2025 and it’s been a hard year. I’d love to know what your North star is, what keeps you focused on the work?

At the start of my career, I worked at Killer Films during the recession in 2010, right after I graduated college. The bottom had fallen out of everyone’s budgets. Mumblecore was the rage. The RED camera had just come out. Everything was in flux. There was also a strike that had just concluded and it felt like the end of the world in a lot of ways. It’s not dissimilar to now. It always feels like a pendulum swinging and I’m hoping it will swing back the other way.

I do think all the mergers are very concerning, given how few buyers there are as it is. If we slim down even more, the types of movies that are going to get made are going to really lack creativity. They’re all going to be slop. I want films like HEDDA. I don’t think there’s been a movie like HEDDA in a long time. A sumptuous, melodramatic, wild ride. It’s not the type of movie you see every day. As everything mergers, those types of interesting movies will go away.

But I’m hoping with SINNERS, and WEAPONS doing so well, and ANORA last year, that those movies continue to win and continue to show the industry at large that there is a need and a want for these stories. My hope is that my small company will continue to make the movies we want to make, which, by design, are not going to be big superhero movies. They’re going to be small movies with a deeper message. If they don’t make a lot of money, that’s not the goal. But they’ll exist and I’ll find the audience for them, and I think that’s half the battle. How are these studio movies going to have any talent if I don’t discover it for them?

Diane Becker (THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTMIST, Premieres), Mynette Louie (THE HUNTRESS, World Cinema Dramatic Competition), Sarah Winshall (JOYBUBBLES, U.S. Documentary Competition), and Kimberly Parker Zox (HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY!, U.S. Dramatic Competition) shared their thoughts on the final festival in Park City, the state of indie acquisitions, and how they are adapting their skills, mindsets, and strategies to thrive amidst constant change and uncertainty.

The winners of the Sundance Institute | Amazon MGM Studios Producers Awards, which included two $10,000 grants — one for fiction and the other for nonfiction — were producers Apoorva Guru Charan (Take Me Home, U.S. Dramatic, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award) and Dawne Langford (Who Killed Alex Odeh?, U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Excellence). Apoorva and Dawne are 2022 Sundance Institute Producers Labs & Fellowship alumni.

Before Shane gave his keynote, Kristin Feeley, Sundance Institute Director, Documentary Film and Artist Programs, had this to say about his exemplary work….

“2026 Sundance Film Festival Producers Celebration Keynote Shane Boris is a consummate creative producer and champion of visionary artists making adventurous, creative nonfiction. His body of work is political without being didactic, wildly creative without feeling inaccessible, imaginative yet rooted in essential truths. Shane is a fierce protector of the beating heart of the creative process and so deeply humble that he would never tell you that he has the rare distinction of being nominated for an Oscar with two films in the same year, Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love and Daniel Roher’s Navalny. He returned to the Sundance Film Festival this year with two films reuniting him with those collaborators,Time and Water and The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. He has produced 13 features since his first feature, Michal Marczak’s All These Sleepless Nights, premiered at Sundance ten years ago. Shane has an intense curiosity and restlessness, which employs choosing projects and collaborators. The connective tissue between the work is Shane’s empathy and boundless compassion for his collaborators. In this chaotic and uncertain moment, these were some of the qualities we felt the field and the world could use more of, and why we asked him to deliver the 2026 Producers Celebration Keynote.”

Producers Celebration Keynote Address by Shane Boris

I feel profoundly humbled to be here among all of you incredible producers who are experiencing your first Sundance, as well as those of you whose work has for years expanded the craft of filmmaking. And especially at this last Sundance in Park City. I mean this sincerely, I wouldn’t have had a career as a producer without Kristin Feeley or the Sundance Institute. You have transformed the prospects and trajectories of countless films, you have redefined what independent filmmaking means, and you have enriched the lives of so many of us filmmakers. From the bottom of my heart, and beyond anything words could ever express, thank you. Thank you Shira, Kristin, Michelle, Maria, Andrea, Tabitha, John, Enrique, Paola, Hajnal, and Amazon MGM Studios for supporting this event and the Sundance Producers Program.

I’ve recently lost my peace. What I mean by that is, for many years, both by cultivating a practice and outrunning some of my issues, I mostly felt a wholeness of my identity, a throughline to the narrative of my life and how I related to the world around me.

It went something like this: growing up I wasn’t sure what I had to offer. I sensed that I could easily connect with others and I loved listening to them. I would scan for creative sparks with everyone I met. When something sparked, I would see if maybe we could kindle a little flame, and from there maybe turn that into a fire in the form of a moment, a lasting friendship, or a creative collaboration. These collaborations yielded all kinds of projects: songs, books, companies, plays. I loved doing this and was passionate about it. But I didn’t know if there was a career path for this kind of thing.

So I did a series of unconventional moves to try and find out if there was a more conventional path. Nothing really stuck and in between these failed attempts at fitting in what I remained passionate about was this life of an itinerant listener. I would travel with two passports and 8 sets of friends’ house keys in my backpack, staying with anyone that I shared a spark with and the need for someone to bounce kernels of ideas off of, identify threads that should be followed, and think through ways to actualize their visions. I owe so much to these friends.

And then I did this for a filmmaker. And then another. And then another. And then people started calling me a producer.

A meaningful, coherent professional life seemingly emerged. I worked with geniuses on films that I believed in. I told myself I was serving important, singular stories that needed to be told. I felt largely fulfilled in feeling like I was serving these extraordinary people’s visions and I was exhilarated when some of their obsession-dust fell on me. I also benefited from some of the perks of the trade: I could finally tell my parents there was a word for what I did; I got to meet amazing people in amazing places; and I fell in love with camaraderie of collaboration and the pure, unadulterated joy of making an impossible thing that was once just a seed of an idea come to life and have a chance of meaning something to someone.

But as I professionalized, the narrative throughline of my work as a person and as a producer ran up against a paradox, one that I am very much still trying to untangle: How are we producers, who are expected to be exceptionally pragmatic, who have exceedingly demanding jobs, who are tasked with planning and executing fully formed plans in circumstances with so many variables–how do we also continue to dream and live in accordance with our ideals?

How are we supposed to balance working backwards always from “what does this film need in order to find and become its truest self?”–an impossibly idealistic question to even think about asking–with “how can I help get the film what it needs in order to become that?”–a question that requires the most practical and pragmatic considerations?

These questions have only become more urgent. The world is clearly in crisis. What will happen with our industry is impossible to predict. We’re living in a time of great uncertainty, one in which the old rules don’t apply, and yet the new rules haven’t been written.

Both of the films I produced at this year’s Festival are in some ways about the possible foreclosure of a future I, like many of us, had previously imagined. In TIME AND WATER it’s the consequences of the climate crisis on our interconnected water systems and our sense of time itself. In THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST it’s the risks of racing to develop and deploy the potentially most transformative technology ever under the worst possible incentives.

But beyond seeing this uncertainty in the world, and even more than exploring it in these films, I am feeling it internally.

Here is what I am grappling with: how are we supposed to produce movies that come from our soul in this moment when all of the stakes feel so high? What does good producing mean right now? What does good living look like?

I don’t have the answers.

At the moment, something that is getting me through is the company I keep. I have collaborated with some of the best producers in the world. And this doesn’t even include all of the incredible executive producers I have worked with as well. Not only have they helped me navigate extremely challenging circumstances in order to turn ideals into reals, they have made space for me to have a chance to give projects something of value. I can’t thank them enough.

One thing that I’ve always loved in documentary and really all art-making and storytelling at its finest, but also something I am experiencing quite acutely now, is the practice of living inside of the unknown. Having just finished these last two films, one thing I can say about the filmmaking process is that we will undoubtedly experience not knowing what to do or where to go, and we will have to figure it out. We will be forced to ask ourselves time and time again how to live spontaneously and improvisationally in relationship with the mystery. And after we respond once, however imperfectly, to the unknown with grace, we will hopefully be able to do it again, and again until we gain a confidence that we’ll be able to cross the river by feeling for stones.

And also, perhaps our job is not to succeed. Maybe our job is to strive, and never stop striving.

One last thing I want to share with you, as we are all celebrating being here – and how rare and beautiful it is to have found each other in this increasingly disconnected world – is also a word of encouragement for the part of you which is reeling from how hard it was to get here. (I am saying this to you and I am also telling it to myself.) Here we are, surrounded by each other, and in this moment we don’t have to be daunted by the suffering of not reaching our ideals, in our art or in our life.

I am going to keep striving for the ideal even though I will never reach it in my living or in my producing. Part of this will mean helping the films I work on and care deeply about get financed, made, marketed, seen. The other part is making sure these films never lose sight of their ideal, always striving to become the soil in which something wondrous can grow.

Alisa discusses with Dear Producer the emotionally and technically challenging journey of making THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, why she believes it’s essential viewing, and how she’s built a producing partnership with filmmakers Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir that treats the company as home base. She also opens up about navigating the awards circuit, using success to open doors for others, and why sticking together as producers is essential to moving the industry forward.

When did you come onboard THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR?

I have a company, Message Picture, with Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir and Geeta is the director of THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR. This story came to us very early because the subject of the film, Ajike Owens, is a family friend of Geeta’s husband Nikon Kwantu, who is also a producer on the film. Within a day of Ajike being murdered, we began documenting what was happening on the ground by filming protests and the funeral. Mostly, we were trying to get clips to send to the media because we were worried that what happened to Ajike was going to get swept under the rug. There wasn’t national coverage. At first, Susan Lorincz, the perpetrator, wasn’t arrested. We wanted to make sure that happened. It became a film two months later when the family lawyer requested the body cam footage through a Freedom of Information Act request. Once Nikon saw the footage, and that it went two years back, he said we should consider making a film. Early on, it was all about helping the family and making sure that Susan was arrested, and then later that she was convicted.

I was reading an interview with Geeta about how making this film helped her process her grief. How was that for you as the producer working with a filmmaker so close to such a traumatic situation?

Geeta and I first met as mom friends. Our families are close. When something like this happens, you galvanize. We were on the ground early. I was working on the Disney+ project HARLEM ICE, and I remember having to pause everything when I heard what happened. I remember where I was seated in my living room because it was so unbelievable. Ajike was shot through a locked door. It was devastating. Ajike is the mother of four children who will never have their mother back. It was grief work.

The film is told solely through body cam footage. Was that a choice from the beginning? How was it working with only that kind of footage?

The film is not only the most emotionally challenging film we’ve worked on, but also the most technically challenging. You see body cam footage and don’t think about the fact that it is really poor-quality, low-grade camera work. The police are walking around, so it’s bouncing all over the place. It has a small mono mic that picks up everything, including the walkie-talkie, the ground noise of walking, and every conversation and sound.

The use of body cam footage, in this case, is trying to subvert something that’s used to surveil Black and brown communities and oftentimes victimize them. In this case, we’re using it to subvert that. Through the body cam footage, you’re actually seeing this beautiful, multi-generational, multiracial community that lives together, raises their kids together, and there’s only one violent outlier.

The police body cam footage also feels undeniable. No one was directing anybody to do anything. Geeta wasn’t giving creative notes about performances. These are just people living their lives and doing their jobs. We thought that objectivity was important. There’s no redoing, no re-recording a line or changing an angle. At the end of the day, this was the best approach because we’re trying to make substantive change. We hoped that if people saw it in this way, Susan would not be let off like George Zimmerman was.

We did not re-interview the kids on the street because we didn’t want to re-traumatize them, and that was another reason for using the police body cam footage exclusively. They had already been interviewed by the police numerous times. We wanted to do this with the least harm to that community. Only one family still lives on Ajike’s street. There has been a loss of innocence for so many of those children. They witnessed murder.

I will admit that until I thought about it more deeply after watching the film, I saw the police as “good guys” compared to what we usually see in the media.

I understand why people initially don’t consider the police officers as a part of the problem because they didn’t show up with guns blazing or overtly mistreating the community. But their inaction was the problem. They should have done more with Susan in terms of consequences, rather than simply seeing her as a nuisance.

Nikon often says “we have such a low bar in America for policing of Black and brown communities that we confuse politeness with competence” or doing their primary job. They treated Susan as an annoyance, as a nuisance. But their biases towards her and her weaponizing her white privilege against the predominantly Black and brown people allowed for the worst possible outcome. Someone was killed.

Have you encountered negative feedback from police officers who have seen the film?

No negative feedback.

We premiered at Sundance 2025 and an older white gentleman who works in law enforcement approached me after the screening and validated what I’m saying. He confirmed that after three times of Susan making unsubstantiated claims, they’re supposed to either incarcerate her or fine her. She’s supposed to be on a frequent-flyer list, and they’re supposed to intervene on another level.

I’ve seen a lot of videos on TikTok about this film and a conversation about whether it’s “Black pain porn,” or essential viewing. What is your take on this?

There are a couple of things. First, we are showing a beautiful, multiracial, multi-ethnic community and what communities should be. We’re showing children playing in the street. We’re also showing children who are often adultified by the time they are 11. In fact, one of them says to a police officer, “We’re just kids.”

A lot of those critiques come from people not knowing who is at the center of the film. I was in an Uber today, and the Black female driver asked me why I was in Los Angeles. I told her I’m a producer and in LA promoting my film THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR. She turned around and started crying. She’s so happy to know that there are Black people - people of color - involved in the film.

The other part comes from their not understanding that our mission is to help the family. When Nikon thought we could turn this tragedy into a film, Geeta asked Ajike’s mother Pam if she wanted that. She prayed on it and said “yes”. Before we submitted it to Sundance, Geeta brought it to her to watch and told her we would shelf it if she wanted us to. She watched it for the first time and had a very visceral reaction. She prayed on it more, watched it again, and said she wanted the world to know what happened to her daughter, similar to Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother. She expressed to us that she wanted the film to help other families and communities so that nobody else has to go through what they went through.

We want this film to effectuate change. We want people to be upstanders, not bystanders, when they’re having conflicts with anyone, especially at a time when ICE is moving into neighborhoods of color and snatching people out of their beds. We’re also here for Pam’s mission. She started the Standing in the Gap Fund to help other families affected by race-based violence. With the impact campaign, they’re focusing on changing policy on Stand Your Ground laws in 5 of the 38 states it exists in. For me, it’s essential to watch because it’s so much bigger than the film.

Most importantly, we showed the film to the community itself, including Ajike’s friends before any public audience saw it. People were really emotional. It was so visceral that they were having physical reactions. Nikon and I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t put the film out there. We wondered if we re-traumatizing people? However, at the end of the screenings, all of the community members - Black, white, other - all of them sitting in the circle thanked us for making the film. They shared that while it was a hard watch, they don’t want any community to go through the same thing.

One of the best things we’re seeing online and on TikTok is that people are sharing videos of their children playing outside. As a parent, I always want my children to be in nature, doing something creative or social, rather than on a phone or a computer. I’m happy that we’re affecting that. Conversations are happening around policing and gun violence, and Stand Your Ground, and all of the things.

The film is now at the top of the Netflix chart. They Trojan horsed it by marketing it to the true crime audience, which has a loyal following. Did you have certain feelings about this approach?

We never thought about it as a true crime story, but we did want it to play like a scripted thriller. We wanted it to grip people and keep viewers dedicated to watching so they could get the full story, the full purpose of having it shown. When we brought it to Sundance, the press kept categorizing it as true crime, and Netflix talked about marketing it to the true crime audience. As filmmakers we feel it is an artful film about a crime, but we have seen how fans of true crime have come to it. It is a Trojan horse. They didn’t expect what they were getting. It was the vegetables in the ice cream. We are grateful that so many different types of people around the world have seen it.

You’re on the awards circuit now. I’d be curious to hear your take on the process and whether you see it as valuable. How do you approach it as a producer? It’s not your first rodeo, how does it feel this time around?

It is a process. You’re in it, you’re traveling and talking about your film non-stop. This film feels so near and dear to my heart and we’re thrilled for the opportunity to promote it,, but it’s also very heavy to talk about day in and day out.. When it gets hard, I look at our North Star, Ajike’s mom Pamela Dias. Everything she wants for her daughter to come out of this, we want her to have.

I want to keep it in perspective. We understand that these awards and the publicity around them allow the film to get seen even more. If our goal is to make sure as many people as possible can see it to effect change, then I’m all about it. To be included as a producer at this level feels really great. I hope more producers are included in the process, because it’s important.

In some ways the awards circuit is part of the impact campaign. You make films. You want them to be seen and well-received. You put your heart and soul into this work. You want viewers to interact with it. These milestones along the way help get more eyeballs on it, and eventually they impact the impact campaign, the policy work, and, hopefully, America. The film shows the best of America as well as the worst of America. That community is the best of us, and Susan’s actions are the worst of us. Let us not lose sight of that.

I want to switch gears away from the movie and talk about your partnership with Geeta and Sam. Unfortunately, it’s become more and more rare for producers to work with the same director repeatedly, for various opportunistic reasons. But you have built a strong relationship with Geeta and Sam to create your company. What are your tips on building and maintaining creative and business relationships?

It was my idea to start Message Pictures - our production company. I went to Geeta and told her that we all have powerful work as individuals and I feel like we could be better together and she agreed. Geeta said she and Sam had been talking about partnering forever so she asked if I would be open to including him. Sam Pollard is documentary and scripted royalty so I said “of course!”

2025 was our hard launch year. We’ve been working behind the scenes for three or four years, and we came out with KATRINA: COME HELL AND HIGH WATER. Geeta directed episode one. I was the showrunner. Sam Pollard was the executive producer. That was successful. It was the number one series on Netflix for 5 days and ranked in the top 10 internationally for 3 weeks. Then we have a short film, THE DEVIL IS BUSY, that was number one on HBO when it came out, and now we have THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR.

Partnerships can be easier if you have the hard conversations around what happens when you’re getting offered certain projects as individuals. I said this to Geeta - and I really mean this—’if there’s an offer that you can’t refuse that doesn’t involve the company, then go for it.’ But at the end of the day, we treat Message Pictures as our home base. Sam Pollard works on many projects. He’s executive producing everything for everybody. But as much as we can, we have decided that we will run everything through Message Pictures and work in partnership.

Sometimes I’m not the producer, but our company’s name is on it. Sometimes I’m an EP and Geeta and/ or Sam is directing. It’s about having flexibility as a producer, too. Obviously, directors are often the stars in the distributors’ and studios’ eyes, and producers do so much unseen creative labor. But ultimately, it’s about putting ourselves out there, actually being the people who form the entities, and making sure that it’s known from day one that no matter what happens, it’s us. A lot of directors produce, but when your job is primarily producer, you know what that means. You handle all of the business, all of the things. The directors you work with need to know that you also have their back in ways that sometimes agents and lawyers don’t.

You’ve had so much success in areas where gatekeepers tell us there’s no audience. Then you defy that with projects HARLEM ICE and THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR. How are you picking projects?

I remember when we first started Message Pictures, our old agents suggested we try to have a company serve as our parent company, maybe a pod deal. I remember in one of the meetings someone saying to us, “But are all of your stories going to be message pictures?” I was like, well, we know we can’t go with them because they don’t understand us!

Whenever we’re considering projects, it comes down to the message. Our work is really steeped in good storytelling about people of color, about women, about marginalized communities, and we have a particular focus. We want to be current and also future-thinking. If people see my resume—BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME, STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING—there’s an artfulness to these pieces. They’re not your straight-up documentaries. In Message Pictures, we came together because we wanted to be innovative. We want to tell immersive stories. That’s how we approach the POV.

We will definitely want to do some scripted projects. It’s time. We purposely made THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR the way we did so people understand what we can do in terms of making a thriller and a great narrative story. Good documentaries are narrative stories.

How are you using this moment to advance your own voice?

As a person that wasn’t always in the rooms, who wanted to be at the table all the time and couldn’t, who had to do so much work behind the scenes on projects and not always get credit, and not be able to land a big project even though I had the same qualifications as those who did. I feel like it’s really important for me at this point to capitalize on the success of Message Pictures by trying to have conversations about opening the door for more people.

We’re a small company. We really hope that our successes help producers, independent filmmakers, and documentarians get their work out and have less of a struggle, even on the promotion side. I want that, and I want to grow Message Pictures so we can give more opportunities, create jobs, and do all the things.

Our film was acquired by Netflix out of Sundance, which doesn’t happen that often nowadays. But I do have faith that we are going to rebound. I’m encouraged by so many producers who are figuring out alternative distribution. Like NO OTHER LAND having had a cross-country theater campaign and making it to the Oscars after no distributor picked up the film. I’m remaining hopeful and using these successes to help usher in a new form of what our industry is, what our relationships with distributors are, and what audiences are.

Tides turn very quickly in this business, but I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful for all independent filmmakers - in scripted and documentary. We’re having tough conversations. Sometimes I know I’ve lost out on opportunities by being forthright. As producers, it is our job to advance the work and to challenge people. You have to clear out a lot of the bureaucracy to get the work done.

Also, as producers, we need to stick together to move the industry forward and create the change we want to see. Our projects can open minds on the distributor side, open hearts and minds on the policymaker side, and the hearts and minds of viewers.

Since my appearance, Todd’s guest have included:

• Oscar winning producer of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE Jonathan Wang.

• Legendary agent and WME Senior Partner Robert Newman.

• Oscar winning producer/writer/director/actor and Smokehouse Pictures co-founder Grant Heslov.

• Warner Bros Co-Charis & CEOs, Michael De Luca & Pam Abdy.

• 87North co-founder and Bullet Train/Atomic Blonde producer Kelly McCormick.

And many more!

Todd’s podcast is a great resource for producers so be sure to check it out.

My episode on Apple Podcasts can be found HERE or you can watch the video below.

When I think of successful regional filmmakers who are intertwined with place, I think of Kelly Reichardt or Richard Linklater. Reichardt’s Oregon-set films, like NIGHT MOVES and FIRST COW, paint vivid portraits of people against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest. Texas and its unique idiosyncrasies are reflected in many of Linklater’s films, from DAZED AND CONFUSED to BERNIE. There clearly is a love for their communities that seeps through the screen across their individual oeuvres.

Shooting on location naturally brings the richness of those places to life for audiences, showing how people live, work, and speak. However, filming on location, particularly in rural communities without strong production resources or tax incentives, is challenging and doubly so when your budget is limited.

Now, imagine choosing to make your low-budget movie on an island, smack in the middle of the Pacific…

When you think of Hawaiʻi, there’s an allure of sandy beaches, palm trees, and mai tais. That postcard-perfect vision of Hawaiʻi has been carefully crafted thanks to numerous studio films and network television shows that provide audiences around the world with hints of “life” here. Outside of Hollywood’s portrayals of Hawaiʻi on the screen, only a handful of narrative feature films have been written, produced, and shot here in the last few decades. That is, thankfully, changing.

As a producer who lives and works in Hawaiʻi, how did I produce my Slamdance-winning narrative feature, CHAPERONE, in rural Hawaiʻi for less than $200,000? Here’s what centering community and place on a budget looks like.

TRAILER TO CHAPERONE

CHAPERONE (written/directed by Zoë Eisenberg) won the Slamdance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Award for Best Breakout Feature in 2024 and was recently made available to stream on AppleTV and Amazon.

About the film: Misha, a 29-year-old woman alienated by friends and family for her lack of ambition, finds a dangerous acceptance in a bright 18-year-old athlete who mistakes her for a fellow high school student.

In general, Hawaiʻi and low-budget anything is a joke.

In case you haven’t been to Hawaiʻi, there are a few things you should know.

Hawaiʻi is the most remote island chain in the world. For context, it’s a 5-6 hour flight from LAX. Not only is it hard to get to, but it’s also one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, with overall costs (housing, transportation, gas, and food) typically 30-50% higher than anywhere on the continent.

To make things more challenging, the state is divided into eight (8) main islands. The majority of the state’s resources are consolidated on the island of Oʻahu, where the state capital, Honolulu, is located. Oʻahu is densely populated and inhabited by roughly one (1) million people, or two-thirds of Hawaiʻi’s total population.

Resources on the other islands are therefore limited, not just for film supplies, and difficult to access as inter-island travel is dependent on air transport. This is why the state incentivizes production outside Oʻahu through a tiered qualified tax rebate: 22% for expenditures made on Oʻahu and 27% for expenditures made on the other islands.

I was born and raised on Hawaiʻi island (often called the Big Island), where it has always felt like there are more goats and cows than people. Growing up in a rural community like this, it was hard to imagine building a career in film, so I left to pursue opportunities elsewhere. In moving back in 2020, I wanted to prove to myself that it’s possible to produce our own stories here, even with the limited resources we have.

So my dear reader, now that we’ve established our baseline: how did we make CHAPERONE for under $200,000 in rural Hilo, Hawaiʻi??

Writer/Director Zoë Eisenberg and I met in a state-funded development lab in Hawaiʻi called “Creative Lab Hawaiʻi - Producer’s Immersive” back in 2019. Rebecca Green (yes her!) was one of our mentors! At that time, I had been working in documentary film production in Austin, Texas, and was looking to expand my repertoire into narrative filmmaking – ideally back home in Hawaiʻi. Zoë had already been working in the narrative space in Hawaiʻi and came to the lab with a script she wanted to direct. Six years later, CHAPERONE is now available to rent/buy on AppleTV & Prime.

Before diving into the practical realities of making CHAPERONE, it’s important to understand our creative partnership. At the core of our collaboration is a shared commitment to local representation, both on-screen and behind the camera. That value guided our casting and hiring decisions, with a strong emphasis on employing local talent and crew. Our cast was entirely AANHPI, intentionally reflecting our diverse community in Hawaiʻi. Although a small number of collaborators were flown in from Oʻahu, Maui, and the continental U.S., the majority of our cast and crew were hired locally.

Although we aim to champion our local scene, as two white women, Zoë and I recognize that not every story is ours to tell. We would not be the right people to tell a story about the Hawaiian diaspora. But a story about an alienated woman living in a small, isolated town that happens to be in Hawaiʻi? Check!

Not only is Hawaiʻi Island home for me, but Zoë has called Hawaiʻi home for well over a decade. Prior to us connecting, Zoë wrote, produced, and co-directed two other micro-budget films shot entirely on Hawaiʻi Island, and previously ran the Made in Hawaiʻi Film Festival, which celebrated locally made films.

In addition to being a filmmaker, she also owns a circus studio in downtown Hilo, and is a published author (so go check out her book Significant Others, published by Harper Collins/Mira, also set in Hilo!). She’s a multi-talented, go-getter with deep ties to her East Hawaiʻi island community. This film celebrates that in so many ways.

Did we consider shooting anywhere else? No.
Could we have made this film anywhere else? Yes. But not for less than $200,000.

Like all ultra-low-budget projects, we worked with what we had.

CHAPERONE’s budget was raised through a combination of traditional investments, with a large number of investors, each putting in a small portion of the budget needed. Additional soft funding was raised through small grants and cash donations received through a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. We qualified as a SAG-UPA production, so cast and crew agreed to work on a low-budget scale, with Zoë cutting her rate entirely. Additionally, by filming on Hawaiʻi Island, the production qualified for a 27% state tax rebate on eligible expenditures exceeding $100,000.

To keep costs down, we leaned into the generosity of our community, with a large portion of support for the film coming from in-kind goods and services. The majority of locations were friends’ homes or locally owned businesses. One of our main locations was the Hilo Palace Theater, a 100-year-old historic theater where Zoë’s husband is the Executive Director. With permission from their board, we were able to shoot there on a few of their down days.

Several executive producers, friends, and family donated their airline miles to help us cover the majority of interisland and continental flights for the handful of cast and crew we needed to fly in. To house them, we rented an incredible bed and breakfast (the Garden Manor) that doubled as both our main shooting location and cast & crew lodging, making for a summer camp-style experience.

Local bakeries donated their end-of-the-day goods to fuel our team with sweet treats throughout production. Several water companies, including Sanzo and Waikea Water, kept us hydrated, all in exchange for social media shout-outs and thank yous in our credits. These things kept everyone going on our shoestring budget.

Here’s where things got tricky.

Because of our rural location, everything was logistically more complicated. We couldn’t afford to forget something important because Amazon doesn’t do same-day delivery to the island. Extra planning in advance was required.

What, no “FilmTools” on Hawaiʻi Island? Nope! No camera rental house, either.

To solve our lack of access to professional gear, Sight and Sound, a local production house on Oʻahu, came on as an Executive Producer and donated a $30K+ camera and grip rental package to supply us with gear we didn’t have access to (or the budget for) on the island. We still had to ship that equipment via air freight interisland. Due to the dangers of shipping lithium batteries, someone from our team had to travel over to Oʻahu to hand-carry them back and forth.

Cheap, fast, and good. Can we choose all three?

To maintain production quality within our budget, we had to move fast. We shot across 17 locations in just 13.5 days. (No, I didn’t sleep those two weeks.) This insane schedule was made possible by two key factors: a two-camera, documentary-style approach that allowed us to capture coverage efficiently, and Hilo’s compact geography. Most of our locations were within a five-to ten-mile radius; often, simply across the street from one another.

Now I’m all about maximizing a schedule, but only if the cast and crew can maintain that pace safely.

Casting attachments are key.

In CHAPERONE, the lead protagonist, “Misha” is in every scene. She is a complex character that we want the audience to both love and hate, and the entire story hinges on her having a sparkling, if not uncomfortable, chemistry with her romantic interest to drive the story forward.

Since day one, Zoë had Mitzi Akaha, a Japanese-American actress, in mind for our “Misha”. Zoë found her via mutual friends on Instagram and became obsessed. Her face was plastered all over early decks. Even though I diligently pressed Zoë to look at other actresses, I knew, if that’s who Zoë wanted, that’s who we were getting. We ended up attaching Mitzi in 2021 when we first thought we could shoot. We then had to put production on pause for several reasons. So by the time we finally shot in early 2023, Zoë and Mitzi had nearly two years together to prepare for this collaboration, which worked to our benefit.

That said, we struggled with casting Mitzi’s male lead counterpart. Since we didn’t have the money to hire a casting director, we dove deep into IMDbPro to find a male, Hawaiian actor in the 18-22 age range who could play a high schooler. It wasn’t until a month before shooting that we discovered Laird Akeo, whom we cast as “Jake”, the protagonist’s youthful love interest. He’s a young Hawaiian actor from Maui who took to the role, bringing a dedication and love of the craft every day on set, and matching Mitzi’s energy on screen each step of the way.

See Mitzi and Laird’s original chem test on our Instagram page!
IG: @chaperonefilmhawaii

From a producing standpoint, this is hard though, right? While we were intent on casting true to reflect the diversity of Hawaiʻi, cast attachments still mean something to distributors. Do audiences know who Mitzi or Laird are? No (and that’s a huge shame), but I get it. From a distributor’s perspective, they can’t drive sales for the film with (yet) unknown talent. So it was a massive risk on our part, but one that needed to be made as a “name” Hawaiian actor in his age range does not yet exist. Despite that, I think they are both brilliant in this film, and I would cast them again in a heartbeat.

Winning!

A year after completing production, we had our world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival (2024). We celebrated for about 30 seconds before having an ‘oh $h!t’ moment and scrambling to raise additional money to attend because travel to Park City, where Slamdance and Sundance were concurrently happening, was both cold and costly.

It was worth it, though! CHAPERONE won the Grand Jury Award for Best Breakout Narrative film. Following our premiere, we played 22 festivals around the world. We secured a small MG for worldwide digital distribution with Filmhub, retaining our own theatrical rights in the process.

Working with local cinemas across the islands, we self-organized a theatrical tour to promote our digital release on October 3rd. We played in six (6) cinemas on three (3) islands, over three (3) weeks at the end of September. While we couldn’t afford to four-wall, we negotiated ticket splits with our local venues and secured sponsorship to cover marketing and a portion of the travel costs for our team to attend individual island premieres. We relied again on donated airline miles and in-kind donations to make this possible.

To see our film celebrated at international festivals, in cinemas across Hawaiʻi, and now on major digital platforms globally, is incredibly satisfying. I’m incredibly proud that throughout the process of making CHAPERONE, we kept our values intact, cast authentically, and hired local crew and vendors to bring this film to life. While CHAPERONE is the first time contemporary Hilo, Hawaiʻi has ever played itself on screen, it is certainly not the last.

Lessons learned…

There is never any guarantee of success in indie filmmaking. We took significant risks to produce a narrative feature film in Hawaiʻi, and did so on an ultra-low budget to minimize our investors’ financial exposure. To be frank, was it enough? Despite strong festival plays, awards, and meaningful audience engagement around the world, we may not break even based on current projections. I will be budgeting my next feature more realistically, to include additional festival participation, marketing, and self-distribution. Hindsight is tricky, but now I have real data and experience informing me what works and doesn’t work.

How does one balance profitability with authenticity and creative storytelling? While I don’t have an answer to this question, I hope to stay transparent with my fellow producers as we continue to navigate these issues.

Ultimately, I hope this case study offers some practical tips and encouragement to anyone looking to produce their own low-budget films, wherever home may be.

While doors are open to shoot here in Hawaiʻi, what stories do you hope to shoot in your own backyard?

Rent or buy CHAPERONE on Amazon or AppleTV

Follow us on IG (@chaperonefilmhawaii) and Letterboxd

In summary:

• Community is key. Local talent, locations, in-kind support, and personal relationships made this film possible when funding alone could not.

• Shooting on location deepens authenticity, but in rural communities without strong film infrastructure, it is often logistically difficult and financially costly.

• Proper prior planning is non-negotiable, as producing on Hawaiʻi Island required anticipating challenges well before cameras rolled.

• Cheap, fast, and good is possible (albeit at personal sacrifice). A docu-style approach and close-proximity locations allowed us to shoot quickly, but only because the cast and crew could sustain the pace.

• Prioritizing local and largely unknown talent strengthened the film artistically, even if it complicated potential marketability.

• Festival success does not guarantee profitability, making transparency, long-term thinking, and early budgeting for distribution essential for future sustainability.

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Alison Week is the lead producer of the Hilo-set narrative feature film, Chaperone, which won the Grand Jury Award for Best Breakout Feature at its Slamdance world premiere. The film was shot entirely on Hawaiʻi Island with an all-AANHPI cast and a local crew. The film is available on AppleTV and Amazon Prime. She previously co-directed and produced the documentary feature Island Cowgirls: Two Portraits of Paniolo, now streaming on PBS (Pacific Pulse). She continues to focus on producing stories uplifting her Hawaiʻi Island home, as well as other women in front of and behind the lens.

In early November, NPR Books sent an email with the subject, “Who’s Allowed to be Awful?” Weeks passed by without reading the email, but I kept seeing the subject in my inbox and I pondered the question over and over again. Who’s allowed to be awful? Who was that woman on the street? And would who she “is” ever make her behavior ok? Why does anyone behave awful at all?

A few days after the Larchmont incident, the news of Netflix buying Warner Bros. broke and Business Insider reached out to me for a quote. They wanted to know what I had to say about it all, but I was at a loss for words. What’s there to say? Nothing about this potential consolidation is good for the health of the film and television business. The only good that will come is for the stakeholders of the two companies. But in 2024, Ted Sarandos made $62 million running Netflix and David Zaslov made $52 million running Warner Bros. Isn’t that enough?

Given the holiday season, it’s hard not to think of Sarandos and Zaslov in the context of A Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge, the original awful businessman. What would the future of the industry look like if Sarandos and Zaslov were visited by their Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come? Like Scrooge, would they wake up on Christmas Day more generous and compassionate? Would they stop the clock of entertainment world domination and think first of the storytellers and artists whose livelihoods are in their hands?

It’s completely understandable to spend your days afraid and insecure given the state of the business so I’m going to give the woman on Larchmont some grace. You never know what someone else is going through right? Maybe she hasn’t worked in a long time and the paycheck fixes the mounting debt she’s accrued. Or maybe this will be the job that allows her to keep her WGA health insurance. Neither of these are good excuses for being nasty, but I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt given how high the stakes feel right now. But here’s the thing… if we’re out in public on a very busy street yelling about a credit, we have no hope.

I often say to myself, ‘just put your head down and do the work.’ It’s what usually keeps me from being that woman on Larchmont. But we can’t put our heads down and just keep plowing ahead as normal anymore. We have to look the future straight in the eyes and doing that is scary. The Netflix/Warner merger, and the rapid growth of AI, is moving forward whether we like it or not. All we can do is be as compassionate, sympathetic, and generous to each other as possible during this tumultuous time and remember that our behavior has a ripple effect. If all we put out into the water is fear, anxiety, and panic, we won’t be able to find a path forward.

Movies are a luxury. Especially the bold, innovative, and original kind. There will always be a new Marvel or Star Wars or Avatar movie, but the future does not guarantee us another Hamnet, or Sorry, Baby or Train Dreams or even Sinners. And we’re not guaranteed to always have our beloved art house theaters or film festivals or film schools or artist services programs or nonprofit organizations. Everything is on the line.

So, as the clock is about to turn to 2026, I encourage you to look back at this year and consider your actions. Were you ever awful? Could you have been more helpful to someone who was struggling? Were you so exacting in your work that you became unkind? If you were, did you apologize? Were you only focused on your own goals and didn’t stop to help someone else achieve theirs? Did you make yourself useful to a cause outside your own?

The doom and gloom headlines, both in the business world and world at-large, are going to continue to be published at a rapid pace. But when you feel fear and anxiety start to take over, be aware of how that energy manifests itself. Dig deep to not let it overshadow your good heart and kind spirit. Realize it’s not just about you and your own personal goals. Extend your reach out wide to share your knowledge and resources. The scarcity mindset is real and it often feels like we’re living in Squid Games, but it is vital that we lock arms and face the future together.

This is my 2026 New Year’s wish.

As soon as you start digging into the particulars of this stuff, you quickly get into some complex tax and accounting laws and regulations. I think a lot of us are in the dark because a) the explanations can be technical, dry, and overwhelming, and b) we’re not (yet) working with a CPA who can explain confusing concepts to us in plain English. I have to be very careful here and steer clear of providing advice that I am not qualified to offer. Questions that start with “can” or “should” (“Can an investor make both an equity investment and a grant on the same project?” or “Should I agree to let a film donor recoup their grant, even if the money goes back into their DAF?”) are best addressed by a qualified professional.

But what I can do is attempt to provide a few definitions in clear terms and pull the curtain back a bit on the factors that might go into how a donor thinks about which vehicle to use and when. The goal is to empower producers with information you can use to most effectively advocate for yourselves, your projects, and your organizations.

People with access to wealth (their own, their family’s, or the foundation’s they work for) have a menu of options at their disposal for how to deploy the money to non-profit organizations beyond a cash donation. For example, individuals can make a charitable donation of stock, put the nonprofit in their will (called a “bequest”), or make a “qualified charitable contribution,” which is a fancy way of saying a donation from an IRA after age 70 ½. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of these here (see above: not qualified) but instead point you to this overview and explanation of terms and recommend following up with a trusted advisor to discuss specific situations you may encounter.

As I explained in my previous post, foundations and DAFs (Donor Advised Funds) are entities that allow a donor to take a charitable tax deduction divorced from any decision about which organizations to support or distributions made to said organizations. This money is intended to someday make its way to the communities and organizations that could use it – in exchange for the tax deduction given – but there’s no guarantee that it will.

But the money that does get distributed can take several forms. I think we’re all pretty familiar with the basic grant: a donation to a qualifying non-profit that has no expectation of financial return. Or, as I like to call it, “free money.” Beyond the straightforward grant, however, foundations and DAF-holders can use other methods to deploy resources to 501c3s that come with some expectation of a return:

• recoverable/recoupable grant

• program-related investment (‘PRI’)

• mission-related investment (‘MRI’)

In very broad terms, these vehicles are designed to incentivize the flow of funds from funders to grantees in situations where grantees are in a temporary cash flow dip but have a reasonable expectation of funds coming in the door in the foreseeable future. For example, a donor may offer a recoverable grant to an arts nonprofit in the midst of a capital campaign raising money to purchase real estate. The grant is in lieu of a mortgage and allows the nonprofit to close escrow on the building before the campaign goal is met. If the terms are super favorable, there may even be very low – or no – interest due on repayment! Ideally, the recoverable grant is then repaid to the donor on an agreed-upon schedule after the campaign concludes. But because it’s a grant, there is also the possibility that the funds are only partially or not at all repaid.

Another example: PRI’s/MRI’s are often used to facilitate the investment of endowment funds in constructive community initiatives versus extractive market options (i.e. a CDFI, or Community Development Financial Institution, vs, say, Chevron). These vehicles have strict requirements and are designed to be used in support of nonprofit organizations, so fiscally-sponsored projects are not candidates for these kinds of investments. They are also most often deployed by large institutional funders like Ford Foundation, which has a handy explainer video about their program-related investing. If you are a nonprofit and are exploring a PRI or MRI from a donor, you’ll definitely need reliable legal and accounting council to facilitate it.

On the grantee side, “free money” and recoverable grants are mostly booked as income, while PRI/MRIs count as loans, debt, or equity, based on the type of investment.

Before we conclude this little tour through 501c3 Land, I thought it might be useful to share the kinds of questions donors may ask themselves to help guide the decision-making about the use of their assets. Then I’ll offer a few suggestions for how producers can use these to shape conversations with future funders.

• Amount: What is our total giving budget this year? What is the recipient’s budget? Do we think about what percentage of their needs we can meet with our funds? Are we prepared to commit to multi-year support?

• Return: What is the likelihood of a return, how much, and by when? Another way to frame this would be to evaluate risk.

• Source: Do we want to use funds from our investment earnings or from our investments (ie endowment)? And do we want to convert them to cash or transfer investment assets?

• Taxes: What is our tax-paying philosophy, and are we looking for opportunities to pay less in tax?

• Time horizon: How long do we want to try to make our foundation or DAF money last? In other words, should this entity exist forever (“perpetuity” in foundationese), or is there a planned sunset date?

• Opportunity: What kinds of mission-aligned opportunities exist out there for us to support, and how do they operate?

• Complexity: How much complexity (in the form of contracts and fees) can we and our grantee partner assume in order to get this money moved?

OK, so how are these useful to you? I’m sure many of you are already doing many or all of these, but just to cover our bases I will offer, based on my experience, a few tips on how you might approach conversations with a possible funder specifically related to the topics covered in this article.

Budget: Share the budget as soon as the funder asks for it, if not before. In a follow-up conversation, ask them what story the budget tells them about your project or organization; in other words, what impressions do they get from their interpretation of the budget? You’ll learn a lot about each other and can use what you learn to assess fit.

Source: Tell the funder what kinds of funds you are set up to accept and into what entity or entities they can be transferred. Better yet, have all of this laid out clearly on a one-sheet or in your deck: your LLC name, the fiscal sponsor (if there is one), account info for transfers of cash. Take the time to make it look professional and be sure the format is copy-and-pastable so there is less room for error if the funder has to manually type bank wire instructions. Seriously!

Benefits: Be up front if you are bundling items with fair-market value in your pitch (like a membership, table at a gala, or festival passes) and clearly communicate the split between those costs and the donation.

Priorities: Most high net worth individuals and institutional funders support a range of causes for a variety of reasons. Ask them about the broader context of their giving, and how they see your project within it. You can always start with, “Are you comfortable sharing…?”

Proportionality: Some financiers think about the percentage of a budget (or a gap) that they are comfortable using their funds to fill. I think it’s fair game to ask about this (see above: “Are you comfortable…?”)!

Timing: Tax planning can have an impact on the timing of the flow of funds from a funder to a recipient. Without seeming too pushy, I think it’s OK to ask something like, “is timing a factor for you and, if so, when might be a particularly advantageous time to plan for support?”

Philanthropy and the nonprofit sector play a critical role in the US independent film ecosystem, especially for documentary. At the same time, significant barriers prevent the flow of resources quickly, efficiently, and joyfully. I am passionate about doing what I can to reduce these barriers, and hope that demystifying some terms and processes is at a least a tiny step in that direction. Thank you for reading!

You are the first director I’ve ever interviewed for Dear Producer! I thought I would deviate from the mission of highlighting producers to talk to you about the film we made together, ALL THAT WE LOVE, which was just released on November 7. Tell us how this story came about.

I started writing the script for ALL THAT WE LOVE shortly after PIT STOP premiered at Sundance in 2013. It was also the year when my dog Tanner got sick and passed away. That was the genesis of writing this story about someone who loses their dog in midlife. It’s an observational dramedy exploring how we navigate the loss of our beloved pets, and how that grief ripples through the lives of our family and friends, shaping their own experiences and journeys. That was the basic idea. It shifted quite a bit over the years, going from a male to a female character. It also wasn’t always about an Asian American family.

I came on board the project in 2016 and you already had a fleshed out script and were working with producers Kelly Williams and Jonathan Duffy. Making this film has been a very long journey for all of us, especially you. How do you stay engaged in a project for over a decade?

Ultimately, I ask myself if the material still resonates with me emotionally. I always write from an emotional perspective or a very personal place. If, over time, that feeling starts to wane, I would disengage. But with ALL THAT WE LOVE, there were these very broad universal themes about loss and this idea of what it means to have pets in your life, and what it really means when you lose them. That was something I was still experiencing even after I lost Tanner, because I adopted a dog shortly after he passed. That whole experience over all those years still spoke to me.

About five years into working on the film, we changed the lead character from male to female and also made the family Asian American. Do you remember how that came about?

I was writing the main character based on me in some ways, so making it a male protagonist was the natural extension of that. We went down the list of all the male Asian American actors, but they were all booked. This was right after CRAZY RICH ASIANS and THE FAREWELL. The actors we wanted to work with were in high demand, getting big streaming and Marvel offers. An actor would attach themselves to our project and we’d wait for them to become available, but eventually they would drop out. We kept losing them, or we couldn’t lock them down. It happened so many times that I thought: I bet women are not getting these offers. Middle-aged women, in general, whether Asian American or not, are not getting many lead offers. We all had a conversation about what we should do and if we should pivot.

The other thing I remember is that you’re good friends with comedian Atsuko Okatsuka and that Atsuko is friends with Margaret Cho and offered to get the script to her if it were a female lead. I was impressed by how open you were to a change this big. You had lived with this project for many years and it came from such a personal place. How do you handle these big curveballs as they come up?

I come from a very DIY, indie film world. I’m talking about making features for less than $10,000 kind of indie. This was the Dallas film scene that I came from. A bunch of us made micro-budgeted films because we had no access to any resources or network in the industry. You had to figure it out. There’s no other way. Do you want to make this film or not? In the case of ALL THAT WE LOVE, it still came from that kind of mentality or survival instinct, if you want to call it that. The male actors were all ditching us so what was there to lose? I challenged myself to do a pass of the script, change the gender, and see what happens. In that process, I was surprised to find that it made more sense for the lead character to be a woman.

What excited me most about this change was that Margaret was way more interesting for the role than any male actor we had been talking to. When you’re trying to get an indie film made, you’re always looking for what makes it unique, for the fresh take, and for us that ended up being Margaret. Did you have any reservations given the majority of her work has been in stand-up or in more comedic roles?

I remember meeting Margaret for the first time in Austin after her comedy show. The conversation was very meaningful in understanding how she connected to the material. She’s a very big dog person and the themes of addiction that are in the film were all meaningful to her. She just got it. I also found her to be a little shy, with an introspective nature that mirrors her character. Comedians can transition to drama effortlessly. After all, a lot of comedy comes from real pain and Margaret knows how to tap into that. Comedy is so much harder than drama, and I have a lot of respect for comedians. I was going by that sort of faith that she could pull it off. And she did!

Most movies have many producers and this one is no different. You started with Jonathan Duffy and Kelly Williams, who had produced PIT STOP for you, and then I came on board, and then Ley Line Entertainment. How do you manage having that many voices in the room?

Having multiple producers on the project is the reality of working on most films these days. This sounds very simplistic, but my criteria boils down to working with kind people. That’s always my mandate, whether it’s cast or crew. I just want to work with nice people. It’s weird because that’s what most of us want, but it’s not what most of us get. Some of the stories I’ve heard from other filmmakers stun me, how they suffered through working with toxic personalities, considering that the task of making a film is already so difficult. Yes, I had several producers on this film, but everyone was a good and decent person who was there for the right reason, so it wasn’t hard.

You’re the only director I’ve worked with who never asked for a producer credit.

Whoa, that’s surprising. I had no idea.

Did it ever cross your mind? It’s so common these days that the writer-director also gets a producer credit that I expected you would ask at some point, but you never did.

Producing is really hard, first and foremost, and there’s a lot about that I don’t know. On top of that, producers already don’t get recognition, especially when movies do well. Most people don’t immediately think about who produced a successful film. You have to be an industry person to have that kind of awareness. Producers generally don’t get enough credit. If I’m a writer-director and I still come in and say I want to take up space in the producing department, it feels unnecessary. If you’re a director, you’re already getting enough attention. I don’t know why we need to hog more of the spotlight. For me, it’s very much a matter of common sense. But I can also understand how it is a power struggle for directors. I personally don’t think it’s necessary.

You brought Margaret to the project and many directors would say that’s enough to earn a producing credit. But casting is part of the directing job. On one of my films, a director wanted a producer credit so I asked if he had done as much producing work as I had contributed creatively to the script and pointed out that I wasn’t asking for a writing credit. That landed with him. In the indie space we all have to wear a lot of hats and it’s your job as a director to do everything possible to get your movie made.

I totally agree with that, especially with my DIY background.

In looking at your IMDb before this chat, I thought PIT STOP was your first feature, but you made a movie in 2002 called HAPPY BIRTHDAY?

Yes, this was back in the $5,000 feature days. There’s a tier of filmmaking where the films are so small that they’re unacknowledged in the industry. David Lowery, another Texas filmmaker, is the same way. He also made a micro-budgeted film that nobody considers his debut feature. We were all in that world of making what we can when and however we can. HAPPY BIRTHDAY actually won a few jury prizes in the queer festival circuit back then and was distributed.

What happened in those 10 years between HAPPY BIRTHDAY and PIT STOP?

I had a regular full-time job, working as a copywriter for Neiman Marcus. In those years, filmmaking was occurring on a nights-and-weekends basis. I’d take annual vacation time to attend film festivals or even make a film, like CIAO. In that time, I never saw filmmaking as a viable career path. It was like a hobby.

So many people are striving to make filmmaking a sustainable career, but the truth is that for most of us, there are many other things going on behind the scenes to pay the bills. You’ve built a business as a graphic designer, which allows space to be a filmmaker. How has that grown and how has that work supported your directing career?

Being a graphic designer as a side hustle was necessary for me. It’s amusing it all evolved from doing pro bono work for my friends who needed poster artwork for their films when they premiered at festivals. The business grew organically through word of mouth. I reached a point where I realized I could quit my job and be a freelance designer because I had enough work. This was back in 2010. When I look back at those years and how I could step away to make PIT STOP and other films, I realized that not many filmmakers have this kind of freedom to go back and forth between these mediums. I could turn things on and off whenever I wanted, step back into design when I’m done with my films, and still have work waiting for me. I’m very lucky to have found my space this way. These days, you have to do that because I don’t know how anyone can make a living otherwise. If you come from money, then good for you. But for many filmmakers, if they want to keep making stuff, they need a job.

Designing for others also has this really nice mirroring effect, because I learned so much from watching other filmmakers’ films, having conversations with them, and understanding their journeys. It often feeds into my own work. It’s also a nice pick-me-up whenever I feel like it’s impossible to make another film. I would hear a client’s more challenging experience to make their film and it gave me a boost of encouragement.

It also helps to take your brain off your own projects and stop obsessing why your movie hasn’t gotten made yet. And I’m sure doing poster design also opened up your film community in a big way.

For sure. So much of it is about community, finding other like-minded people, knowing when to ask for advice or recommendations and all that kind of stuff. In that sense, it’s precious.

Speaking of community, many Dear Producer readers are in different areas of the world, wanting to be filmmakers and make their films, but who are not in the industry hub. What has the Austin community been like for you over the course of your career?

The reason I moved from Dallas to Austin was to get closer to what was happening here. There was so much going on with SXSW and the Austin Film Society. I met many filmmakers based here who make regional films, like Kat Candler, Bryan Poyser, PJ Raval, and Andrew Bujalski. I had a feeling that something exciting was happening. I moved here in 2011 and quickly immersed myself in the community and met all these different directors and producers. It was so easy. Being a queer Asian filmmaker, I was struck by how accessible and unpretentious the community was. You can go to lunch or have coffee with anyone and pick their brains, and form these lifelong friendships with them. The grants from Austin Film Society have been lifesavers. I’m lucky to have received multiple grants over the years. It’s also how I came to work with producers Kelly Williams and Jonathan Duffy, both Austinites.

Your previous film was much lower budget than ALL THAT WE LOVE and we filmed in Los Angeles not Texas. One of my favorite moments of filming was when you thought we were going to run out of money. You were worried about something small—I can’t remember what—and I assured you we weren’t going to run out of money; if we were, there’d be an actual conversation with you and wouldn’t be a surprise. How was that jump for you, going from low-budget films to having resources?

This was my first union movie and there was quite a learning curve in that regard. Being reminded that I couldn’t speak directly to the extras or that every location needed permits. Things I completely took for granted when I made smaller films in Texas. There was a disconnect in the earlier days of making ALL THAT WE LOVE for me because I kept hearing people talk about how there wasn’t enough money for this or that. I later came to realize most of our crew had worked on bigger productions so were used to more money for their departments. I was absorbing their concerns and was worried that we were in trouble and I would have to start cutting corners. I went so far as to take the bus to get to the set. I did that for a while!

That’s what it was! You were worried that production spending money on a rental car for you was going to break the bank. And you genuinely had no problem doing it, but once I realized you were taking the bus, we got you a rental car.

I was thinking, what if I save some money? I really didn’t mind using public transportation. Some of the crew found out about this and were so shocked. The director has been taking buses in LA?? For me, it always ran on time, and I found taking the bus pleasant. I got to see the city and the residents in ways I have never seen before. Ultimately, I was shocked by how much things cost to shoot a film in Los Angeles. Things I didn’t think would be a big deal in Texas would be expensive line items there.

Looking back, is there anything that could have better prepared you for the budget jump? Something we could have done to help with that?

One big thing I learned from ALL THAT WE LOVE is that it’s okay to ask questions and ask for help. The DIY mindset has made me way too self-reliant. That has unwittingly made me more reluctant to ask for support. Taking the bus to the set without telling anyone was a result of that thinking. ALL THAT WE LOVE was also the first film I made after COVID and we were still masking and following protocols. I felt I was coming out of a fog to work again and nothing felt quite clear for me. I believe this also contributed to the mentality of keeping things to myself. On top of that, masking definitely created a barrier between us and the actors. When I talked to them, they couldn’t see my face. That affected things quite a bit, and I hope we never have to make films under these circumstances again.

Stepping back and looking at your career, are you planning out your next several films or do you take it one film at a time? Do you have any sort of strategic plan?

I always have this feeling that whatever I make last might be the final film. Because it’s so hard to get something off the ground! It’s always a pleasant surprise when there’s an opportunity to make a new film. That mentality has not changed much. One of the things I am more comfortable accepting these days is that, despite what’s happening in the industry and how it’s tougher now, I feel more at peace with the idea that no matter what, I will still tell stories. Whether it gets made or not is kind of secondary. It’s more of this idea that I’m not going to stop writing them. For a lot of us, especially those who are mid-career, who have put at least 20 years into this, it’s too late to quit. There’s a certain kind of freedom from realizing it’s too late to quit, so I don’t even think about it anymore. I only ask myself: what is it that I want to write next? I think that’s the only way forward.

I recently wrote about filmmaking versus the creator economy. There’s this drive to push the creator economy into film, and vice versa. But to me, they’re two separate forms of storytelling. Yes, it’s all under the media umbrella, but how are we protecting film as an art form to keep it going? Not everything has to be about TikTok views. I’ve been trying to separate the two because I feel that if we think too much about the digital content creator space, we end up feeling that what we’re doing in the film space is not enough. Do you pay attention to other spaces, does this anxiety creep up for you too?

Paying attention to other spaces is necessary. We need to be aware of what’s going on. But it’s not helpful to measure audience and engagement as metrics of success. For me, it’s about affecting one person or a handful of people. That feels more real, and one can argue is the higher calling of why we’re doing this. Sure, we want millions of people to watch our film, but at the same time, if it impacts one person, it’s pretty fulfilling to me.

The audience’s attention span has changed drastically since we started working on this film a decade ago. When you’re writing now, do you ever think about the zeitgeist and culture and writing for the moment? Or are you writing from your heart and what stories you want to tell, because who knows when it will get made?

I definitely had writing assignments since ALL THAT WE LOVE that were going with the trends, if you want to call it that. Doing those for-hire projects gave me clarity about the kinds of stories I really wanted to tell. There’s a specific lane I want to stick to and I want to keep going down that lane even if it is unpopular. For instance, everyone frowns on drama these days. Meanwhile, dramas are still getting made. And many are still hits! It’s this weird reactionary thing that you have to tune out. You have to remind yourself that if it’s meaningful to you right now, that’s all that matters, over what other people say. Listen to that part of yourself and try not to focus on the noise surrounding it. Come to think of it, everything I’ve written from the heart so far has been made eventually.

You have a fairly positive outlook when it’s very easy to be bleak these days.

I know that when I do interviews or speak to a class, a lot of this positive outlook presents itself. I’m not masking any pessimism you might have seen over the years. It’s more about telling myself I’m ultimately an optimistic person despite the hurdles. When I vocalize my thoughts to others, it reminds me that’s how I genuinely feel, while using sarcasm and dark humor to cope with disappointments. But yes, when I talk about film with others—and even in the stories I tell—they are hopeful.

What are you looking forward to in the next year? What are you excited about right now?

There are definitely many films and shows coming up that I’m excited to see, especially works that my friends have made. Personally, it’s more important now than ever before to engage with people. I’m talking about actual in-person interactions. We have to talk ourselves out of staying at home or staying online. We need to get out, meet people, and be in spaces with humans around us, and interact or experience events with them. So much of the social divide we’re experiencing now is because we’re not doing enough of that. We must learn how to humanize each other again.

ALL THAT WE LOVE is available to watch on Apple / iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango At Home, Google Play or via your cable provider.

Like Adam, one of my films was acquired by The Orchard, which then became 1091 Pictures, which then got bought by Chicken Soup for the Soul, which then filed for bankruptcy. I was lucky that it only took a year to track down who was granted the rights to my film out of the bankruptcy and little money was lost. However, IT FOLLOWS got caught up in the Weinstein bankruptcy, which took years to track down and resulted in what I can only guess was millions of dollars in losses.

With the current unstable nature of indie distribution, the likelihood of distribution companies going bankrupt is a real fear and one distributors don’t want to address. I tried hard recently to get bankruptcy language added to a distribution deal that protects the filmmakers and was met with great push back. I don’t have the answer to this dilemma, but reading Adam’s piece below is a step in the right direction in learning how to protect our films.

-Rebecca

Introduction

My first feature, Good Funk, is the story of three generations of Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in Brooklyn whose lives intersect through acts of kindness. The movie was the product of a first-of-its-kind film training and visual literacy program where young Brooklynites learned filmmaking craft, shared their stories and collaborated for pay on a feature film production. The result is a portrait of love enduring and a testament to finding family in unexpected places.

The entire project cost around $55k to produce. I shot it with a small crew of friends in 2014. We took our time with the editing process and ended up having a modest world premiere at the Sidewalk Film Festival in 2016. We had a short but respectable fest run that did not yield any viable distribution offers.

Due to both my lack of preparation and the rapidly deteriorating conditions of the indie film marketplace, Good Funk spent the next few years sitting on a shelf: not making money, not available anywhere and hardly seen by anyone.

Distribution

In August of 2020, my partner recommended I reconnect with distributors who had initially passed on the film. She speculated that, in the wake of the BLM protests, they might have more interest in movies like Good Funk that feature predominantly black casts and center the experiences of black Americans.

I reached out to several distributors, two of whom were now interested to release the movie. Neither offered a minimum guarantee — an advance upfront — but both were willing to invest time, resources and a small marketing budget.

I ended up signing a global all-rights deal with 1091 Pictures (formerly the film and television subsidiary of the Orchard). They had released several well-known independent pictures and seemed to prioritize transparency. They had a tech platform, Streamwise, which allowed filmmakers to view comprehensive royalty reports in real-time. They were flexible in contract negotiations and accepted everything my lawyer and I requested. Most importantly, they were interested in the “making of” aspect of Good Funk — the apprenticeship program — and saw it as a foundational part of the marketing campaign.

It was a successful partnership at first. The 1091 team delivered on their initial promises. They created cool key art and a compelling trailer for the film (which was released exclusively on comingsoon.net). They arranged an interview with PopMatters during which I was able to discuss the apprenticeship program at length. They got us featured in USA Today’s List of Summer Movies. On the day of our digital release — June 8, 2021 — we had a banner in the iTunes store.

Royalties

The film made a couple hundred dollars from purchases and rentals in its first month on transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) platforms. Cool marketing assets had been created, but there was neither a strategy nor the support to build buzz with them. When the film did not immediately catch fire, 1091 shifted their focus to other projects. In the following months, as the movie became widely available on subscription (SVOD) and then ad-based (AVOD) platforms, revenue dropped precipitously until we were making virtually nothing.

One reason for this is logical and natural: as a film gets further into its release cycle, and starts appearing on SVOD and AVOD platforms, the per-view royalties shrink. At the same time, I did not realize how small the royalties are until I saw them for myself.

Because I had access to real-time reports on Streamwise, I was able to see how many minutes my film was viewed and how much revenue was generated by those minutes.

In the first quarter of our streaming release, Good Funk was watched for over 13500 minutes on Amazon Prime. The film is 73 minutes long. 13500 minutes is roughly equivalent to 185 people watching the film start-to-finish. For those views Amazon paid us 55¢ total. 1 cent for every 245.46 minutes viewed. By these metrics, to make $100, Good Funk would need to be fully watched about 33,624 times.

This is infuriating, honestly fucking insane, absolute highway robbery. If 33,000 attended a theatrical screening of the film, at $15 per ticket, and production kept 25% of the gross revenue, our net would be $123,750. If 185 people bought Good Funk for $1, and we kept 100% of the proceeds, we would net $185, which is about 336 times more than 55¢. It is a terrible joke.

At some point, Streamwise went offline. I emailed my contact at 1091. “We have stopped using Streamwise and launched a new dashboard,” they informed me. “You should have been notified a few months ago.”

I was then sent an invite to get enrolled on the new platform (Looker). Once I was set up, I began reviewing the reports. Our total revenue on Looker was approximately 17% less than it had been on Streamwise. I inquired about the missing revenue.

“I do not believe Looker has historical statements,” they replied. “This should only be the revenue since the first accounting report into Looker.”

“Can we reach out to accounting and get a hold of those historical statements pre-Looker?” I asked. “Or at the very least, can you find and send along the cumulative revenue of the film?”

“Uploading historical data is a part of our phase 2 process of our roll out. I will check in with finance to provide the cumulative revenue.”

I did not hear from them for the next ten months and never received the information I requested. I eventually followed up.

“I was over on the Looker page recently, and noticed that it still hasn’t been updated with historical data from the first four months surrounding Good Funk‘s release. Any idea what’s up with that?”

“Unfortunately the company did not move forward with backfilling historical data into Looker. As you can imagine we have thousands of films so getting everything reformatted and prepped for the new platform was quite a heavy lift for the accounting team. It’s just not something that’s possible at this time and we don’t have a timeline for when it could happen.”

“How am I supposed to know how much money my film has made in revenue from release until now?”

“We advised licensors to pull down revenue data prior to the shutdown of Streamwise. If you did not do this we can ask accounting to compile but it might take some time as they are short staffed and backed up.”

“Yes, I was never advised to do that, and so if that could be compiled at some point in the next month or so, it would be much appreciated.”

I never heard from them again.

Bankruptcy

Fast forward eight months, to December 2024. I am attending a discussion with Keri Putnam about her groundbreaking study of the American film landscape, co-hosted by Scott Macaulay and Jon Reiss-8Above. They are discussing how several distribution companies who popped up in the mid-2010s — at the height of the VC-backed streaming gold-rush — have since folded. Jon mentions a few recent examples, then says something like “1091 is about to shutter, if they haven’t already.”

Um, what?

I quickly start googling and find several concerning articles:

• Chicken Soup for the Soul Buys 1091 Pictures for $15.6M (March 2, 2022)

• Filmmakers Take Legal Action Against Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment as It Faces ‘Cash Flow Issues’ (December 20, 2023)

• Filmmakers Take Self-Help Publisher Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment To Court Over Back Pay (January 24, 2024)

• Redbox owner Chicken Soup for the Soul files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (July 2, 2024)

• Former Employees Of Redbox Parent Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment Sue Bankrupt Company And Ex-CEO Bill Rouhana For “Ponzi Scheme” & “Greed At Shocking Levels (July 24, 2024)

I reach out to my contact at 1091 and receive the following auto-response:

“As of June 14th, 2024 I am no longer with Screen Media / 1091 Pictures.”

I receive an additional auto-response from a person I do not know:

The company [1091/CSSE] has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, all employees have been terminated.

Sorry, but I have been given no information or instructions on moving forward, only that if you have a claim against the company:

“please file the claim with the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of DE. Google for instructions.“

Legal Action

I reach out to my lawyer and explain the situation, and he connects me with a bankruptcy lawyer at his firm.

This lawyer informs me that the proceedings are taking place in Delaware, where CSSE is established, and that I will need to hire a Delaware-based bankruptcy lawyer to proceed. She connects me with a Delaware-based lawyer who is familiar with the case and has helped other filmmakers recover their films.

I meet with the Delaware-based lawyer. After learning details about the case, he is confident we will be able to recover the rights to my movie. The situation is made easier because I am not trying to claw back potential owed revenue (which could complicate things). I sign an agreement, pay a retainer and he gets to work.

Within a month, the lawyer had gotten a signed order from the Delaware Bankruptcy Court terminating my agreement with 1091/CSSE and returning all rights of Good Funk to me. The entire process cost around $2500. If you are in a similar situation, I recommend reaching out to Michael Busenkell.

I now had the rights back to my movie. What would I do next?

FilmHub

I wanted to experiment with what else is out there beyond the traditional distributors. I spoke with a few companies who are exploring and offering alternative models for releasing movies. I ended up going with FilmHub, a distribution marketplace that allows filmmakers to distribute to digital platforms and collects and pays out royalties on the filmmaker’s behalf. FilmHub takes 20% of revenue generated and the rest goes to the filmmaker. The filmmaker retains all rights to their film at all times.

Their process is straight-forward. You upload your film and accompanying assets and submit them for a quality check (QC). If you do not pass QC, they explain why and tell you how the issue(s) can be resolved. You have three chances to pass QC.

FilmHub can assist in making changes required to pass QC. On their website, they offer a comprehensive a la carte menu of supports and services. They will, for example, caption your film or create key art for it, and their prices are competitive.

Perhaps the biggest selling point is that they charge $0 upfront to upload and QC your film and assets. There are costs if you choose to (or need to) add something from the a la carte menu, but if not, the $0 basic plan is sufficient for one filmmaker distributing one film. The only drawback I have found is limited access to data and analytics: an upgraded plan is required to receive detailed performance insights for all available platforms. For a back-catalogue title like Good Funk, this information would be nice but is non-essential.

Once Good Funk passed QC, I personally issued DMCA Takedown Notices to all the platforms where the movie was currently streaming and/or available for rental and purchase. Some of the platforms responded immediately and pulled down the movie without fuss; others were a bit more difficult and required more harshly-worded emails. After about six weeks of hard work, the movie was not available anywhere.

At this point, FilmHub started availing (pitching) the title to potential partners. In the past few months, they’ve licensed the movie to seven platforms.

If you wanna try FilmHub for yourself, use this referral code.

You can rent/buy Good Funk on Amazon, but I would prefer you rent/buy it on Vimeo-On-Demand or from me directly (more on this below).

Lessons Learned

I did not know what I did not know about festivals, distributors, release windows, marketing, rights and more. Here are six things I wish I had been aware of and done differently.

1. I did not set a clear goal for the distribution of the film. Jon Reiss-8Above talks about how films need to prioritize their goals early on in the process and use their top priority to shape every aspect of their release. Every filmmaker wants their film to get press, make money, have a socio-cultural impact, be seen by lots of people and launch their career. When resources are limited, it is essential to decide which of these objectives are of utmost importance and which can be deprioritized. The prioritization of goals reflects both a film’s strengths and its weaknesses. I wanted everything with Good Funk and ended up achieving not much as a result. In hindsight, I should have picked one primary goal and developed a strategy to align with and work towards that particular goal.

2. Once you set a goal, how do you determine if it has been met? When I was making and releasing Good Funk, this question never crossed my mind. I did not know how to measure success beyond obvious indicators like views and revenue. I realize now that metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential for raising funds and measuring success. Every film defines success differently — An Inconvenient Truth wants to educate, Conclave wants to win awards, The Minecraft Movie wants to make money. Metrics and KPIs that encapsulate a film’s top priority are crucial for analyzing strategy and its implementation.

3. I knew nothing about film rights, neither how to negotiate nor exploit them. My initial agreement with 1091 was a global all-rights deal. Without thinking twice, I gave away all the rights to my movie for $0 upfront, even rights that 1091 had no interest in exploiting. I should have negotiated a split-rights deal, licensed to 1091 only what they would exploit, and retained all the other rights so I could continue monetizing the film in other ways.

4. It was almost five years between our festival and streaming premieres. In this stretch — not counting festivals — we only did one theatrical screening and two grassroots screenings. I did not reach out to or partner with any community organizations. I did not think about who exactly my audience was: where they are, how they consume media, how to reach them. I expected somebody else to do this and nobody did and the film suffered as a result. I was foolishly oriented towards distributors when I should have been thinking about the audience and building digital and IRL communities around the film from day one.

5. We had no digital release strategy beyond the traditional waterfall of TVOD to SVOD and AVOD. In each stage, the goal was to be on as many platforms as possible, even though most of our transactions were on Amazon and most of our streams were on Tubi. In hindsight, we should have considered scrapping the under-performing platforms and consolidated our efforts around driving traffic exclusively to Amazon and Tubi.

6. Even when the digital distribution system is “working”, it is not working for independent artists. We need ways for fans to directly pay filmmakers for their work. Each indie film release moving forward should be treated as an opportunity to experiment with new direct-to-audience release strategies. To ensure a sustainable future for radical, cool and uncompromising movies, filmmakers must take control of the marketing and distribution of their work.

Feel free to rent, buy or stream Good Funk on the major platforms, but know the revenue your view generates will mostly go to rich guys who had nothing to do with the film. If you want to watch the movie and directly support the team, donate a few dollars via my Tip Jar or Venmo (@Adam-Kritzer), include your email address in the contribution (or DM me), and I’ll send along a private rental link for your viewing pleasure. If one person pays me $3 for Good Funk, I will make more than if 1000 people stream it on Amazon. Success is relative; I like my odds. <3

This essay was originally published by AMAUTEUR, a production and distribution newslabel founded and run by Adam Kritzer that makes, releases and writes about indie and nonDe (non-dependent) movies and music. Adam’s second feature film, Lost Cause, just had its world premiere in San Francisco, and will have its east coast premiere in Philadelphia at PhilaMOCA on November 13, with an encore screening at the Weitzman on November 21. Learn more and buy tickets here, and join the Lost Cause mailing list to follow our distribution journey. The American new wavelength is here!

What follows is my attempt to demystify the components of the nonprofit universe that most directly relate to indie filmmaking in the hope that it empowers you to ask good questions and make the most informed decisions possible as you fundraise for your projects.

But first, a disclaimer: I am not a CPA, attorney, or foundation staff member. I’ve functioned as an independent, grants-focused funder of documentary films and the broader ecosystem for about 12 years now. What I share here is based on my personal experience, research I’ve conducted, and conversations with my accountant and lawyer. It’s intended for informational purposes only.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s start with the basics:

What’s a “501c3”?

“501” refers to the section of the IRS code that establishes the rules for tax-exempt organizations. Qualifying entities are not required to pay federal income tax and, often, state income, sales, and property taxes either (rules vary state-by-state). “c” refers to the section that lists the exempt organization types (there are 29! You can read the text of the statute for yourself if you really want to nerd out), and “3” is where you find “(c)orporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes…” (emphasis added).

This is also the paragraph that states that in return for the tax exemption, “no part of the net earnings… inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.” In other words: yes, there can be income, but there cannot be excessive profit-taking and proceeds must be responsibly returned to the organization and its charitable purpose.

What is a fiscal sponsor and how does it operate?

Because films are not in and of themselves non-profits, many producers set up their projects with fiscal sponsorship in order to receive charitable donations. In very simple terms, a fiscal sponsor is a 501c3 that is approved to accept donations on behalf of projects (yes, like films!). It’s a way to accept charitable donations without having to go through the rigamarole of becoming a non-profit yourself. “Rigamarole” being the technical term for obligations such as establishing a board of directors (and having meetings), crafting and filing articles of importation, paying fees, and adhering to IRS regulations in perpetuity to maintain non-profit status.

The fiscal sponsor organization assumes all of the obligations and risks, guaranteeing that these funds meet the IRS charitable guidelines. They also often offer some level of bookkeeping and accounting services, and, in exchange, charge a 5-10% fee on the contributions they manage on the project’s behalf. Note: it’s important to research your potential fiscal sponsor’s background and review their 990 (search ‘ProPublica + organization name’) to make sure they are on steady financial ground.

Once you’ve set up fiscal sponsorship, you can then accept tax-exempt donations from individuals, foundations, and DAFs (Donor Advised Funds). Individuals who make a direct donation to a 501c3 get a receipt and can itemize it on that year’s tax return if they so choose. Grants made from a foundation or DAF, however, come from a pool of money that has already received the charitable tax deduction before it’s been distributed to any public charity.

Say, what? Yes. Foundations and DAFs are essentially non-profit parking lots where people “donate” their own assets, thereby taking the charitable deduction when it best suits their overall financial plan – not when the funds make their way to an outside charity. This is what is often referred to as an endowment, and these funds can be invested just like other assets can, as long as the income earned on those investments is put to charitable purpose.*

Once the money is in the foundation or the DAF, it’s theoretically public: remember, these entities are tax-exempt because they are “operated exclusively for charitable purposes.” How does the government ensure that funds don’t sit in foundation and DAF accounts forever? In the case of foundations, you may have heard of the “5% rule,” which states that each year a private foundation must distribute at least 5% of the average fair market value of its investment assets for that year to charitable organizations. They are of course welcome to pay out more, but many choose not to. You wouldn’t be alone if you’re wondering if a 5% payout requirement is enough, but that’s a hotly debated topic and well beyond the scope of this piece.

Back Up: What, exactly, is a DAF?

Think of a donor-advised fund as a “charitable account” that sits under the umbrella of a large entity, like a finance firm (Schwab, Fidelity and the like) or a community foundation (Silicon Valley Community Foundation, for example). Instead of standing up a foundation of their own, which requires a board of directors, annual meetings, filing tax returns, and other administrative responsibilities, people move assets into the DAF and take the charitable deduction at that time. The term “donor-advised” refers to the fact that these funds are now technically held by the large institution, who bears the responsibility of ensuring they are ultimately distributed to 501(c)(3)s in good standing, with the original donor acting as an advisor over the distribution of those funds.

If a person wants to support your film project with a grant from their DAF, they make a recommendation (ie, they “advise”) their DAF-holder that they want to make that grant; once the DAF-holder checks the legal standing of the recipient, they release the funds. Without getting too much in the weeds here about contracts and agreements, it’s important to state that it is illegal for a donor to fulfill a binding grant promise with a donation from a DAF. In other words, I can’t sign a contract that says, “I, Maida Lynn, will donate $50,000 to Film XYZ by ABC future date out of my DAF at Schwab,” because it’s Schwab that’s on the hook for the donation, not Maida Lynn. If Maida Lynn depletes the DAF prior to ABC date, Schwab is then liable for making a donation they never agreed to. A situation they, understandably, prefer to avoid. What I can sign, however, is a contract that says something like, “(g)rantor intends to recommend a grant from the Maida Lynn Charitable Fund, a donor advised fund, in the amount of $50,000. Grant recommendations are subject to the approval of Schwab Charitable. This expression of intent does not create a legally enforceable obligation.”

Unlike foundations, DAFs have no annual minimum payout requirement. There’s also a marked lack of transparency; foundations, for example, are required to file 990s – DAFs are not. Here’s a fun exercise: head over to the Media Impact Funders Media Grants Data Map and look at the top film funders since 2009. You’ll see some familiar names, but #7 is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with 843 grants totaling $56 million. This might lead you to think they have a film granting program you can apply to, but you’d be wrong. These are all payouts from DAF accounts held there, with no way to see who’s behind the money.

Last thing here about foundations and DAFs: the IRS prohibits “self-dealing,” which in plain English is a way to prevent donors from using their charitable funds for direct personal benefit. There’s a ton of gray area here and, frankly, abuse (family foundation “strategic retreat” in Aruba, anyone?) but my CPA and attorney have advised me to pay out of pocket for anything that has monetary value (like a table at a gala, a membership, or film festival tickets). Executive Producer credits, which many donors receive as acknowledgement for their film support, are very hard to put a true market value on, so it’s unlikely to ring any IRS alarm bells. My advice is to check in with your attorney and CPA to devise a framework and contract language they are comfortable with.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least briefly mention one other key actor in the nonprofit film sector: intermediaries. These are the organizations many of you interface with directly: Sundance, Firelight Media, Chicken & Egg, The Gotham – just to name a few. They are themselves 501c3s (and, in some cases, fiscal sponsors) who rely on donations to meet their annual expenses. In addition to running programs like labs, markets and festivals, many of them also re-grant to film projects.

This is as good a point as any to wrap up our producer nonprofit primer. I hope it’s provided more clarity than not; however, I am interested in what questions remain on this topic. Feel free to send them to hello@dearproducer.com and perhaps I can answer them in a future write-up. Happy fundraising!

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*This income is taxed, at 1.4%. It’s the “excise tax” you may have heard about recently, which a version of the Big, Beautiful Bill threatened to raise up to 8%, mostly to stick it to university endowments, like Harvard’s. The philanthropy sector got very organized and successfully excised it from the legislation so the rate remains 1.4% – for now.

Odell’s Open Garden’s piece is thoughtful, though obvious, and can mostly be summed up in the first sentence of the "Primary Responsibilities" job description for my new position: “Drive curriculum innovation based on current industry practices and emerging trends.” This is part of the job I’m most excited about and I agree with Odell's take on this matter. It is essential for film schools to not only meet the industry where it is, but to stay ahead of the game, adapt, and reinvent, which can be a challenge for big institutions when the media landscape changes so quickly.

Where my views differ from Odell is that I don’t believe film schools need to be chasing the creator economy to stay relevant. As the piece points out, there are many “alternatives for creators to sharpen their skills” such as Creator Camp, Content Academy, Creator Now and more, which fill this need. Odell goes on to say, “A friend recently suggested another core requirement — every student (together or separately) should launch their own channel.” While I said in my job interview that no student should graduate film school without understanding how to monetize YouTube, I don’t believe you need to launch your own channel to learn how the platform works or innovative ways to connect with audiences. And the last thing the world needs is more YouTube channels. His friend’s comment reminds me of when Facebook was the cool kid on the block and someone declared it necessary for every filmmaker to have at least 10,000 followers in order to be successful.

What Odell’s piece doesn’t touch on is why film schools matter outside of being a cog in the wheel of the capitalistic media landscape. I have yet to meet a film school student who is attending school to become a “creator” (there’s more to write on the definition of the word that I’ll save for another time). Artists choose to formally study their craft, whether it's film, dance, music, sculpture, photography or any other form, to master self-expression and learn how to interpret the world around them in interesting and unique ways. Artists are looking for their purpose in the world and to help open people’s eyes to new ways of thinking and feeling. To articulate this better than I can is EGOT winner Viola Davis who was given an Honorary Degree at the 2025 AFI commencement ceremony I attended just a few weeks into the new job. In her acceptance speech (which you can watch here) she said this:

“The purpose of the art is the same thing as the purpose of the artist, and that is, you are creating stories so people do not feel alone, that they not only just feel a connection with other people, but with themselves.”

And she ended with…

“You have the power to come home to that one thing that made you want to do this, to be healers, to be alchemists, to buck the system, to see life just a little bit different, and therefore, you don't just leave something for people, you leave something in them. Because your purpose is not what you do, it's what happens to people when you do what you do.”

This is what it’s about for those who attend art school, for the storytellers, for the creatives of the world. Whatever the medium is you are trying to master, the work comes from your soul. Do film schools also have to prepare students for the real world and present opportunities to make a living? Of course. Do we have to introduce them to new ways of storytelling and give them the tools to grow in the exploration of their art and stay ahead of the curve? Absolutely. But we can’t lose sight of the purpose of the arts, especially in this moment when being your authentic self is under attack.

This year many of my friends have asked me, “What’s the point?” We’re at an inflection in the industry (and the world) that feels impossible to overcome and many are wondering if they should keep going. Corporate consolidation, strikes, layoffs, fires, and now censorship are doing all they can to keep us down. But if we look at one of our own Hollywood creations from 1989, John Keating of Dead Poets Society played by the great Robin Williams, he would say to us, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world." My friends, you are the point. You are the ones breathing light into the world. Your stories bring people joy and demonstrate empathy. You make us laugh and cry and jump out of our seats. You create ways to escape and take us to places we’ve never been. And along the way, you have built an undeniable community of artists who respect, value, and care for one another.

A few days after the AFI commencement ceremony, I attended the memorial service for Jason Constantine who died of brain cancer at the young age of 55 and left his wife, three sons, and this world too soon. I was one of the lucky ones who had the good fortune of working with Jason at Lionsgate in the acquisitions department early in my career. Jason loved movies more than most and he met every moment with enthusiasm. Even though I worked with Jason so long ago in the early 2000s, he was always one of the first to send me a note of congratulations when one of my films premiered at a festival. Something Jason’s wife Kristin said in her eulogy really spoke to me that I feel is worth sharing. She said that Jason believed in living your life by “eulogy virtues, not resume virtues.” That while he was certainly proud of the box office numbers of the franchises he helped build like the SAW and JOHN WICK movies, what mattered was the people behind the films. And not just the people in the industry, but his family and friends who supported him even if they totally didn’t understand his job (something we all can relate to.) This was evident in the large crowd at Jason’s memorial whose hearts were full of sadness from losing their brother, but also filled with joy from being blessed with the time they did have together.

As I was about to start teaching a film class at the University of Michigan last year, I saw a quote on Instagram by Kelly Pollack, who was the Executive Director at the Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis, that really stuck with me. It said: “The true purpose of arts education is not necessarily to create more professional dancers or artists. It’s to create more complete human beings who are critical thinkers, who have curious minds, who can lead productive lives.” These are the eulogy virtues Kristin spoke of and when people ask me, “What’s the point?” I think of this quote. As an arts educator, I feel very lucky to have the focus of my days be about helping others find their voice and articulate their point of view. Whether that results in a box office hit, a podcast, a low-budget indie film, or a short form video on YouTube, that isn’t what’s important. The world needs more compassion and empathy and people who push the boundaries of thought and art is a vessel to make that possible. I love producing and I’m so proud of the films I’ve made, but I’m just as proud of the work you don’t see, the parts of my life that aren’t highlighted in box office numbers or at film festivals. Because as Jason’s wife Kristen pointed out, life is more than just a press release.

Odell ends with, “Film school has always been a “maybe.” It asks for time and money, and the return was never guaranteed.” But to that I would argue nothing in life is guaranteed. To Odell John Keating would say, “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

Carpe Diem.

(For those who are wondering… I am able to continue to run Dear Producer and produce while in this new position. I have been a little behind on posting - not only did I start this new big job, but I also moved back to Los Angeles from Detroit so have had my hands full. But I am starting to settle into the rhythm of the job and my new apartment so will be able to get back into it all soon. Thanks for your patience.)

You're now partnered with Maya Rudolph at your company at Banana Split, but you started at Animal Pictures with both Natasha Lyonne and Maya. Before joining forces, your background had been indie features so how did the opportunity to work with them in television come up?

For context, in 2016, I launched Superlative - a film fund and production company. At that point, I had a lot of success making good films for very little money and selling them at markets like Sundance. I went from raising money project to project to raising a pool of money that I could deploy instead. For the first time, I was able to work on more than one film at a time and it also provided me more flexibility and control over my schedule which I needed with two young kids. I thought I had finally cracked the code on how to have a sustainable career in indie film as a working mom and then everything changed with Netflix and Amazon moved away from acquisition to producing films themselves.

A few years into running Superlative, I reconnected with an old friend from high school Maya Rudolph at Christos Konstantakopoulos’ Oxbelly Filmmakers Lab in Greece. Initially we discussed doing a feature together - an improv based film I thought we could do independently, but that conversation unexpectedly shifted when she asked if I’d be interested in helping her launch a production company.

For me, it came at a great moment. As much as I was a die-hard indie film person, I was intrigued by television. Producers I had come up with in indie film were having a lot of success in TV and seemed to be enjoying it. For example, Gina Kwon was an exec at Amazon, Andrea Sperling was producing TRANSPARENT - there was a lot of crossover and the worlds no longer seemed bifurcated.

Initially, it seemed like a unique (maybe odd!) choice to have an indie film person run a company that was planning to focus on TV. But ultimately, it was a sensibility fit, and there was a level of trust that already existed. We were also hoping to produce documentaries and features in addition to TV so in that way it made sense.

I thought it would be an interesting new challenge but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I was used to working on my own often in quasi-isolation and now, I had these very smart and dynamic partners. We had all been working for 20+ years so we had a lot of collective experience and relationships we were able to leverage.

Did you feel there was a big learning curve moving from indies to TV?

At first, it was nerve-wracking with some imposter syndrome, but what I quickly realized was that at its core, my job was the same as it ever was. I was supporting creative people and trying to help facilitate their vision, whether that means protecting them from outside forces or sometimes getting them out of their own way. And I’ve always built bridges between the creative and financiers. Instead of the high net worth individuals I was used to on indie films, now I was working with studio and network execs but the dynamic was similar. Writing on television is group sport so that was a little bit of a shift too but in general, the showrunner holds the vision much like the writer/director does in indie film.

The company was quite successful right out of the gate with POKER FACE and LOOT, how did that happen?

We launched the company during peak TV, and through our relationships, we were able to build a pretty strong slate fairly quickly. We had a lot of projects in very early stages of development when Covid hit so we were able to continue moving forward when production came to a halt. The second season of our animated show THE SECOND BEST HOSPITAL IN THE GALAXY just launched on Amazon this April and that was something we pitched in August of 2019 and we just wrapped the third season of LOOT which we initially started working on in 2021.

Was it hard to earn the trust of the studios at the start?

Being partnered with talent, I’ve found the network and studios often assume you don’t have any production experience. And unlike the feature world, a lot of the people with producer credits are actually writers with little to no on-set experience. Coming from indie film, I have been hands-on in every aspect of production from giving creative notes to crewing up and overseeing the budget so I think our execs were pleasantly surprised that I could actively problem solve and find creative solutions when things came up.

Feature people tend to want to get into TV, and TV people say they miss the feature space. Do you feel a yearning to go back to features?

Yes - I would love to do another feature soon! There is something satisfying about making a complete meal - one with a clear beginning, middle, and end. There’s a dark cloud over our business right now and I think I have this fantasy that getting a film going will somehow be easier than getting another series greenlit. Even in the best of times, it’s never easy to get something going, but it’s tough right now. There’s a lot of fear in the industry and a high level of risk aversion.

If you were still funding indie films today, what would your approach be?

If I was financing now, I would focus more on development than production. It’s very risky, but the outlay of cash is less, and you keep your options open. You can finance the development of a project and then you have the choice to either attempt to set it up at the script stage or stick with independent financing for production and try to sell it as a finished film. In the past, if you made a quality film on a shoestring budget, you had a very good chance of recouping your investment and making a profit. Now, all bets are off.

For most of my career, I was working independently on modestly budgeted films. I was able to support myself and stay independent. That would be almost impossible now.

So are you saying emerging producers should be looking to work with talent, like you’re doing now, or with financiers, or production companies rather than trying to build a solo career?

If I were just starting out and knew I wanted to be a producer, I would go to a production company and try to get an entry level job. I would get a foot in the door with someone already established. When I was starting out, it was different. There was enthusiasm around indie films and a market for them, so there were more points of entry. Right now, it seems impossible to break in just by making a couple short films or a low budget indie.

Ten years ago, my advice was the exact opposite - I’d encourage people to jump in and make things and carve out their own path and not “wait for permission.” I always say I got in through the back door, but I don't think there's a back door anymore.

What was the entry point into your first feature GROOVE?

GROOVE really changed things for me. At that point, I was 25 working at a nonprofit production company in San Francisco producing social issue documentaries. I was at a crossroads - I had just directed my first short documentary (which Maya actually did the voiceover for) and I was thinking about applying to film school. It was around this time I met Greg Harrison, an editor, who had written a script about the rave scene that he wanted to direct.

GROOVE really appealed to me because although it was scripted, it felt very authentic to what was going on in San Francisco at the time. It felt documentary-adjacent and we approached it that way. We populated the cast and crew with people who were from the scene. The art department hadn’t done movies before - they actually did raves and all of the DJs featured in the film were real DJs. GROOVE was Hamish Linklater’s first movie and we also had Nick Offerman (both of whom came from theater), but many of the actors weren’t professionally trained.

On the business side, Greg and I were very ambitious. We put together a business plan and thought we'd be shooting in six months. Ultimately, it took over a year to raise $250,000 which was just enough to shoot the film and get us to a rough cut. We mailed a VHS tape to Sundance (yes a VHS tape!). Once the film was accepted, we were able to raise finishing funds quickly. As an aside, I would never recommend that anyone start shooting without enough money in the bank to get them through post. This was the first and last time I ever did that and fortunately, I wasn’t caught out.

What about that experience made you want to do it again?

I lived the quintessential Sundance dream. There was a bidding war - we were up all night negotiating. GROOVE was the first film to sell that year at Sundance. We got invited to parties, we made money, our investors made money, and we even featured in the New York Times. Coming from San Francisco, we didn’t understand how the business worked and how rare this experience was. Of course, I was hooked!

You've also produced some really great documentaries. I have a memory of being on the same flight as you, I think coming home from Sundance in 2012, when Lauren Greenfield’s THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES premiered, but someone was trying to get the film pulled from the festival lineup?

It was wild! David Siegel, the subject of the doc, was suing not only the filmmaker, but also Sundance in an effort to get them to pull the film which was set to premiere on the opening night of the festival. It was ultimately a first amendment right issue and Sundance did not acquiesce. David was dealing with lawyers as his wife Jackie Siegel was in Park City walking the red carpet at the film’s premiere. Now more than ten years later, the film has been adapted into a musical and is opening on Broadway soon with Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham as Jackie and David Siegel.

Speaking of Broadway… Let's talk about WAITRESS, which you executive produced. In my eyes (and from a box office perspective) it's one of the all-time greatest indie movies and became a huge broadway musical success story. How do we as producers make sure we're part of these ancillary opportunities?

When I was negotiating my deal on WAITRESS, I never could have imagined it would be adapted into a musical. Now that you’re seeing that happen more and more and films being adapted into series, etc., it’s important to have any potential for future value contemplated into the backend definition.

You've filled so many different shoes in your career, where do you feel most valued or most useful on a project?

I enjoy solving problems and bringing people together. I understand a filmmaker’s passion and commitment to a particular location or shot, and I also appreciate the pressure that the line producer might be under to bring the budget down. I can help prioritize and find a middle ground. My goal is to remind people that we’re ultimately all on the same team. Even when I was financing, I always thought of myself as a director’s producer. Protecting the initial vision that got you excited in the first place is always hands-down the most important thing. Still, I genuinely believe you can do that without ignoring the economic realities.

Looking at your filmography with COLUMBUS, WAITRESS, THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES, and so many others, you have such an eclectic filmography. Is there any through-line you can pinpoint?

I don't think there's a thematic link in the projects I’ve produced. I think it's more about my belief in and connection to the filmmakers. That's what inspires me and keeps me enthusiastic - it’s as important if not more so than the subject matter or the script. I’ve been able to identify filmmakers and up and coming talent who are really special - people like Kogonada, Sammi Cohen and Dominique Fishback. Seeing their careers flourish is very fulfilling to me - knowing I’ve had a part in supporting them and carving out space for them to do something creative without a lot of corporate interference. For example, I produced and financed Kogonada’s directorial debut, COLUMBUS, which was a very beautiful film albeit not overtly commercial. Building on that film, he was able to make AFTER YANG and now he has A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY coming out soon with Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. Every time I see an ad for it, I smile. I’m not involved in that film but I'm very proud that I was a part of Kogonada’s trajectory as a filmmaker.

When a longtime director friend called me and asked if I would produce her latest project, I frantically Googled “Vertical” while saying yes. Vertical videos (also called microdramas), are 60-80 minute shows that are released to phone apps in 1-3 minute “episodes” and are indeed, framed vertically. The format originated in Asia and is wildly popular. In the United States, companies like ReelShorts and DramaBox are pulling in huge audiences raised on TikTok and the Hallmark Channel. The leading US based production company for verticals, Crazy Maple Studios, is clearing $10 million per month and was named a TIME100 most influential company in 2024. The stories are a mix of billionaire CEOs with secret babies, shy girls in love with the school jock, and sexy werewolves. The company that hired me (and US branches of these Asian companies) can’t produce these low budget, non-union videos fast enough. The stories must include cliffhangers at the end of each episode, then the apps require viewers to buy coins to keep watching. The production quality ranges from unwatchable to fine - the common denominator is the addictive content. I was both fascinated and repelled, but after the pandemic, the strikes, and a job market in Los Angeles that’s vanishing before my eyes, I couldn’t say no. I hadn’t worked in months.

The director and I have decades of Hollywood experience between us. I normally work as a DGA assistant director, but also produce indies when I feel passionate about the subject or the filmmakers. We both had reservations about how to achieve a quality show on a super limited budget (isn’t that always the case, fellow producers?), but we were both game to try. Our mission was to impress the company, be a hit on the app, and become one of their “regulars.” Our executives suggested more opportunities if we executed this project successfully.

Before we started prep, the director asked me an impactful question: “What do you want to get out of this experience?” She knew it wasn’t the low salary or questionable quality. So why would I work on something I was jokingly calling “porn-adjacent?” I answered that I wanted to try a new form of storytelling, wanted to see what this buzzy part of the business was all about, and that the possibility of consistent employment (despite not earning a penny towards my DGA health or pension) looked pretty good right about now. I also wanted to teach the next generation of filmmakers in the way I had been taught in the 1990’s and 2000’s (minus the sexual harassment and bullying, of course, #MeToo). I worry that the earthquakes in our business have left crews behind, adrift in the changing landscape of “new media” and “content creation” that often resembles a race to the bottom. I ignored the cognitive dissonance that I could achieve any of this on a 7 day micro budget video shoot.

I entered a world that felt familiar and utterly alien at the same time. Many of the aspects of the shoot were totally normal: hiring department heads, casting, location scouting, script rewrites. Others were not: I was not just expected to be the creative and line producer, but also the location manager, and supporting casting director. Departments on verticals resemble student films: 1 costume person, 3 grips and electricians, everyone doing more than one job and being paid incredibly low wages. The company had codified this process: I was issued a detailed producer’s manual and a fixed budget. They had anywhere from 1 to 4 videos filming at any given time with crew cycling from one shoot to the next. We were an assembly line. I was told in no uncertain terms that every single person we hired must be non-union, and if any unions got involved, the company would shut down the shoot and cancel the project. I shushed the voice in my head that reminded me that this corporate POV wasn’t consistent with my approach to producing. I plowed ahead to make my work the best it could be under the circumstances.

The company employed an in-house casting company to cast the two lead actors. While the director and I had input on our top choices, the final decisions rested firmly with the company and more specifically, their marketing department. Their criteria seemed to rest on a combination of looks and social media followers.

I was a typical producer in many ways: I talked through the shots with the director and DP, strategized the day’s timeline with 1^st AD, signed cast contracts, booked locations, and completed all the millions of tasks we do every day to make a shoot successful. I called in countless favors and lowballed vendors who were slashing their rates just to stay afloat in Los Angeles. I enforced the company’s ruthless manpower mandates to stay on budget.

By day 4, we were finally hitting our stride. Filming 10+ pages per day was a challenge, and we quickly learned that any scenes with complicated blocking (or almost any actor or camera movement) took too long. Stunts and intimacy scenes blew our timeline. The phrase “Citizen Kane in the morning, Dukes of Hazard in the afternoon” ran through my head every day. Through a combination of flexibility, necessity, and sheer will, we were making the show and the studio was happy. I finally understood why these videos looked so amateurish, or in many cases, downright bad. There wasn’t enough time, and everyone was stretched so thin that we just had to settle for good enough and move on. The audience just wanted the instant gratification of romance and drama, and didn’t particularly care if the shot was poorly framed or the actor didn’t hit their mark.

As we were setting up our last scene of the day, a call buzzed through on my phone. An executive at the company told me that they had found evidence that our lead actor had been kicked off another show for sexual misconduct. There were articles in the press and additional allegations on social media. I had missed this, the company had missed this, marketing had missed this, because the actor booked the role under a different name. In the midst of these stunning discoveries, two cast members revealed that the actor had been harassing them on set as well. I remember time slowing to a crawl - my mind struggled to keep up with the tsunami of terrible revelations at the same time I was juggling panicked phone calls from our executives and the looming realization that the shoot was probably doomed.

The company instructed me to wrap the crew immediately, and say nothing about why. Word traveled fast, by the time the crew had gathered in the bar after wrap (we were on location outside Los Angeles), everyone knew. The next day, a company representative addressed the crew and cancelled the show, effective immediately. The crew would not be paid for the days we were supposed to shoot the following week. The crew pushed back, saying it was not their fault the shoot got cancelled, and that they had turned down other jobs because they believed the booking dates we had put in their deal memos.

I agreed with them. We were pulling the rug out from under them, and then refusing to honor the dates in their deals? I knew that the deal memos allowed the company to cancel employment at any time, but this wasn’t their fault. It was mine, it was the company’s, it was the actor’s for not disclosing any of this upfront. They were collateral damage.

In the ensuing quiet, I realized I couldn’t continue working on the show anymore, or try to become one of the company’s regular producers. We were playing fast and loose with production, moving fast and breaking things. People were getting hurt. My last conversation with the production executive went something like this:

Me: “Your producing manual has a section on the company’s mission statement. The company pledged to treat everyone with respect. How does not vetting the cast and shorting the crew their expected salaries fit into that mission statement?”

Executive: Sigh. Silence.

I’d never called out a company like that. I’d never questioned an executive, my boss, in this way. She accepted my resignation. I made peace with never working for this company again.

As for the goals I articulated to the director during prep… it was a mixed bag. I saw what Vertical video/microdrama format was like, and I realized that there was no chance for quality given the budgets and schedules. The trenches were full of film school graduates just trying to work in Hollywood, but were not afforded any health & pension benefits or much upward mobility. My efforts to train and mentor the crew mostly fell flat - they didn’t want someone telling them how things were done on union shows. They were just trying to get through the day.

I also had to reconcile my own actions. Why hadn’t I spent more time Googling the cast? Why hadn’t the actresses reported the harassing behavior to me? What was my part in this debacle? Yes, I missed glaring red flags about the actor, but so did the company, who was ultimately squarely responsible for hiring him. But I also led by example when production went sideways, I stayed professional even when the shit hit the fan. I realized that participating in a system that codifies non-union work, substandard wages, and questionable production processes into their business model does not align with my values. I can hear you say, that’s naive, isn’t that every piece of entertainment? Yes and no. Give me a passion project indie, a short designed to further worthy peoples’ careers, give me a story with social impact - those are the types of projects I throw myself behind.

If I can pass along any advice to fellow producers, it’s to research every cast and crew member you bring onto your sets. Don’t just rely on word of mouth (although that’s critical as well) - do your own vetting. And don’t be afraid to hold the company to account if they are cutting corners. So often our drive to be a good producer keeps us quiet when we need to speak up. Going through this experience allowed me to speak bluntly, but only when there was nothing left to lose.

As for the Vertical video business, I keep telling people that I feel like a canary in a coal mine. A few months ago, I didn’t know what this content was, and today I’m still introducing veteran production colleagues to the concept of microdramas. According to a recent article in The Ankler, “ReelShort, not even three years old, brings in more than $1 billion in revenue annually…(yes, billion with a B), from in-app purchases and advertising combined.” Traditional scripted television and streaming shows, once a boon for above and below-the-line workers, have fled Los Angeles (as of this writing, the California Legislature officially approved a long awaited increase in the tax incentive, which may stem the bleeding). Vertical video productions are employing hundreds, if not thousands, of cast and crew every day. This could be the future of production. As producers, we must adapt or go extinct - and I am trying to adapt. While this particular show was a disaster, I’m still willing to give verticals another try. The microdrama business is still in its infancy, which provides opportunities for producers to grow it responsibly. I’m looking to find productions that better align with my values. I want to think outside the box. And in the end, I’m still trying to leave this business better than how I found it, no matter how elusive a goal that seems today.

You came into making films as an artist, and you’re directing & producing your tenth feature film right now. Can you talk about your evolution as a filmmaker and how your art-making practice informs your work?

I've been thinking and writing a lot at the moment about where I sit in my career. Lots of thoughts I've had across my practice are finally coalescing. They’ve come to a crescendo on YOUR FAT FRIEND in a way that makes me feel that I can do this. I’ve finally arrived at a point where I know how to do this.

When I was practicing as a visual artist, my side hustle was doing graphic design and branding for companies, helping them to tell their story. Early on, I embraced the idea of ‘it’s all the work.’ As an artist, everything you touch is the work. The audience for your film may actually be the people who only see your trailer or poster. Realistically, many, many more people will see your marketing materials than actually see the film. That could seem disappointing, but if you embrace everything that touches your film as the work, then it can become a really fun and creative opportunity.

My first film, TEENLAND, was commissioned by the BBC. It’s a documentary about four teenagers living their separate existences inside their bedrooms all day long, isolated from the rest of society. I was six months pregnant, and I had been in development for a year prior to that. I'd made, by accident, an interactive documentary called HOME-MAKER that had gone viral in the early days of the internet. I was hand-coding websites and creating interactive environments in the living rooms of older people who were housebound in Derbyshire and then Tokyo. I started filming because the conversations I was having with people as I photographed them were actually the work. They were the essence of the thing. So I picked up a camera and I learned by doing.

TEENLAND got into just one festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. It was there that I had this transitional moment where I saw an audience watching my film and realized I loved the response. There was something about the immediacy of the audience that is completely invisible when you make work in a gallery. After a gallery opening, the only thing you’d get is the visitor's book. I decided I’d rather be an arty filmmaker than a filmy artist. Around this time, I attended one of the first BRITDOC festivals, which was really important for me in terms of forming my identity as a filmmaker. I felt like this wide-eyed stranger arriving, a noone from nowhere with my 60-min film TEENLAND, talking to all of these very confident people. And then I realized I had completed a film when many others hadn’t got past the pitching stage and I left feeling more confident.

My second film, GOTH CRUISE, was commissioned pretty quickly after that. The documentary follows 150 pale, ‘people in black’ on a boat, taking part in the absolute antithesis of Goth – a cruise in the blazing sunshine, as they sail around Bermuda for five days on the 4th Annual Goth Cruise. The experience was a baptism by fire - running two units across a huge ship in the Atlantic, working with a production company, notes and the challenges of delivering for an American channel. I learnt so much and it helped define how I wanted to approach production going forward.

I soon set up my own production company, Glimmer Films, because I knew that I wanted to make films with care - care for the people in front of the camera, care for people behind the camera. I wanted to set the schedule so I could have a longer edit. I wanted to be able to pick collaborators that chimed with that, and I wanted to be in the room when production decisions were made.That doesn't mean that I don't want to play with everyone else. I want a big team, but I want to be driving the bus, because that's my happy place. I like being in charge. I like setting the tone and saying, 'These are the rules of engagement. This is the budget. This is how we’re going to make the film.' I called it Glimmer, because I'm always looking for that tiny something - the glimmer of a moment that only happens because I've lifted a camera with that person, in that moment, at that time.

That desire to be in charge, to believe that ‘it’s all the work,’ how did that inform your approach to distribution and audience building?

TEENLAND had played Big Sky, but it also had a successful BBC broadcast and loads of press. It was the Pick of the Day in every newspaper. I also built a website for it, did print, and it felt fully launched. And then GOTH CRUISE went out through IFC in the US. We did a screening in London, but it didn’t have a meaningful festival run. It made me realize that if you don’t have an audience strategy, you miss the opportunity. It would be like making an artwork, but you never get to show it to anyone. I discovered I really needed the public-facing engagement to feel like the film was complete.

I had met Gary Hustwit through BRITDOC and was really fascinated with how entrepreneurial he was about his audience. He described taking his film HELVETICA on the road, booking out design venues and schools independently, and I was inspired. That’s what you would do if you had a gallery show or a book tour; you dream what you want to do and you make it happen.

With my film SOUND IT OUT, a documentary portrait of the very last surviving vinyl record shop in Teesside, North East England, it was very grassroots. The BBC passed on the film, saying it was too small but I knew that the smallness was the charm of it and if I ended up pitching the film for 2 years, I would lose the love I had for it. I just wanted to make it - so the film became one of the very first crowdfunded films in the UK.

It premiered at SXSW which opened up huge opportunities for the film - we ended up releasing it in New York. That led to a theatrical release in a few countries and by the time we brought it back to the UK, we took the film out on the road like an indie band. We had vinyl parties, record pop up shops, and played at music festivals. It was the first film where I had this really direct connection with the audience and I kept questioning how the storytelling of the film bleeds into the world.

My background as an artist informs my love of multiples, special, beautiful things you design, to fit exactly how you want them to be. I had a meeting with a distributor about the DVD, and he was a right old wise guy. He said, 'I'll take your film, I'll stack them high and sell them cheap.' I was horrified. My emotional response to what he said solidified for me that what I wanted to do was make a double seven-inch gatefold DVD with a baby blue vinyl soundtrack. They’d be limited edition, so they would be cherished in peoples’ record collections. We distributed them via the Record Store network in the UK and they were released and screened in independent record shops on Record Store Day across the world, as well as The Lincoln Center. And then the BBC bought the film after all.

You made a film, ORION: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, about a mysterious Nashville singer whom hundreds of thousands of people believed was Elvis back from the grave. He wore a mask to hide his real identity and had a voice that sounded just like Presley’s. He became beloved in the South, selling more than a million records, and playing to large audiences. Given that you had this large potential fanbase, how did you connect them to the film?

We approached them in a few ways. We worked with a media scraping tech company called Tint to help us collect digital archives of fan mementos. By using the hashtag #MyOrion, the audience and fans were able to share old photos and mementos from concerts, and we were able to gather those memories and follow up by phone. It was a way where we could include the audience in the making of the film and give them a way to show off what they had.

We knew ORION's fans were older people who lived in the South and were on Facebook so we also did research through Facebook. We would post questionnaires with an incentive. We made phone calls. We interviewed people. There are lots of ORION interest groups. I put in an enormous amount of work to gain entry and be trusted. My strategy was to identify who were the leaders and most chatty people in the groups, and go to them first. What I’ve learned is to always bring the activity or the work to the places people live. It works really well because you’re finding out where the audience lives, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or whichever social media, or offline social spaces, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

With your films, you have this ability to create an experience that expands beyond the screen. Dr. Judith Aston calls your practice ‘wrap-around artworks.” Can you dig into how you use artwork inspired by the film to deepen the connection to your audience?

When we were researching ORION, I brought on board Dr. Lucy Bennett, who is an academic focused on fan studies. What I learned from her is that in fandom, it’s not the relationship you have with the person who is the object of the fandom (i.e. Orion); it’s finding community. It’s finding each other, the fellow fans.

With ORION, I created a wraparound artwork called ‘I Am Orion.’ We recreated the masks from Orion’s iconic album covers and then we gave them out to audience members. On the inside of the mask, there was the hashtag #IAmOrion with the question, ‘Would you wear the mask?’ I wanted people to wear the mask and think about what it felt like, knowing that Jimmy Ellis wore the mask to become the mythical singer Orion. It was transformative but also a cage. People used the hashtag when they posted their photos and it allowed us to locate and then display them online. The release snowballed and we had guest Orions in every town performing at screenings, at a huge gala screening in Bristol, performers dressed as Orion abseiled down a building. Really. Even Jimmy Fallon ended up wearing the mask!

With THE GREAT HIP HOP HOAX, I re-drew by hand those fortune teller fish as lie-detector fish and had them printed as a multiple. You could only get one at a screening and I handed them out in person. With YOUR FAT FRIEND, we did gold stickers. I’ve always done stickers because I like the long tail; people take it home, they put them on their wall. As an example, I was making a film called INDIETRACKS and I wanted a particular piece of music for the film. I saw the band ‘The Just Joans’ play and after, I went up to them to ask if I could use their music in my film. David, the singer pulled out his wallet, showed me his SOUND IT OUT sticker he’d got a year before, and said, ‘Yes, you can use our music.”

As an artist who makes films, everything that touches the film bleeds out into the world and continues long after the credits roll. If you make a beautiful print and someone puts that on their wall, that lasts for a really long time. It's a deep, meaningful connection in people's lives. I like interrupting the tech algorithms by making things by hand, making them special. At a time of AI slop, that hand crafted touch feels like rebellion. The street art is the film. The sticker is the film. The hand embroidered opening titles to my Game Of Thrones doc is the film. It’s all the film. It’s all the work.

Your most recent film is YOUR FAT FRIEND, starring Aubrey Gordon, a writer and co-host of the popular podcast Maintenance Phase. When you met her she was an unknown anonymous writer, writing for free and you were working on a different project, LUXURY BITCHES. How did that meeting with Aubrey come about and when did you know she was your subject?

I’d had development money for LUXURY BITCHES from Broadway Cinema (my base in Nottingham) and spent roughly a year developing a film about perceptions of fatness. I’d met a lot of plus-size bloggers; they were fabulous but there was too much focus on clothing and surface. . I couldn’t find the specialness, no heart or emotion. No story.

But I stuck with it. I was in Los Angeles for my documentary GAME OF THRONES: THE LAST WATCH and flew to Portland because there’s a big fat scene there. I spent a few days filming a dance troupe and meeting up with a few different people. I’d contacted Aubrey, who lives in Portland, because I read the first piece she wrote as her alter ego Your Fat Friend. I was intrigued that like Orion, she was anonymous, that she was dealing with small, relatable emotions and her writing was candid and poetic, and I had no idea what she looked like, because she was an avatar.

I met her on the last day of my trip. I remember her opening the door and giving me a massive hug. She knew who she was and wasn't afraid of that. She was just so charismatic. She showed us around the house. I got her to sit at the table in her kitchen and read out her essay and her voice changed. She became quiet and serious and contemplative. On the next trip we filmed Aubrey and her mum in the kitchen together. Her mum found the conversation very challenging. Her dad couldn't say 'fat' out loud and her mum just seemed like this deep well of emotion. It was a deep contrast with Aubrey’s desire to change the world and between those two things, I felt there was a space where a film could live. I knew she was the film.

Aubrey is now a well-known blogger and podcast host with a huge audience. How did that factor into your distribution strategy for the film? Did you have a sense that the film would resonate with so many people?

We didn’t expect it at all. I'd been filming her for a few years when she started making the Maintenance Phase podcast. YOUR FAT FRIEND, as well as with GAME OF THRONES: THE LAST WATCH and SEAHORSE, were all films made in secret. Initially, my expectations were that I'd made a small, weird, niche film - for myself, and I was completely wrong.

We started the mailing list and launched the Instagram account the day that the Tribeca Film Festival announced they had programmed the film. I chose the images very carefully because I wanted them to be really impactful. I had a relationship with this rock star photographer, Joseph Cultice, and I knew that I needed Joey to light Aubrey with luxury – to make her look like a rock star.

We launched with a collaborative post between Aubrey and the film, and my phone – I’d never seen anything like it. People were losing their minds. We did a countdown for buying tickets and they sold out immediately. Tribeca had put us in a really small cinema and we tried to warn them that the premiere was going to be really popular, that Maintenance Phase has 1.2 million listeners just in NYC, but I don’t think they really believed us. When the screening started selling out fast, they moved us to a bigger venue. People flew in from other countries to see the film. When we showed at Sheffield DocFest, we sold out the Crucible Theater, which is a legendary venue, with people flying in from Europe to watch the film.

I would caution here though that Aubrey’s following was just the beginning. What we developed was a reciprocal conversation with the audience and listening to them really shaped what followed.

After your UK and limited US theatrical releases, you partnered with JOLT to maximise the rollout to online audiences and to really learn about them. How did you bring your ‘it’s all the work’ care to the social media content?

I saw Gerilyn Dreyfous talking about Jolt on a panel and I contacted them and said “we could learn a lot from each other”. At that point we had released to cinemas across the UK and generated six figures in online screenings, all through an advertising spend of £0. Everything we had created was organic, instinctive.

Jolt was an opportunity to discover how paid, targeted advertising and deep audience insights could really “jolt” a release. Could we uncover an audience that is way out of our hands as independent filmmakers? Consulting Producer Suzanne Alizart and I are always hungry to learn new things, and the transparent data that Jolt provides to filmmakers is really a rare look under the bonnet. We had protected our rights on the film - could we maximise their potential?

It was important for me to place a brilliant fat lady (Social Media advisor Dor Dotson) onto their team who would not only be tenaciously creative but also deeply understand the needs of the audience and what had worked prior.

It was a lot of work as we were posting unique content every single day but it also meant we now had a team, so instead of just me and an assistant, there was Dor, a designer, and the whole Jolt team. And we were having a very direct, responsive conversation with the audience. That is, I believe, what really helped us to break out and we’re their most successful film to date.

Once our initial period on Jolt ended, and we weren’t feeding the machine as intensely, the social engagement definitely dipped. When filmmakers think about the life of their film, I’m not sure how much they’re thinking about the volume of content needed. You might have one good image, but have you got 20, or 100?

Dor was amazed though at the traction we’ve been able to maintain. She thought the “fat” content might be problematic for the platforms as the word can be seen as a slur, but we appear to have gotten into a sweet spot where we’ve trained our algorithm for the YOUR FAT FRIEND account plus Aubrey’s and my accounts. They know we will use the word fat in a neutral way. In contrast, our composer Tara Creme went to post about the broadcast and wrote ‘Yay, YOUR FAT FRIEND film is on tonight,’ and she immediately got a content warning about offensive language from Meta.

We’re back on Jolt again, one year on and learning more new things ahead of our streaming release later in the year, which will be boosted by the deep audience insights we now have.

I often think about what’s coming up and how I can riff on that. I also think about how to lean into the parts of the movie that are difficult. When I knew the broadcast on BBC Storyville and CBC was coming up, I wanted to prepare the audience a bit. The film would reach people we’d never reached who might not be as comfortable with the content.

I licensed a series of writings by Ragen Chastain “What to say at the doctor’s office” and designed them as printable cards. A practical, fact-laden set of support cards for the fat audience for the place where they can experience the most bias.

When we put the film out in cinemas, I was concerned that people would think that Aubrey had invented fat politics and activism. She’s coming in 30 years down the line, so one thing we thought would be an approach to acknowledge this would be to have a fat reading list on the website and to partner with independent and queer bookshops wherever we showed the film. We asked them to come down to our screenings and set up mini bookstores in the foyer of the cinema, lifting up other’s work.

We were also asking fat audiences to sit into potentially small seats, so we made every venue showing the film think about seat size as an access issue - asking them to measure and publish their seat size. We can’t make the seats bigger but we can give people the information they need to make a choice.

All of these interventions were designed in response to what the audience for this film needed, in this moment, to really land.

I really hope that anyone reading this is prompted to think about the questions that their audience is asking rather than “Got it - watch parties and Jolt are the answer.”

Given Aubrey’s following and the response you saw from your festival run, it’s disheartening to know that traditional distributors didn’t step up. How did you fund the release without that piece?

We turned down the paltry and disappointing offers from distributors, that is, the ones that got back to us. The offers were pretty standard but honestly insulting and did not reflect what we thought was the commercial value of the film. I also didn’t think they were going to do a good job because I didn’t think they understood our film. They were scared of the subject matter. We also weren’t able to raise money to take the film out on the road through traditional routes. Instead, we built up a reserve. We did three Kinema watch parties. The first one made enough money to allow us to release in the US at DCTV in NY to qualify for the Oscars. It was a global watch party and we did it as a drop. We made it so if you joined our mailing list, you got access to the tickets, and we doubled our mailing list overnight. We told people two days before the watch party tickets went on sale. I think it sold out in 40 minutes. The second watch party paid for our UK release in cinemas. We toured twelve cities in a sold out live preview tour and then went wide to over 100 cities, with many booking week runs. We were the number one documentary at the UK box office

I think we spent around £40-50,000 to cover the usuals: marketing, DCP creation, our great theatrical booker Tull Stories, PR, and trailer. We also wanted to pay for ethical transport for Aubrey. I wanted to bring Aubrey over in comfort and as a fat lady, that means business class travel, taxi from the airport and a car. We also brought on a project manager to take us around the UK, but our merch sales paid for that.

You mentioned you qualified for the Oscars. Did you raise money for an awards campaign?

We had a meeting with our brilliant PR person who launched our film at Tribeca where he told us if we wanted to get an Oscar nomination, we needed to reserve $5,000 to send out just five ‘For Your Consideration’ emails and that we needed to have a party. It just seems immoral. It’s throwing money in a well. I knew we weren’t going to get an Oscar nomination. We had no studio behind us. We didn’t premiere at Sundance. If you look at the stats, those are the films that get nominations. So instead, we spent that money on artist commissions to make beautiful merch where we could pay them fairly and share those pieces with the fans.

I think so often there’s a desire to make the film and move on to the next one. Listening to you describe your process – there is something really beautiful and very deep about taking a film and caring for its cultural long tail, digging in to explore every shade of what this idea could be.

When I was a baby artist in my first week at university, I was on a contemporary art degree. We had to make a piece of work to introduce ourselves to the rest of the cohort. The piece I made was a tiny flyer with my face peeking through a hole and it just said, ‘Hello.’ I gave them to my course mates but then I stood on the street and handed them out to members of the public.

I feel like every piece of work I’ve made since then, whether it’s a film or an artwork, is about a small moment of human connection. It’s just now I can connect with millions of people.

Jeanie is releasing the detailed case study of the radical creative distribution of Your Fat Friend by Glimmerama in a series of online chapters - join her mailing list to find out more.

Jeanie Finlay is a British documentary filmmaker and artist known for intimate, award-winning films that resonate globally. Her latest, Your Fat Friend, premiered at Tribeca and won the Audience Award at Sheffield DocFest. She has directed for HBO, BBC, and IFC, including four BBC Storyville films including The Great Hip Hop Hoax and Orion: The Man Who Would Be King.

Her work spans subjects from a transgender man’s pregnancy (Seahorse) to the final season of Game of Thrones in her Emmy-nominated The Last Watch. Her work is known for its emotional intimacy, pathos and humour and has garnered Emmy, BIFA, Grierson wins and nominations as well as an inspiration award from Sheffield Doc Fest and an honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent University.

A champion of creative distribution, she’s a Chicken & Egg Awardee with retrospectives at Criterion, BFI, and MOMI NYC, True Story and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Jeanie is a member of AMPAS, BAFTA, and FWD-Doc and is currently making her tenth feature. www.jeaniefinlay.com / @jeaniefinlay

However, having the right mentor can be life changing. It can lead to career advancement, expanding your network, feeling less alone, and can help you build confidence, which is why I’m excited to continue the Dear Producer Mentorship program for a fourth year.

For 2025, we selected four esteemed producers and asked them to choose an emerging producer and commit to providing consistent and reliable mentorship for 6 months. In exchange for their time and expertise, each mentor will receive a $5,000 stipend.

The mentors for this year include:

• Rachael Fung: FREMONT, LITTLE WOODS, THE GIANT

• Amanda Marshall: SWISS ARMY MAN, GOD’S COUNTRY, DON’T THINK TWICE

• Darcy McKinnon: NATCHEZ, A KING LIKE ME, THE NEUTRAL GROUND

• Alisa Payne: THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, HARLEM ICE, STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING

The Dear Producer mentorship is generously sponsored by Facet, founded by Maida Lynn, whose work has looked for and embraced ways to contribute to risk-taking, free-thinking, and diverse filmmaking, particularly supporting individuals and organizations operating outside of the mainstream.

I am thrilled to shine a light on the talented producers who were chosen for this year’s mentorship program. Below you can read more about them and get a glimpse of why their mentor felt drawn to them for this opportunity.

EMILY FRIEDMAN is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film & TV Production and minors in Business of Entertainment and Art History. Her commercial clients include The Obama Foundation, Visa, WNBA, Enfamil, Google, Harlem Perfume Co, Match, H&R Block, Jones Road, and Popeyes.

Her work has been featured in BAFTA-qualifying Aesthetica Film Festival, Academy Award-qualifying HollyShorts, NOWNESS Asia, Inside Out's Finance Forum, image+nation Montreal, the Berlin Music Video Awards, NYWIFT’s Annual Creative Showcase, Film Shortage, and Beyond the Short.

Recent projects include producing a hype video for the Chicago Sky basketball team for Emmy-nominated director Rodney Lucas, as well as a narrative short film titled THEY’RE PACKING starring Jo Ellen Pellman (THE PROM), Leyna Bloom (POSE), and Tony-nominee John Ellison Conlee.

She is also a musician and founder of production and development company happytobehere.

Why Amanda Marshall chose Emily as her mentee…
Emily came highly recommended when I was seeking a line producer. Though we didn't collaborate on that project, our conversations revealed someone whose tenacity, creativity, and resourcefulness immediately impressed me. Her career aspirations echoed my own early producing journey—that familiar hunger to transform ideas into compelling stories while navigating the constant balance between creative passion and financial constraints.

The producers who shaped my career were mentors who challenged me and provided guidance during pivotal moments. This taught me that mentorship is essential for cultivating the next generation of storytellers. Emily represents the kind of emerging talent that deserves investment, and I'm genuinely excited to support her development into the producer I believe she can become.

ANNIE HUANG is a first-generation Asian American who grew up in Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong before immigrating to the U.S. at age 11, where she learned English as her 4th language with the help of subtitled films. She has over 7 years of experience working in creative development, film production, and marketing strategy at Warner Bros. Studios, Universal Pictures, Searchlight Pictures, CBS Studios, and Sony Pictures. In her current senior manager role at Sony Pictures, she helps foster filmmaker and talent relationships, as well as secure new project acquisitions for the studio.

Annie has produced over 10 short films with filmmakers from around the world, in collaboration with organizations like Film Independent, Netflix, the Latino Film Institute, the Alliance of Women Directors, and Satellite Collective. Her most recent work includes a proof-of-concept short featuring Randall Park, a Honolulu-based film with Moana 2 writer Bryson Chun, and a 30-minute pilot following the career of a female culinary chef. Her goal is to empower emerging filmmakers and help them break into the studio realm. Annie is a member of the inaugural class of the Academy of Motion Pictures GOLD program, a Forbes 30 Under 30 Scholar, a Women In Film Independent Producing Fellow, a Soho House x Creative Futures Fellow, and an APIA NBCUniversal Award recipient. Her work can be found at Annie-huang.com.

Why Rachael Fung chose Annie as her mentee…
I have been so impressed with everything Annie has accomplished so far in her career. She has shown incredible tenacity, determination and intelligence in the numerous short films she has successfully brought to fruition while balancing her professional roles. I am honoured to have the opportunity to be her mentor and champion as she takes steps towards full-time Producing this year and am excited to witness her growth and development.

IMANI JOHNSON is a journalist and documentary film producer committed to preserving and amplifying the global Black experience. A modern-day griot, she blends truth and artistry to tell stories that resonate across generations. Since earning degrees in Journalism, Africana Studies, and Documentary Film from NYU in 2019, she has worked across TV, radio, and film. Imani is an NAACP Image Award-winning producer of Netflix’s HIGH ON THE HOG, and her credits include Emmy-nominated projects like Peacock’s LOWNDES COUNTY AND THE ROAD TO BLACK POWER and Hulu’s TASTE THE NATION. Most recently, she worked as an Associate Producer for an upcoming documentary series about Hurricane Katrina directed by Spike Lee, Geeta Gandbhir, and Samantha Knowles, and produced by Alisa Payne. Imani is now producing for a PBS series called WEATHERED and continues to create short and feature-length documentaries rooted in history, innovation, and immersive storytelling.

Why Alisa Payne chose Imani as her mentee…
My directing partner recommended Imani for an Associate Producer position on our forthcoming project KATRINA: COME HELL AND HIGH WATER. I was immediately struck by Imani's wide range of gifts: her adept research, poetic writing and empathy for participants. Imani is a skilful storyteller who crafts narratives of loss and resilience, with such honesty and compassion, a clear point of view and new revelations - all which was invaluable to a team revisiting a disaster that so many feel they know all there is to know about. I am thrilled to work closely with Imani again and feel honored to be one supporter in a career that will undoubtedly be extremely long and accomplished.

ÁI VUONG is a Vietnamese-born, Texas-raised filmmaker drawn to stories that explore the tenderness, fragility, and compassion of life. She has produced commissioned documentaries across five continents through TÁPI Story, the production company she co-founded, and has led filmmaking workshops with the School of Slow Media. Her recent short films include LA COSECHA (SXSW 2023), BOCA CHICA (PBS/Reel South 2023), and FLOODPLAIN (2024). She is currently developing AZULE, a short documentary supported by the New Orleans Film Society, and WHERE THE SUN SETS, a feature project backed by the Austin Film Society. Ái is a 2023 Tory Burch Entrepreneur Fellow. Before turning to filmmaking, she served as Executive Director of a children’s shelter in Vietnam and later earned a master’s in NGO Management and Public Policy from NYU.

Why Darcy McKinnon chose Ái as her mentee…
I met Ái through various film festivals in the South, and then through the Southern Producers Lab hosted by the New Orleans Film Society. When you meet Ái, you'll be struck by her unique combination of wit and warmth. She has that combination of keen intelligence and empathy that make her an excellent problem solver and steward of film projects. I'm also specifically drawn to her vision of the work she wants to make, that connects human stories across borders, relying on her own and her creative partner's lived experiences. She also has a foot in the commercial world, and a clear affinity for the business of making films. I'm excited for all the projects ahead for her.

I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring Daniel since he was a Fellow in the 2023 Film Independent Producing Lab and I was the Lab’s lead Creative Advisor. Watching Daniel’s growth from then until now has brought me a lot of joy and his thoughts from Cannes resonate with me so I asked if I could share his latest post with the Dear Producer readers.

In his first diary entry from Cannes, Daniel reflects on his fiancé posing the question, “Do you want to be a producer today?” A question myself and all my producer friends ask themselves every day. In Daniel’s second piece I’m sharing below, he continues his reflection on the purpose of cinema in the world at large as he writes a letter home, not just to his fiancé, but to all of us.

More producer diaries will be going up in the next few days on the Filmmaker Magazine website. Consider a paid subscription to Filmmaker Magazine to support more of this kind of valuable content. An annual digital subscription is only $12.00. And thank you to for always being generous and allowing me to share Daniel’s special writing with the Dear Producer audience.

This piece was first published in Filmmaker Magazine on May 20, 2025.

My Love,

I’m at the halfway point of this experience. And though I’ve started most mornings by sending you a quick text, just something sweet for you to wake up to, I still miss you terribly. Being here without you by my side feels like something is always slightly out of frame.

At this point, sleep is rare. There have already been late nights where the Fellows and I pour bottle after bottle of rosé, eat every delicious French thing in sight, swap stories, and argue about Sinners like only producers would do. We’ve grown close quickly, and I’m honestly so impressed by the people I get to share this experience with.

Still, I fall into old habits. I get a schedule and suddenly I’m a teacher’s pet again, dragging myself out of bed early to attend the Producers Network Breakfasts. I show up, bleary-eyed but eager, ready to meet new people and learn from the speakers seated across from us.

These breakfasts have become unexpectedly reflective. Whether we like it or not, there is a mild hesitation to represent the U.S., and the goodwill we once assumed we had is slipping. I listened as Indian filmmakers described how their government can block the distribution of co-productions that don’t pass CBFC certification. Or the Russian Indigenous filmmaker whose work has been banned from festivals, not because of the film itself, but because of where he’s from, despite not sharing the Russian government’s views. No premiere, no audience. Just silence.

Being in Cannes, surrounded by an international community, reminds me how insulated we can become back home. Collaboration across borders isn’t just about politics, it’s about people. We’re all fighting to tell our stories. Not just against financial odds, but rising censorship. And the idea that such suppression could take hold in the U.S. used to feel far-fetched. It doesn’t anymore. That makes me more cautious, more measured, and more aware of what it means to be a representative, not just of my country, but as a global citizen.

These moments stay with me. Maybe it’s just the nature of being at a foreign film festival, watching bold stories from around the world, it puts one in a state of constant questioning. I’ve taken in a few films so far: a surreal and devastating portrait of postpartum depression; a meditation on four generations of women processing inherited trauma; a love story interrupted by war. Then, in a jarring pivot, I walked into the Marché, surrounded by rows of booths selling genre titles for a quick buck.

It’s a whirlwind. A collision of art and commerce. And most of the time, I don’t even have the chance to process it, I’m off to another mixer, another filmmaker meeting, another panel.

But one day, I took my own advice. I hit pause.

I skipped a screening, wandered down side streets, passed local markets, and made my way up to Église Notre-Dame, the historic church perched on the hill above Cannes. I sat there, looking out over the town. It was cliché in the best way, a moment straight out of a French film. And in that quiet, I thought about the future of filmmaking. Of our place in it. Not just AI or job loss or outsourcing, though those are real concerns, but how those threats ultimately censor freedom of expression and the pursuit of who we are. To create scarcity to exert control, disrupt the community and remove our critical thinking.

If that future comes, will we be brave enough to confront it?

It’s hard not to fear what’s ahead. Because beyond the world of film, I think about our life together. A Latino man and a Jewish woman, both children of immigrants, building a future and (hopefully) a family. That very existence is political in ways we never asked for. Will we have to censor who we are? And if we have children, what does it mean to ask them to play small to stay safe? At the heart of this, perhaps it’s these very complexities of life that push me to be part of the films that I seek to make.

And yet, for all the contradictions, all the extravagance and dissonance, a film festival centering in one town for 11 days has the power to create a special energy and moments of constructive dialogue between communities.

We’re not here to fix the world. But this festival does offer glimpses, through stories told here, of something bigger than ourselves.

Maybe that’s the magic I’ve found in Cannes so far.

With Love From Cannes,

Daniel

I’d love to start by hearing about both ColorCreative, which you co-founded with Issa Rae, and your company Reform. How did they get started and are they connected or separate entities?

Issa and I started ColorCreative together in 2014, two years after AWKWARD BLACK GIRL, when we were producing a lot of digital content. We launched it as a mission-driven company designed to create opportunities and pipelines for emerging creators and diverse people with great voices. We helped usher their careers, whether that meant representation, getting them jobs, or just helping them get paid to do what they did best. This came from what we saw as a lot of gatekeeping and limited opportunities outside of labs and programs.

The company was successful with various partnerships and continued to grow over the years. In 2020, we relaunched the ColorCreative brand with the same mission, but positioned it in the representation space. Now, ColorCreative exists as a management and production company. It's run by Talitha Watkins, who came over from CAA in late 2020 and has built it into a formidable business in this town.

When Talitha took over, I stepped away from my time with Issa and that company to launch Reform. The companies exist completely separately. I'm more passively involved with ColorCreative from an executive leadership standpoint, while Reform is my shingle and producing brand as I build a slate of stories I want to tell.

I listened to you on a podcast where you mentioned reading Lawrence Turman's book "So You Want to Be a Producer" as a very young person on a flight. How did you even know that book existed? What did he say that made you believe you wanted to produce?

The real origin story starts in high school. I got into video production when I was 16 and learned how to edit and produce videos for school announcements and commercials. By senior year, I realized I could go to school to learn more about film. I'm from Las Vegas and I didn't know anyone who worked in Hollywood or had thought about a career in this business. My first instinct was to apply to film school. I wanted to move to New York, and it seemed like a great launching pad to learn more, but I felt a bit of imposter syndrome. I decided to go to film school at Brooklyn College, but didn't know this world at all. That led me to Google, "What are all the positions on a film set?" By process of elimination, I started considering producing. This was 2005 and when I Googled "What does a producer do?" Larry's book popped up. I immediately bought and read it on the plane while moving to New York for college.

The book broke down the role of a producer as it relates to all parts of the filmmaking process. It blew my mind because producing wasn't just one thing. It was creative while still being business-oriented and you could be part of something from inception through completion. Many positions in filmmaking come in at only one part of the process, but producing allows you to be involved in the entire thing. The book changed my life because it validated my interest. It allowed me to go to college knowing I wanted to be a producer. No one in film school wants to be a producer – everyone wants to be a director, writer, or cinematographer. I was that anomaly, this young Vegas person saying I wanted to produce even though I hadn't done it yet.

I went into film school thinking I would be a cinematographer. I was a photographer for my high school yearbook and it felt like the right fit, but when I got to film school, I realized how technical cinematography is and that’s not one of my strengths. And It's even more technical now, gaffers walk around with iPads controlling the lights.

What's funny is that in your first year of film school, they make you take classes in everything. I remember taking editing and screenwriting classes. I joke with my DPs now that I had a C-minus in cinematography. I knew that wasn't my jam. I couldn't wrap my head around it. I give cinematographers so much credit. They're the smartest people I know, it’s all math and science. It's a real skill set to be good at and love.

What was your entry point into the web series THE MISADVENTURES OF AN AWKWARD BLACK GIRL?

That was a ‘right place, right time’ situation. I graduated from AFI's producing program in 2012 and digital was exploding at that time. I consciously chose to be a freelance producer for a few years because I figured they wouldn't be calling big Hollywood producers for a $50,000 web series. They needed young, hungry people who wanted to work and gain experience.

That decision led me to apply for many freelance producing jobs, one of which was for a web series that needed a line producer. That turned out to be for AWKWARD BLACK GIRL. It was kismet. Issa and I met, hit it off, and I jumped into season two with her the following week. For the next three years, I freelanced with her on different projects while working with other creatives on music videos, shorts, and other web projects.

I'm grateful I took a non-traditional path that still led me to the television and film projects I ultimately wanted to do instead of answering calls for years and waiting for someone to give me permission. At the time, I knew I didn't want to put away everything I'd been learning in a closet somewhere to take out one day. I wanted to keep going.

I went the answering calls route. I was an assistant at Lionsgate to the Head of Acquisitions. I didn't even know that was a job or what acquisitions executives did, but it prepared me as a producer in learning about selling films at festivals and knowing how to read distribution agreements.

I figured out my monthly budget and hustled. If I didn't have producing jobs, friends would ask if I wanted to be a production coordinator for three days or take PA jobs. Every check counted to keep the lights on. Looking back, it provided me with a wonderful foundation in production. Many people I worked with then are doing incredible things now, and we're still working together in different capacities.

Let's talk about your new movie ONE OF THEM DAYS. You’ve produced so much TV, but from IMDB this looks like it was your first feature?

I actually did an indie feature before this film. I shot it in Atlanta last February, but it hasn't come out yet. That's what I would technically claim as my first feature. I did the indie movie first and then ONE OF THEM DAYS came right after. What's unique is that within six months, I was able to produce my first tiny independent feature with a first-time writer-director and then my first big studio theatrical movie back-to-back. Two completely different experiences.

ONE OF THEM DAYS was made with TriStar, I'd love to know how much of a package it was before they got involved. Was it just a script or was the cast already attached with a director?

To tie it back to ColorCreative, ONE OF THEM DAYS was initially set up through a lab that Sony and Columbia did with ColorCreative that launched in 2018. This was back in ColorCreative's origin days when we did various partnerships and pipeline opportunities. We approached them and created a program that gave emerging writers, who had never written in the studio space, a chance to be paid and write their first studio feature. We brought in four writers with unique, original ideas. Syreeta Singleton's script was one of those four. It started from the pitch and went through the whole development process at the studio. Syreeta's career continued to rise throughout that time – I think she was still a staff writer on INSECURE and continued to move up, eventually show-running RAP SH!T. Around the pandemic, Keke Palmer read the script, loved it, and attached herself to star and executive produce. After we worked with Lawrence Lamont on RAP SH!T in 2021, he became attached as the director.

Before the strikes, we met and discussed who would star in the film with Keke. Then the strikes happened, and I honestly thought this would be one of those projects that would disappear afterward. Development was cut everywhere and projects that had been hanging on disappeared. Looking at how long it had taken to get that far, and in the climate we've been in, I wondered about the odds of them making a predominantly Black female original comedy film. But the conversations continued into casting and that's when SZA came into play. By last spring, it became apparent, based on how busy they both were, that it was "now or never." Sony shifted the project to TriStar under Nicole Brown and her team, who were great and dug in with us immediately. Once it was moving, Macro got involved, and six weeks later, we were shooting.

It's not just a predominantly Black comedy, but one about women where it's not about sex, marriage, or having babies – it's about friendship, which we rarely see.

Ironically, it dropped in January, amid the inauguration and other events and we realized what a great time it was to make this movie. We all need joy, especially at the box office, to escape the realities of our lives. I think that's part of why it's been a successful film.

Can you give me some basic stats on production like your budget and how many shooting days?

We shot for 20 days on a $15 million budget in Los Angeles. We didn't have a tax incentive because we weren't planning to shoot in the window we found ourselves in. After production, we had about three and a half months of post before delivering the film theatrically. I'd love to see if this is the fastest movie made for theatrical release because it felt that way. Every day, I thought, "Just keep going," because it was shocking that a film like this was getting made. This was an original comedy, a first-time feature director in Lawrence Lamont, Keke in her first big studio release as the lead, and SZA had never acted before. All these elements where people would say, "That movie will never get made," but we were making ours. Coming out of the strikes, it felt like a miracle.

I worked at Lionsgate when they released AKEELAH AND THE BEE and launched Keke’s career, which has come so far since then. But with SZA, how did you know creatively that she could go toe-to-toe with Keke like she does?

Honestly, the chemistry you see in the film was evident in the early screen tests. Being fans of SZA, we thought it could make sense, but we needed to see their dynamic. She just naturally fit this part and had organic chemistry with Keke that lit up the screen. I wish we could take full credit and say we were geniuses, but like anything in producing, you try different things until it locks in. I'm grateful to the studio and our partners throughout the process. Sometimes, studios might force certain casting or tie your hands, but this wasn't the case here.

I've shot two movies in Los Angeles – one for half a million about 10 years ago and a $3 million movie more recently. One was 18 days, and one was 20 days, neither were as big in production scope as your film. You had stunts, amazing production design, camera movement, and many locations. How did you accomplish so much in such a small window?

We had some shortcuts. We hired cinematographer Ava Berkofsky, who had shot INSECURE with us for many seasons. She was familiar with the look, color palette, and many of the neighborhoods and locations we were shooting in. Though this movie establishes its own look, it helped to have someone with that knowledge who could connect quickly with Lawrence.

Our production designer was Monique Dias, someone I went to AFI with and worked with during my indie freelance years. Although she had done TV shows like GRAND CREW, this was her first studio feature. I trusted her because I'd worked with her on projects where we had $100,000, and magic happened. Out of all the designers we met, she blew us away, and I knew we could count on her to make things happen with limited time and budget. For example, we built Drew's interior apartment set and shot all those scenes over a couple of days, but we couldn't afford or have time for a separate set for Bethany's renovated apartment. Monique designed Drew's apartment to be modular, and overnight in 12 hours, when we showed up to set the next morning, it was Bethany's completely renovated apartment, though using the skeleton of the same set.

So much of how you get things done on a fast timeline with a smaller budget is making sure you hire the best department heads who are there because they love the story and are talented at what they do. They bring ideas that help you figure out how to accomplish things no matter the limitations. This applied to electrical and stunts. We hired some of the best crew in town who were great at problem-solving.

For locations, we brought in our location manager from INSECURE because she was familiar with these neighborhoods and the permitting process. Knowing we were working with people in key positions who already had knowledge about the world of this film allowed us to hit the ground running. That's important for a show that's so location-based and specific to this LA neighborhood.

I give a lot of credit to everyone who came in and worked with us – it allowed us to do it together. We had a proper pre-production schedule of only four or five weeks before we started shooting. We were lucky to have so many of our favorite people available because things were slow coming out of the strikes.

ONE OF THEM DAYS is such a high-energy movie – it ramps up and never lets go. Obviously, some of that is editing, but how did you keep that energy on set?

Honestly, it was in the script and Lawrence was great at working with all the department heads, including our editor Tia, to build that in. The countdown clock of "10 hours till rent" wasn't in the script; it was an addition in post that Lawrence added to help move the momentum forward. Once you establish that ticking clock, which continues to be reinforced throughout the film, it makes you feel that anxiety with the characters.

When did you finish post-production?

We were mixing the film the week before Christmas last year. We delivered in December, and the film came out on January 14. Think of it this way: our first day of production was July 1 2024, and our film was in theaters on January 14, 2025.

What's remarkable about that is doing it with a studio. Getting notes from studio executives and getting them to sign off on cuts is hard. It must have been a well-oiled machine, not just in production but the whole team.

I give so much credit to Tristar and the entire Sony distribution and marketing team. They fully leaned in and were ready to go. It was their idea to release it so quickly and they were game to do what needed to be done. When you have a studio partner showing up with that much support, saying it's not all on us to meet our deadlines, that helps tremendously. Especially for my first studio film, I probably learned more than I would have in another setting because of the fast and furious process.

I think it came out at the perfect time of year. Industry-wise, we all the Academy Award contenders, which I watch and love, but they're so heavy. And none of my friends are coming with me to see THE BRUTALIST. I think it was timed perfectly to provide counter-programming.

People have asked if this film has opened up conversations for other filmmakers and studios to look at comedies again. Absolutely. For a while, comedies got very expensive, and they continued to recycle the same cast and stars for those vehicles instead of opening up or trying something different. I think it’s a good thing some time has passed since then and there was an opportunity to reinvigorate the genre.

Switching gears to your career… You have been so successful in TV, but always wanted to produce features. I feel like feature producers want to be in TV, and TV producers want to go back to features. How is the producer role the same or different in the two mediums?

What doesn't change is that production is production. As a producer, you go in daily with new problems to solve while executing a singular vision. The camaraderie and collaboration with the crew never change.

The biggest difference? TV is more taxing because it's a bigger job overseeing usually many more millions being spent and TV has that dual mentality that eats you up and spits you out. There are times you're on set prepping an episode and scouting locations without a script because the writers are still writing. It has that demanding pressure and many more challenges because of how intense it is and how much you're shooting. You're prepping and shooting 8-9 hours of storytelling in 6-9 months. In film, you have one script and director and try to prep everything before starting production. Then, you can focus just on production. In features, production should be a breeze if you prep well and nail down pre-production. You're only there to address problems as they arise, not still trying to solve fundamental issues. It's incredibly hard to do that in TV.

I want to ask about your thoughts on the creator economy. MISADVENTURES OF AN AWKWARD BLACK GIRL started as a YouTube series, then grew into INSECURE at HBO. However, that was over 10 years ago when we didn’t have the creator economy we have. As a producer, are you looking at the latest YouTube stars for talent?

It's definitely on my mind. I've been studying and observing it because it's fascinating. The business is cyclical and coming back around in a different capacity. For the first time, more funding options are available to the creator economy – whether building their own brands and charging subscription models, getting money from advertising and brands to fund content, or selling products like Mr. Beast.

The creator economy has grown fascinatingly and is here to stay. Through social media, technology, and video, many people have always wanted to be creators. Before all this, it sounded like a pipe dream, but now it feels accessible. Anyone who dreams of creating content, having something to say, or launching a brand, even a real estate agent who wants to create content about building a real estate business, can enter the creator economy.

This opens up revenue streams and raises their profile as influencers. I look at how storytelling is evolving and who's creating stories. Will traditional media and the creator economy coexist? Yes. Will everyone suddenly be on Netflix? No. What works for the creator economy is that creators build brands based on the platforms that work best for them. YouTube is the most massive, but someone on TikTok might only use TikTok. That creates fragmentation, making it hard to say the creator economy is all in one space.

Within film and TV, traditional Hollywood always looks at where the eyeballs are, where you have a built-in audience, and what it means to have IP. What's changing is looking at the creator economy, what they're building as IP and brands, and how to use that as an entry point for telling stories.

With YouTube now surpassing hours watched on all platforms recently, I wish filmmakers took it more seriously. There seems to be a "I don't want to be on TikTok" or "I don't want to be on YouTube" attitude. It's a prestige thing, but that's where people are watching stories.

I do agree it's about prestige, but there's also the workload. It's easier to sell an idea to a studio that will help develop, market, distribute, and release it. However, you’re also giving up ownership. The minute you decide to be an indie creator, you own your own IP but then must figure out editing, funding, paying people, and marketing. You need the wherewithal to invest in yourself. The creator economy isn't for everyone. The most successful artists in this space will be people like Morgan Cooper, Issa Rae, and others who aren't afraid to create what they want because they don't want to wait for permission or go through gatekeeping hoops. Our business will always have that gatekeeping aspect. I want to see more people taking control over creating the stories they want to see. There are no excuses now. I've seen people make incredible content for absolutely $0.

I saw on your Instagram that you are launching a new workshop, tell me about that.

I'm launching The Producing Playbook this summer. It's my way to take all my skills and everything I've learned and share with those aspiring to do what we do. I didn't grow up with a producing mentor, but I like to help people, so I asked myself, "Why am I waiting for someone to come to me to host or teach this? What if I created it myself?"

I'm excited to cover what producers need to know from the standpoint of Hollywood business and just the basics that aren't readily available. The average person doesn't know if they need a manager, an agent, or both or what these people do. I'll cover producing from creative development through production – soup to nuts.

I decided to do this now because I've checked my boxes and made my movies, but I'm also inspired by how many people create lanes for themselves. I have so much information to give. I've shared it on podcasts, panels, and speaking events and now here. It dawned on me that I could create something myself and write a book about it someday.

I have the creator bug, though it scares me because I'm putting myself out there. I'm terrible at shameless self-promotion. I recognize that if I'm going to do this, I need to step out front a bit and be smart about launching, marketing, and what I want to give back. I'm a die-hard producer, and what's always struck me is that it's the one position that never gets enough resources and support, whether in labs, training programs, or general. I want to create this because people don't talk about producing. I've read almost every producing book, and sometimes, they still get it wrong or regurgitate the same old information. Who will be transparent and give people the real insider baseball version of this town?

The first session of The Producers Playbook starts (virtually) on June 28. To learn more and sign up, visit: https://www.theproducingplaybook.com/