SAMANTHA CURLEY and MARS VERRONE on Producing UNION and Distribution Beyond Sundance

By Rebecca Green

After enjoying a dream-scenario premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2024, where their film UNION won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change, producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone sat down with Dear Producer to discuss their journey to find distribution beyond the glitz of a festival premiere. They share frankly about how the labor issues echoed throughout the documentary, highlighted by Amazon's labor force unionizing, mirror the labor issues we face within Hollywood. And along the way, two producers who had never met before this film, formed a new and lasting creative partnership.

This week UNION was one one 15 films that advanced in the Documentary Feature Film category for the 97th Academy Awards. One hundred sixty-nine films were eligible in the category. To watch UNION, visit THIS PAGE.

UNOIN producers - Left: Mars Verrone, Right: Samantha Curley

I recently watched UNION and was very impressed and also had a lot of questions so thank you for sitting down with me. First, tell me how this film came about.

MARS VERRONE: In 2020, Chris Smalls led a walkout at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island with Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, Jordan Flowers, and Jason Anthony, all organizers appearing in UNION. Chris was immediately fired, and then a couple of days later, there was a leaked memo from an Amazon C-suite meeting detailing that they decided to make Chris Smalls the face of the union organizing movement. They felt he wasn’t smart or articulate enough to lead such a movement so they painted a bullseye on his back. This was their PR strategy, which was obviously incredibly racist. It's both shocking, but also not shocking, how Amazon treats its Black and brown workers. When that news story broke, that was how I first learned about Chris.

SAMANTHA CURLEY: I first met Chris in the early days of the pandemic through local organizing networks that I was part of here in Los Angeles, and started talking to him about a documentary. Mars and I actually reached out to Chris separately, we didn’t know each other at the time.

VERRONE: My friend and I messaged Chris on Instagram about making a documentary film and so that's how I connected with him. He mentioned another producer had already reached out and put us in touch - that producer was Sam. We hit it off right away and the rest is history. A funny story… This was happening in the very early days of the pandemic so all of our communication was over Zoom. It wasn’t until six months into working together that Sam and I realized we were basically neighbors, we just had no idea because we had been talking on Zoom for months.

CURLEY: The other piece of the origin story is that at the time, Chris was organizing under the banner of a group that he started called the Congress for Essential Workers. They were going around the country protesting at Jeff Bezos's mansions. Mars and I were part of organizing the protest they did in Beverly Hills. As we were developing this project, we were unsure of the scope. Should the story be about following Chris? Was it following the Congress of Essential Workers? Should it be about Amazon labor issues more broadly, just told through the eyes of Chris? There was a lot up in the air about what we were doing in those early days.

VERRONE: The timing of packaging this project was really wild, in retrospect, because just as we raised some early equity funds and received a small development grant from the International Documentary Association (IDA), Chris and his colleagues said they wanted to unionize the warehouse where Chris was fired. We had a tangible story we could follow, and we were able to film it from the very beginning because of this early funding.

What was the process of bringing Brett Story on to direct? Was that a relationship you had already?

CURLEY: I had seen Brett's short film with Field of Vision called CAMPER FORCE. Not too long after I met Chris, I reached out to her and we started talking about the process of making that film and what was happening with Chris and Amazon. We had been talking to a couple of other directors as well and everyone agreed we had a great central character, but we didn’t know yet what the film was about. And they of course wanted to know if we had money. We were doing a lot of development work to get the project to a state that would attract the kind of director we knew we needed to make the film. Brett was definitely at the top of that list and we conversed for many months before she officially came on board. We committed to this being a vérité project and we knew we wanted this to be a collaborative team with two directors. That led to Brett inviting Steve Maing to join the project.

VERRONE: I would add to our criteria that initially, when we were thinking through directors in the development stage, it was important to know who had the right politics for the film. From the beginning, we wanted this to be a rank-and-file worker story. We weren't interested in someone who would try to get both sides of it. It was really important to know the director's politics and to look for someone doing interesting work as an artist. We were also thinking a lot about how the public has been so inundated with stories and information about Amazon’s exploitative practices - to the point of overwhelming fatigue and apathy. So, we wanted a different angle for the film and to work with a team that would tell this story in a new, innovative, and cinematic way. That was the criteria that led us to working with Steve and Brett as co-directors. And overall alignment of political values was the foundation for how we brought together many of our team members.

Many people caution heavily against co-directing because it makes having central vision harder. How did you handle that collaboration and what was the breakdown of labor? Was Brett following a certain character/storyline and Steve another?

CURLEY: What held us all together was the politics of what we were making and why we were making it. We were all committed to that, which meant we could have different opinions about how to do it because we all trusted and shared the same central vision. The team in the field had to be small, necessarily, because we didn't want to negatively influence or impact the organizing that was happening. It was a long production schedule. We shot 230 days, had 800 hours of footage, and edited for a year and a half. It took a lot of persistence and teamwork to make it happen. And often, it felt like the dynamics we were observing through the camera were being reflected back to us as a team as we were making the film. That process was really interesting and informative.

VERRONE: Because the project originated with us as producers from the beginning, this wasn’t configured as an auteur film, collaboration was necessary from the start. Except for music composition, each of the primary creative roles was held by two or more people. We had two directors, the two of us as lead producers, two cinematographers, and two main editors. Each project area had a built-in collaboration, which was extremely challenging but also rewarding because the project would not have worked from a singular perspective. After all, it's a group story– a group portrait about group dynamics.

And then there's the labor aspect. It often feels like independent documentary filmmaking is still stuck in this setup of a one-person band of a director who's also shooting, producing, editing, everything. They can work on their film as a passion project or hobby for years and pay for it on their own terms. So it’s challenging to have a large team that needs to be paid properly and consistently throughout their work, but we were committed to this and actually pulled it off. That's extremely rare.

Did you have all your funding raised before you started shooting?

CURLEY: No, we had development and early production money from the IDA development grant and equity from some friends and family who saw the vision for the film early on. We continued raising money as we went through production. We did raise the full film budget before the ALU won their union campaign in April 2022, which we were really proud of because they became overnight media sensations once they won. There was a lot of interest in their story and what they were doing and the fact that our funding solidified before that moment really spoke to the team and the vision we all had (funders included) for this story.

Did that include paying yourselves?

CURLEY: Yes. Funding is so hard right now so we feel incredibly honored and grateful that we had such robust support across the philanthropic documentary landscape to be able to pay ourselves. Everybody on the team was getting paid throughout production and the edit, which was really important. The struggle has been since the premiere. How do we raise money to pay ourselves for an independent release?

I would assume it's very challenging to make a movie about worker exploitation and then exploit your own crew, which happens on so many indie films.

CURLEY: The film industry needs to reckon with so many of the same questions that the workers in our film are reckoning with, like dignity in work, sustainability of livelihoods, being able to have a family, all of those things. We've discussed and felt all those pressures.

VERRONE: I also feel really proud that we maintained complete editorial control of the film. Often, the funding you access for indie films is either grants, which are highly competitive and have application processes that take months and months, so you risk the story passing you by if you are just waiting around for grant money. Or there are investors and companies who want the film to look or feel a certain way. That would have been a huge issue for us, so we were lucky to not have to make any kind of creative concessions in order to finance the film. All to say, it's hard to actively fund a film, pay everyone fairly, and maintain creative control.

So much of the film takes place in the parking lot across the street from the warehouse, how did you handle making the film when you didn’t have access to one of the central characters, Amazon?

VERRONE: In the film, you have undercover footage inside the warehouse that organizers recorded themselves. This is an important texture in the language of the film, because for us, interior visuals should only be captured from the workers' perspectives, not our production cameras. Otherwise, it suggests we got some form of brokered access into the warehouse that could only be permitted on Amazon’s terms. This kind of compromise discredits our whole perspective and goal with the film. Instead of attempting to gain interior access without production cameras, we focused entirely on the fascinating group dynamic happening just across the street. We had everything we needed at the organizing tent. The energy there was so electric and dynamic and we could just focus on the human relationships that are the core of this film.

CURLEY: Like any film, constraints and parameters are needed to find something beautiful and worth telling. And whatever you choose as your constraint then informs what kind of film you're making. And so we knew we had to commit to the tent. We had to be there because everything worth knowing would be in the small details. And you can't plan for those. It's not like someone could tell us a week in advance what would be happening that we would want to get on camera. The transformation of these workers and their organizing efforts in real time meant we had to commit to being there a lot, and that's largely fueled by the anxiety of whether we would get what we needed.

I launched the Producers Union several years ago and I often had to remind people that labor organizing takes a very long time. I'm wondering, from a production standpoint, how did you know when to end the film, when would you stop filming if the organizing continued indefinitely?

VERRONE: There is a parallel universe where this film doesn't have a triumphant ending. The workers submitted their petition for a union election at the end of the film's first act. Then, they have to withdraw because so many workers were fired or quit so their signatures didn’t count and thus the union fell short towards the required threshold for an election to be approved. The ALU could have just given up there and then we would have been in a tight spot as filmmakers because I don't know how interesting of a film that would be if they just ended things there. So, there was a lot of anxiety throughout production of wondering, will this actually continue? If they don't get to a certain stage of organizing, is there still a film?

CURLEY: We were pursuing other potential parts of the story because we didn't know if they would win or even get to an election. We did a ton of research and got far in the “labor consulting” industry, including a significant interview that we didn’t end up including in the final film. If they lost or didn't get to an election, there needed to be another element of the story that we were thinking about and pursuing in parallel. We didn't make the film because we thought they would win. So it was never about that. It was about how we document what politicizes a person and how labor and work can politicize us.

It's not easy to step up and lead an organizing effort against one of the largest companies in the world. Following Chris’ his emotional journey and the decisions he had to make as a leader was what I found most interesting - having to decide when you should just fight for yourself versus when you should fight for everyone else.

CURLEY: Chris talks about how he understood the weight of that decision because he was a manager. When he got fired, he could have only tried to sue the company for unfair labor practices without thinking about the workers more broadly. It's one of the most elusive and interesting things about Chris; it was like he understood he had a choice, but he also understood he would never go out for just himself.

You had the ideal Sundance premiere with a coveted slot in U.S. Documentary Competition, which unfortunately doesn't always translate into distribution. Since your premiere, you’ve taken on a robust distribution and impact campaign without a distributor and I’d like to know if you went into Sundance with that plan? How long did you wait for a distribution offer to come in after Sundance?

VERRONE: Throughout making the film, we were at a few different pitch forums and markets, which gave us an external perspective on our future distribution options and we would get a really mixed bag of feedback. Some would say, ‘Oh, this is a no-brainer. This is such an incredible project. It will be so easy for you guys,’ while others said, ‘No one will ever buy this film.’

The upside is that having mixed feedback meant we had some healthy skepticism throughout the process. No assumptions were made on our end that we would immediately get a deal out of Sundance. We always asked ourselves how we would get this film out into the world if we didn't have that kind of support behind us. Also, we always felt that impact was central to the film's distribution and life. So, when we were late into post-production, we reached out to impact producers to ensure that those steps were in place once we premiered and that work could begin immediately. After we premiered at Sundance, there was a bit of a waiting period just to see what might happen with a potential sale, and when it was clear there was no immediate interest, we didn't want to keep twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to come around. We were already set up to work with the impact-producing company Red Owl and we could jump into plans to get the film to unions and labor organizations we were already connected with.

CURLEY: We tried to go into Sundance with no expectations about selling the film and like Mars said, we knew that regardless of what happened, we would do our own impact campaign. But it's hard not to buy into the hype of getting a Sundance premiere and winning an award. We enjoyed great press coverage and people loved the film. However, we started to hear repeatedly from individuals how they loved the film, but yet their company would never go for it, or they could never sell it to their boss. So, we quickly said to ourselves, "Okay, we know how to do this. We will release it ourselves and build our way forward." We knew that unless a big streamer was interested right out of Sundance, this was our way forward. We're in such a weird time for the market and for getting distribution. If we can prove there's an audience for this film, who knows what could happen down the line?

VERRONE: And I would also emphasize that when we got hard or soft no's on the film, we were rarely given a tangible reason for it. We didn't get specific pieces of feedback to react to. It was just general no-go's and so we can only speculate on the reasons why.

CURLEY: We also understand that many amazing films have premiered at Sundance and other great festivals without getting distribution offers. But because of the nature of our film, we feel a good kind of pressure to show up for a different distribution path that does the film’s own story justice. And that's been really motivating. It's also really hard. For as little money as there is to independently make a film, there's far less to independently distribute one.

Speaking of that, you’ve just received a grant from Distribution Advocates new FilmADE Fund, but you’ve already been working on the release of the film all year, what’s left?

CURLEY: We did a theatrical release, which was extremely successful. We worked with Michael Tuckman and have a great publicity team. We've also collaborated closely with Jenny Raskin at Impact Partners and with Red Owl as we mentioned. So we've got a big team of people that are working on the film. We did our theatrical run in partnership with 250 community organizations in 20 cities nationwide. The film is doing great on the festival circuit. We just surpassed 80 festivals around the world. And thanks to the Distribution Advocates grant, we were able to do our own digital release on Black Friday, making the film available for anyone worldwide to rent online through the end of the year.

VERRONE: We're also excited to work with the Gather platform to release the film via community screenings and VOD because they have a new VOD feature where you can do affiliate marketing and profit share with partners. So, many of our labor partners such as the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), Jobs with Justice, the Labor Force, and more will be able to distribute the film and share profits with us.

We're thinking about the self-release in three phases. The first phase was formulating the plan. The second phase focused on the theatrical release, plus this limited streaming run with Gathr. Next year is the third phase, where we'll continue to build relationships with unions and when we really hope to open it up much more broadly, making the film available for different organizations to do all kinds of screenings. Our educational materials will be ready by then as well. So, yeah, we see a long life for the film!

What you're doing is so important for filmmakers to hear about because I believe this kind of approach is the future of distribution for independent film. Going to Sundance without any expectations and making a plan for your film outside of traditional distribution models was so smart, especially for this being both of your first feature films. If you had waited six months for a distribution offer to start strategizing a distribution plan, you wouldn’t be as far along as you are at this point.

CURLEY: Even with the lead-up we had, Well, we could have had six or 12 months more to plan and prepare. You need it because of how much work goes into distribution and how long it takes to build the kind of relationships you need to succeed. In some ways, I wish we had started even earlier.

This process has changed how I think about producing in terms of two tangible things: One is audience. The reason we're able to distribute the film successfully ourselves is because we clearly understand who our audience is – workers. And the other is planning for distribution as part of producing a film. As producers, especially in the documentary space, we know there isn't a clear transition or delineation from development to production and production to post. Each of those stages bleeds into and circles back to the others. And distribution is now part of that. You can and should be thinking about distribution as early as development because why not? You're thinking about who will edit the film before you start. Why wouldn't you think about how you will distribute it and build it into the budget, schedule, and workload? Those are two things that I wouldn't have known or hadn't really heard talked about when we started making the film in 2020. It's much more a part of the conversation now, and that's going to only benefit producers to have realistic expectations… and budgets!

Are you working towards award campaigns? What's the effort being put there? Because that can be very expensive.

VERRONE: We are doing an awards campaign. Because everything we're doing is so indie, we're trying to double and triple up on everything in the release campaign. So it's not only just basic distribution, but also impact and awards. And so it's cool because it means that we're not going about an awards campaign in a way that would conflict with the film's mission and philosophy. We're really trying to make sure that we're being as efficient and economic as possible with anything awards related. Still, it's really challenging to see the behind-the-scenes of what is required for a successful awards campaign and how it is obviously not designed at all for anyone doing an independent release. But I feel proud of how we're going about it.

I had a movie released almost 10 years ago called I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS that had what I thought was a small awards push for the lead actress Blythe Danner. However, when we audited our distributor several years later, I was shocked at the awards campaign price tag. I had no idea they had spent so much. And that was money that would have come back to the filmmakers, as we were already fully recouped from the Sundance sale of the film.

CURLEY: It's so expensive. I am glad we're doing it ourselves because that means that we are the ones leading the decision-making and process. We have eyes on everything from the budget to the strategy, which is so unique for producers, especially producers at this stage of our careers, to really see behind the curtain. We went into the decision to do an awards campaign knowing it was going to be a lot of work and a lot of money, but understanding that, because of the way the film was being received early on and the support it was getting, that it would be an injustice to the film, the team, and the workers not to see that through. The awards campaign has allowed us to get more visibility for the film, for independent distribution, for the labor movement overall, and that is meeting enough of our impact goals to justify doing the work (and spending the money). But that is unique to the circumstances of this film, and in and of itself, an awards campaign probably doesn't often meet your impact goals and you have to decide if it is worth the money and the unpaid labor that has to go into it.

You talked about how you didn't know each other at the start of this film and it’s so clear in talking to you that you have grown to have so much respect and admiration for each other, it’s really beautiful. What has made this partnership so successful?

CURELY: As complicated as co-directing is, I will never produce a film alone. Producing is way too much work, too many jobs, and is so isolating. No one is advocating for you on the project. If it weren't for our collaboration as producers, there's no way we could have made this film. The way a film gets made, the way your days feel while you're making a film, has to be worth it, and this collaboration has been the thing that has made it feel worth it day-to-day for me.

VERRONE: Workload-wise, especially for this film, it absolutely required two lead producers. So many psychological responsibilities came with producing this film; having a partner was so necessary. And as Sam said, it's hard to advocate for yourself as a producer, so having another person on the team made that really helpful.

I also think we're attracted to enough different parts of producing that we were able to distribute our labor in ways where we could each do the aspects of producing that we enjoyed most and that spoke to our strengths. I feel like I'm the introverted producer, and Sam is an extrovert, and I love that. I'm the one who will be in my room writing grants and not talking to anyone and Sam is the one making 20 calls a day.

CURLEY: I would work with Mars on anything forever and always. We aren't working on anything else outside of this project yet, but I can't imagine that not changing soon.

I produced several films with Laura Smith and while we worked very hard, we also made sure to celebrate all the wins, big and small, and I want to remind you to do the same. As you're in this moment right now, have fun together and go out to celebrate your achievements. What you've done is really hard on so many levels: You made a movie, an impossible feat, you got it into Sundance, another impossible feat, and you got it in front of audiences, which is the hardest thing to do. Each of these moments deserves celebration. And so if you haven't done enough of it yet, use the holidays to catch up on celebrating each other and all you have accomplished.