Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa

Women directors are making some of horror's best films. So why do the franchises keep going to men?

In Part 3 of our Unpacking Horror series, Fantastic Fest director Lisa Dreyer gives us her answer, and explains what it takes for a horror film to earn a spot at a festival that takes film and fun equally seriously.

A former special education teacher, Lisa joined the festival in 2018 as a volunteer on the pre-screening team, worked her way up to features programmer, and took over in 2022.

We talk about:

• Where she draws the line on what's too far to show, and why depiction doesn't equal endorsement
• Why she's seeing fewer submissions from women filmmakers this year, even with a majority-women team picking the films
• The story behind Fantastic Pitches, the $100K competition whose first winner, Play House, was just acquired by Focus Features.

She also shares how teaching shaped the way she treats every film, what gets a submission passed on fast, why Smile's uncompromising vision paid off, and why half the lineup comes from outside the U.S.

Catch up on the series:

• Part 1 with Jacob Chase, writer-director of Insidious: Out of the Further
• Part 2 with behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner.

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Horror is the least liked genre, and also the most loved. Behavioral scientist and horror producer Coltan Scrivner explains why there's almost no one in the middle. Coltan Scrivner is a psychologist at Arizona State University, a researcher with the Recreational Fear Lab in Denmark, creator of the Morbid Curiosity Scale, and author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.

He also founded the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and runs the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl.

In Part 2 of our Unpacking Horror series, Coltan gives us his definition of horror (it comes down to one word), pushes back on the idea that horror struggles on streaming, and explains why horror booms when it reflects what a generation is anxious about.

He also reveals which group scores highest on his morbid curiosity test and what haunted house operators understand about fear that filmmakers miss,. Plus: his pick for the best horror movie ever made, and why he doesn't think Get Out or Obsession will stand the test of time.

Take the Morbid Curiosity Scale: https://www.coltanscrivner.com/morbid...

Missed Part 1? Watch our conversation with Jacob Chase, writer-director of Insidious: Out of the Further.

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Jacob Chase made his first short film with friends and no money. Nine years later, he was handed the keys to one of horror's biggest franchises. Jacob also directed Come Play, four episodes of Peacock's The Girl in the Woods, and is now in prep for Sleepover with Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster.

And while he's done a ton of great press for Insidious: Out of the Further, he hasn't talked about much the decade before it, which is the part you know I love.

The TV pilot that collapsed days before shooting, the student loan debt that shaped every creative choice he made in his twenties, the Doritos Super Bowl commercial that won him just enough money to breathe again. In this conversation, Carolina and her pal Jacob go past the franchise talking points. We explore:

• Going from a four-minute short film called Larry to a phone call from Amblin
• The fear of repeating his own parents' patterns while directing a film about generational trauma
• How becoming a father reshaped what scares him.

Jacob also tells the story of pitching Insidious the way he first told it to Carolina over brunch, before any of it was real.

Can't wait to hear what you take away!

xx CG

Today we're serving you a special episode in collaboration with Latina Squad, the community of Latina executives launched by Christine Davila reshaping Hollywood.

Carolina sat down with three of her fellow squad members:

Julia Balleza (VP of Development and Programming, Blumhouse Television) Greta Fuentes (MACRO, where she started as Charles King's assistant the day he left WME to build the company), and Adriana Martínez Barrón (former Netflix exec, now running Stacey Abrams's production company Sage Works). We're also honored to feature Chika Igwilo, SVP of Development at FX, as our guest of honor.

Chika was awarded the Catalyst for Change award at the organization's second annual Creative Honors, recognizing her impact across two decades in the industry.

Together, we discuss the career-defining gambles they didn't see coming, what it actually means to advocate for a project no one else believes in yet, and what they hope the next generation inherits. I hope this convo fills your sails with wind!

MORE ON LATINA SQUAD www.latinasquad.com

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Adrien Rabago has spent 25 years dressing people in Los Angeles, from actresses on red carpets to brides finding "the dress" to two very famous soccer players who needed twelve jerseys instead of two, two days before the shoot.

She founded Adrien's Closet in 2009 to make elevated dressing accessible beyond celebrity circles, and in this conversation she pulls back the curtain on what styling actually looks like behind the glamour: the steaming, the pinning, the returns, the paperwork, and the constant last-minute fires that come with production work.

Carolina and Adrien actually go way back, one of those funny things that happens once you've been in LA for 20 years and your paths keep crossing. Carolina was thrilled to head into Adrien's Closet for her Tribeca looks, and Adrien even surprised her with an outfit for this very recording!

Experience the flowy fabulousness on YouTube!

Clothing can shape identity, confidence, and how we are perceived. It can absolutely change how you walk into a room. There's real research behind this, including the concept of "enclothed cognition," coined by Northwestern researchers in 2012, which explains how what we wear doesn't just signal something to the world, it actually changes how we think, perform, and feel about ourselves.

We also dig into the real difference between a stylist, a designer, and a costume designer, how wardrobe communicates trust or authority or struggle before an actor says a word, and why quiet luxury might really be a response to overwhelm. Adrien also opens up about dressing women through body changes, including postpartum, and what it means to help someone feel confident in a body they're still getting to know.

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CONNECT WITH ADRIEN https://www.adrienrabago.com/

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Sherry Thomas is one half of Bialy/Thomas & Associates, the casting powerhouse behind Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Walking Dead, The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, Barry, The Righteous Gemstones, Dead to Me, Apple TV+'s Sugar, and Broadway's Jersey Boys. She and Sharon have earned multiple Emmy nominations together across their 25-plus year partnership. Their most recent Emmy nom is for Apple TV+'s Pluribus, which is Vince Gilligan's follow-up to Breaking Bad.

It's a full-circle moment: Sherry and her partner Sharon Bialy are the team who first brought Bryan Cranston to Gilligan's attention nearly two decades ago.

In this episode, we go all the way back to New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where a girl obsessed with Donny and Marie and Three's Company had no idea she'd end up building an empire in casting. She landed in LA not knowing a single person. She slept on couches for two years. She worked retail at the Gap. And then, through a chain of small moments (a charity basketball game, a fundraiser, a woman named Victoria Burroughs) she found her way into a casting office and never looked back.

We dive into:

• Her first job as a location casting assistant on Contact
• Meeting her business partner Sharon Bialy at a Starbucks and building a 25-plus year partnership without ever putting anything in writing
• What she wishes every producer understood about working with casting directors
• Her honest, unfiltered take on AI in casting and what it means for actors
• How becoming a mom to two teenage daughters changed the way she sees ambition and grit

Sherry is candid, funny, and doesn't hold back, whether she's talking about the gritty early days or the future of our industry. This is a primer for building a career (and a business) on relationships, resilience, and staying true to who you are.

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Keep creating, keep hustling. And as always, thanks for doing this life with me. — C.

Dana Ledoux Miller ​is a shape shifting scribe. ​

S​he was PA'ing on Lost and The Descendants when she first said out loud that she wanted to be a writer. A decade later, she's co-written and co-directed Moana 2 and written Disney's live-action Moana, in theaters July 10 — becoming one of the ​f​ew Pacific Islander writers steering a major Disney IP. In this episode, we trace ​h​er full arc: from set life in Hawaii, to landing in Aaron Sorkin's writers' room on The Newsroom, to the surreal call that brought her onto Moana.

We talk about what it actually feels like to carry the weight of representation on a project this big — the pressure of getting it right, the imposter syndrome that hasn't fully gone away even after a billion-dollar movie, and how she handles public reaction to work she's poured herself into.

We also get into PEAK, the nonprofit she co-founded so she's not the only name on the list of Pacific Islander storytellers working in Hollywood.

Plus: desert island essentials, her favorite Hawaiian island, and what The Rock is actually cooking.

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What does it take to hike 26 miles at 14,000 feet with no signal, no Uber, and two of the funniest people alive?

We're about to find out.

Join me as I sit down with comedy legends Bob Odenkirk and David Cross at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival to discuss their documentary Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu — a film about friendship, mortality, and what happens when Hollywood strips away and the mountain shows you who you actually are.

Plus:

• Why David chose Bob for this — and why Bob almost said no
• How Bob's heart attack during Better Call Saul gave the whole journey a different kind of weight
• The moment the mountain cracked them both open — and what they found on the other side

Special thanks to Greenslate, Theorem Media, and Portrait for making this panel happen! Greenslate has been a longtime partner of AOP and it never gets old talking about the ways they have revolutionized production payroll and accounting for independent film. They had 22 projects at Tribeca this year and Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu was the one we chose to spotlight, via their client Left/Right.

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Colby Day is a breath of fresh air who refuses to be performative. In an industry that runs on heat and carefully curated perception, he just gives it to you straight. Day is an Emmy-nominated writer whose credits include the Netflix film "Spaceman" starring Adam Sandler and "In the Blink of an Eye," which premiered at Sundance this past year. He also served as a writer and story editor on Apple TV's For All Mankind season five.

He is also the creator of Hollyweird, a Substack where he documents the unglamorous reality of being a working writer in Hollywood with more honesty than almost anyone else in this business.

His directorial debut "The Comedy Hour "with Tim Heidecker and Tatiana Maslany is up next.

This was one of my favorite chats of the year so far. Colby and get super real about 10-year timelines, selling a show and watching it collapse, why transparency is a radical act in this industry, and what keeps us going when everything falls apart.

Tune in! xx CG

Post is where a movie becomes a movie. Where a TV show gets it's bells and whistles. The edit, the VFX, the color, the sound mix, the sound design, and everything in between. It's where everything comes together. And yet for years, California has had no standalone incentive to keep that work here.

In this episode I sit down with Marielle Abaunza, President of the California Post Alliance and EVP of Business Development at Signature Post, to talk about AB 2319, the proposed standalone post-production tax incentive that could be game changer in helping keep jobs in LA. We get into:

• How we took Hollywood for granted and where we go from here.
• How 1,800 post jobs have been lost since 2012 and what that actually means for working crew.
• What AB 2319 does and why the "shoot anywhere, finish in California" model is the shift the industry needs.
• How New York netted $47 million in state revenue from post credits in a single quarter

The people this bill protects are not Hollywood elites. They are editors and sound designers and post producers trying to log enough hours to qualify for health care. This is a movement. And there is not a lot of time.

Go to www.californiapostalliance.org to join, donate, or submit a letter of support for AB 2319. Legislators read those letters. Your story matters!

Angle on Producers spotlights the magic makers in Hollywood. Hosted by Emmy-nominated producer Carolina Groppa, the show goes beyond the highlight reel to explore the craft, challenges, and unfiltered truths behind one of Hollywood's most essential, and often misunderstood, roles.

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