Nicolas Wendl shot a horror feature in his co-director's apartment for $7,000 and it ended up on the CW.

Nicolas (director of STUPID GAMES, Chapman grad, half French / half German) sits down with James and BJ to break down how he and co-director Danny turned a no-budget apartment shoot into a movie that trended in Tubi's top five horror titles, out-marketed studio campaigns with nothing but their own TikToks, and became the calling card that got him his next feature.

Also: why every effect in the movie is in-camera, the magnets hidden under a board game, the real reason for the green M&Ms, Shannon Doherty's first-ever on-screen death, practical effects vs. aging CGI, a shark-movie bucket list, the dolphin HGTV pitch nobody asked for — and five straight minutes of Jim Carrey being personally responsible for the Mandela Effect.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

— WATCH STUPID GAMES —
Streaming on Tubi and the CW · rent or buy on Prime · also
Or just Google "stupid games" — the marketing worked that well.

— FOLLOW NICOLAS —
@nicolaswendl on all socials

— THE TRACKSUIT PODCAST —
Hosted by James Cullen Bressack & BJ Hendricks
Produced by Bent Wrist Productions

## Jeremy O'Keefe — Casting, Directing & the Bold Choice

Jeremy O'Keefe — casting director, producer, director, acting coach, and tracksuit convert — sits down with James and BJ to pull back the curtain on how the indie film casting machine really works. From assembling the stacked ensemble on *Boris is Dead* to landing Anthony Hopkins for his feature casting debut *Eyes in the Trees*, Jeremy breaks down the philosophy behind great auditions, why actors sabotage themselves by over-planning, and what it feels like to finally step back into the director's chair after 15 years for his passion project *The Avoidant*.

**Key topics:**
- Casting *Boris is Dead*: targeting 90s names, writing personal letters to actors, and why almost every role was a recognizable face
- The Mindy Sterling "sadly passed" email incident that convinced everyone she was dead
- Jimmy Duvall — 12 years of friendship finally landing in the right role
- Jeremy's Meisner-adjacent acting technique: getting out of your brain, into your gut, and making your scene partner matter
- Why over-rehearsed auditions tank on set — and how James spots it by throwing adjustments mid-read
- BJ's Glee audition: nailed the choreography, lost the role to his own tattoos
- Jeremy's shirtless Rallies Burger commercial audition dancing to Nelly — his most humiliating moment
- In-person vs. self-tape: why bringing actors back into the room had them crying with gratitude
- Landing Anthony Hopkins for *Eyes in the Trees* and learning the producing side of star attachments
- *The Avoidant* — Adam Goldberg leads; shooting in Delaware; Jeremy directing for the first time since 2011
- The Dregs (dir. Connor Martin) and chasing Freddie Prinze Jr. across two sitcoms
- James's 100+ tracksuit collection, COVID origin story, and the Emmy tux incident
- LA Metro life, Waymo shoutouts, and how Silver Lake is starting to feel like Astoria
- Networking events, giving vs. getting, and why being useful is the real career strategy

Kay Day — writer, director, actress, musician, Coyote Ugly veteran, Gloppy the gorilla, and the only person to escape a Brooklyn satanic naked shroom party by borrowing a stranger's clothes — takes over a host seat for a full Tracksuit first. James and BJ dig into her $7,000 debut found-footage horror film *There's a Man Over There*, five rounds of rehab (she hit on the EMT en route to number five), eight years of punk rock chaos at Arlene's Grocery in NYC, the viral Bowser thirst trap, ghost stories that actually scared us, and a remarkably open conversation about living with bipolar disorder. Plus: the satanic Brooklyn basement, Gloppy's origin story, Bears vs. Karen, and the Coney Island acid-trip movie she's already writing.

Find Kay Day: @kraykayday on Instagram

## Peter Jae — Wrenches, Van Damme & Finding Your Voice Peter Jae — actor, stunt performer, K-Town institution, and the guy who carried The Workout on his back — rolls into the Tracksuit for a wide-ranging conversation about grinding through New York, breaking into Hollywood, and what it actually feels like to finally be the lead. **Key topics covered:** - Growing up in the Bronx, LaGuardia High School for the Arts, and ditching menswear design after reading *The Alchemist* on the subway - The New York hustle: bouncing at night, student films during the day, going days without sleep to feed a calling - How the death of two close friends pushed him to move to L.A. — and learning to drive at 28 as the world's worst Asian stereotype on the road - *K-Town Cowboys* — the viral web series that accidentally became a voice for Asian American representation before Asian content existed - **Darkness of Man** (Hulu): playing the main villain, meeting JCVD for the first time mid-monologue with Todd standing in, and shooting the final scene on day one - **The Workout** (Tubi): being handed 16 pages and a lead role, the wrench moment in the strip club scene, 20-camera setups, and the closed-down hospital Manhunt sessions - The April Fool's hospital bed prank that cost him friendships - Josh Kelly double-dipping between *General Hospital* and *The Workout* on the same days - **Black Hat** with Michael Mann and Chris Hemsworth: nearly losing his teeth on a table stunt, and Thor giving him a hug in the K-Town parking lot in front of everyone who doubted him - **Olympus Has Fallen**, meeting stunt legend Simon from *Best of the Best*, and how the stunt world runs on relationships - James training with a Golden Gloves coach for the Fantastic Fest boxing match and cornering with a UFC fighter - Working with Mel Gibson, Kevin Dillon (who knows everyone's lines), and Shannon Doherty on *Hot Seat* - Peter's original drama script inspired by the Bronx, and why he wants to write the stories he needed as a kid - Advice to aspiring actors: know your authentic voice, don't get lost in the smoke, and remember you're playing pretend for a living - *The Workout* officially turned a profit — checks incoming

RJ Cooper — Osmosis, Oners, and Editing Three Movies at Once

James's longtime editing partner and secret weapon RJ Cooper finally sits down in front of a camera. A USC film school grad who started out designing posters for Batman Begins and Spider-Man, RJ has cut the bulk of James's directing filmography — Survive the Game, Hot Seat, Fortress, Darkness of Man, The Workout, Boris is Dead, and I Have Proof — and the two have developed a creative shorthand that borders on telepathy. This one gets into the real craft: how editors read footage, fight for the film alongside the director, and keep the heart of a movie alive when producers start circling.

Key topics & highlights:

• How RJ and James developed their editing language across seven-plus films — and why the first cut keeps getting closer to what James actually wanted
• The frame-blending trick born on The Workout and the Star Wars–style wipe transitions RJ snuck into Boris is Dead over James's objections (and won)
• Hot Seat's unique challenge: building fake computer screens for Kevin Dillon to react to and fighting for every stock helicopter shot
• Why The Workout's extreme multi-camera chaos (15 cameras, cell phones, angles James didn't know he had) ended up changing the way both of them shoot and cut forever
• Editing three feature films simultaneously — and how he keeps the worlds straight
• Reading a director's signature: James = performance + action + dark humor; Matt Eskandari = relationships; John Keyes = women against impossible odds
• Actors who gave him gold he had to leave on the cutting room floor: Antonio Banderas and Alice Eve
• RJ's most panic-inducing job: Hot Seat, with its blank monitor problem
• His first feature: Game of Assassins shot in China with Bai Ling
• Three Bruce Willis films with Matt Eskandari
• Pre-production involvement on Boris is Dead — hired before cameras rolled, suggesting shots and knowing the film needed heavy needle drops from day one
• Music as craft: temp tracks (Dark Knight, Interstellar, always Sicario), playing the edit like an instrument, and using his wife as a fresh-eyes test audience
• AI in post: Night Driver as a real-world test case, AI ADR via ElevenLabs, the color-space limitations of AI-generated visuals right now, and why storytelling with a point of view is the only real moat
• RJ's directorial ambitions: sci-fi (loves Denis Villeneuve), Westerns (already collecting sound effects just in case), and James's on-the-record promise to produce his first feature
• James's $7,000 first-film program and the indie model (No Stars, $200K budget, $4.5M at AMC with no P&A)
• UFOs, Tesla life, Gerald the Dolphin, and alien cinema (Blurp 3 is apparently the masterpiece)

Find RJ: rjcooperfilms.com | @rjcooperfilms on Instagram

James brings his big sister Samantha Sellars onto the podcast — curriculum manager by day, BookTok evangelist by night — and the result is an hour of family chaos: the graduation purse cigarette ambush, a toddler-James getting tricked by Toy Story walkie talkies, how Sam accidentally introduced her boyfriend to extreme M/M torture fiction, and whether 300 years of alien luxury living is worth getting eaten at the end.

Watch on Youtube: Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Kelly Lynn Ryder -  (actress/producer, Deadlock, Complex Texas, The Leader) sits down with James and BJ for a wide-ranging conversation about building a career entirely on her own terms — no reps, no fallback plan, no safety net, and apparently no Die Hard. Kelly and James have worked elbow-to-elbow producing Complex Texas and The Leader (a Heaven's Gate biopic that just got into Tribeca), and this episode is part industry masterclass, part warm roast of someone who sprinted to South Georgia at 5:36 p.m. for a last-minute Bruce Willis recast. 

Key Topics

• From quantity to quality: why Kelly went from saying yes to 95% of jobs to producing her own projects — and how cultivating financing relationships became her leverage 
• The Deadlock call: getting phoned by director Jared Cohon at 5:36 p.m. and driving to South Georgia overnight for a three-and-a-half-week lead role opposite Bruce Willis — while her mom read the script to her on Bluetooth 
• Bruce Willis from Friends: Kelly's now-legendary confession that she knew Willis primarily as a recurring guest on Friends, not from Die Hard 
• Slotherhouse: the killer-sloth Tubi movie where an American sorority house doubled for the Serbian royal palace 
• The first Deadline mention: sitting at Grumpy Grizzly coffee shop in upstate New York with her grandmother when the notification hit — and sobbing into her cup 
• Producing Complex Texas: first full producing credit alongside James, including James knocking himself out cold taking a baseball bat to the head (one take, one piece of sugar glass, one dented car)
• Kevin Dillon on set: powering through illness for every take, running lines with the full cast, staying for everyone's coverage — and Kelly not knowing who Johnny Drama was until halfway through filming 
• The crab bucket theory: why success creates enemies and why you have to build your own table 
• The Leader at Tribeca: the Heaven's Gate biopic Kelly co-financed and acts in, with Joel David Moore's Balcony Nine and director Michael Gallagher 
• Wes Craven's advice: the people who make it aren't the most talented — they're the ones who don't quit 
• James's knuckle tattoo: deliberately making himself unemployable in restaurants to remove every possible exit from filmmaking 
• The go bag: always packed by the door since Deadlock, ready to drive to Georgia at any moment 
• Advice for aspiring actors: outlast everyone, say yes to the rooms the universe opens, and remove every escape route

David Lawrence — Cancer, Cannes, and a Fake Australian Accent

David Josh Lawrence (actor, writer, producer, acquisitions at Studio Dome / Bloodstream TV) pulls up a chair in the most eventful tracksuit session yet. What starts as a conversation about his self-produced passion project *Lincoln Must Die* quickly spirals into a deeply honest — and deeply funny — account of how he actually got here: surviving non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at 16, becoming a firefighter in San Bernardino, finding acting through exposure therapy, and learning to write scripts because the 2007 WGA strike shut everything else down.

Topics & highlights:

• Lincoln Must Die — how David pitched the story from nothing at Cannes, waited five years, and finally got it made in a month with indie collaborators Leanne Bauer, David Mitchell Park, and Mario Garcia Duenas
• Cancer at 16 — non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the Make-A-Wish negotiation (Jackie Chan was busy, Jet Li was busy, Britney Spears was apparently doable), and why surviving it made everyone else's excuses hard to tolerate
• Firefighting & exposure therapy — how anxiety attacks on medical calls in San Bernardino led him to a therapist who told him he was actually just an actor
• The Australian accent arc — faking a full Aussie identity to book a role, accidentally getting signed by an agent, booking Bundaberg rum and Outback Steakhouse commercials, and the moment it all unraveled at a client mixer
• Breaking into distribution — filling in for a no-show at the American Film Market and getting offered an acquisitions job by the end of the day; working with mentor Tom Malloy
• Why you shouldn't put your indie film on IMDb too early — a genuinely useful breakdown of how festival dating kills your international sales window
• Complex Texas, I Have Proof, and the buddy-cop-with-a-monkey movie — the ongoing collaborations between David, James, and BJ
• Weed brownies, alien theories, and the case for just going out and making your movie already

Jessica Russo — Sales Agent, Producer, Hat Assassin Jessica Russo (VMI Worldwide / Vantage Media) joins the tracksuit table for a genuinely rare perspective: the sales and distribution side of indie filmmaking.

She and James have collaborated on a string of films — including Darkness of Man (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, currently on Hulu) — and BJ just wrapped The Night Driver with her. So the war stories are real, the industry takes are sharp, and yes, the dolphin kidnapping story is discussed at length. 

### Key Topics 

• How the indie market has shifted — quality over quantity, the death of easy pre-sales, and why the financial model for indie films has fundamentally changed post-strikes 
• The Van Damme hat story — how Jess saved the *Darkness of Man* poster on day one of filming by killing James's fedora
• Library acquisitions & consolidation — Netflix/Paramount, Gravitas/Shout, Chicken Soup for the Soul/Redbox/Screen Media, and what it all means for indie filmmakers
• AVOD vs. SVOD — why ads came full circle and what Tubi's rise means for the market
• What actually gets greenlit — script, team, name, and financials that make sense in today's landscape
• Delivery schedules — the unglamorous paperwork mountain that filmmakers are never taught about in film school
• Film school vs. real-world training — why internships and networking beat most curricula
• The Sex Pistols documentary — Billy Idol cameos, Glenn Matlock, and a Netflix sale 
• Jess's first producing credit — Awake (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Francesca Eastwood), shot in Oklahoma during tornado season
• Crystals, tarot, D&D, and Harry Potter — the full nerd profile of the most organized person at VMI
• Aliens, Mayan temples, elongated heads, and one architect allegedly kidnapped by dolphins (James later discovers it was an April Fools story — BJ chooses to believe it anyway)
• Advice for aspiring filmmakers — read a delivery schedule, do an internship, go to networking events, be a good person 

> Want a delivery schedule? Reach out to Jess and tell her you're coming from the Tracksuit Pod.

Today’s guest is our good friend, the incredibly talented actor, singer, and artist, Justin Cornwell!  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to hit that SUBSCRIBE button and leave a comment below! Justin sits down to share wild stories from his decade-long run working consecutively in network and studio television. He talks about his nerve-wracking audition process for Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, improvising a scene with Dave Chappelle and Wesley Snipes, and acting alongside Tom Hardy in the upcoming Netflix film Havoc. He also reflects on starring in Training Day with the late Bill Paxton and surviving intense 16-hour days on set.  Plus, we dive into Justin's hidden talents—from his killer karaoke skills and spot-on impressions to his jaw-dropping portrait art. We also discuss his new indie film Million Dollar Bet (releasing on April 30th), the crazy world of prediction gambling apps like Polymarket and Kalshi, and his dream of starring in a triumphant biopic.