In this inaugural episode of What's Wrong with Hollywood, I sit down with filmmaker Alex Rollins Berg, an award-winning writer-director, NYU Tisch professor, and writer of the Substack newsletter Underexposed.

In our full conversation, we cover:

🎭 Why "humanize don't moralize" - How being preachy and didactic in storytelling alienates audiences who are already allergic to message-driven content

🌱 The biodiversity crisis in Hollywood - Why bringing back small and mid-tier budget movies is essential for a healthy entertainment ecosystem instead of the current monocrop model

💌 The art of indie outreach - Specific tactics for reaching talent and financiers, from providing comps and case studies to writing heartfelt letters that explain the "why" behind your project

🚢 Why traditional Hollywood feels like boarding a sinking ship - How the wrong people now control studios, running them like tech companies while shutting out original voices who aren't nepo-babies

📱 The Luke Barnett breakthrough model - How a filmmaker got rejected from every major festival, released his short online, gained millions of views, and now gets to make his movie

🎬 Building your own studio from scratch - Establishing a strong house style and brand identity, exploring hybrid crowdfunding models like Eli Roth's approach, and ditching antiquated marketing techniques

Full Transcript Below:

Jon Stahl: Hi everyone. Welcome to the inaugural episode of What's Wrong with Hollywood, where I talk to professionals from Hollywood and the Creator economy on how to improve the entertainment industry and seek their guidance on building a new type of entertainment studio.

That's a mouthful. I'll work on that. The very first guest on our show is filmmaker Alex Rollins Berg. Alex is an award-winning writer and director based in New York City. He's the winner of the Blacklist and Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Fellowship for his writing. He has written, directed, and produced for brands like Vanity Fair, BBC America, and Proctor and Gamble, and teaches at NYU Tisch, focusing on screen acting, development, and production.

He also publishes the popular Substack newsletter Underexposed where he dissects cinema culture, which I highly recommend to all four of my listeners. Alex, welcome.

Alex Rollins Berg: Thank you, Jonathan. It's a pleasure to be here on this maiden voyage. Thank you for having me.

Jon Stahl: We're gonna be learning in real time. It's all happening now, and we'll figure it out. Thank you again so much for joining. First things first, gotta start with the question at the top. What is wrong with Hollywood?

Alex Rollins Berg: Well, that's a rich vein to tap into. I always reach for analogies and I think Hollywood used to be like a vineyard, where the focus was on cultivating quality over time. And I think what's happened in recent decades is that it's become more like an industrial monocrop farming situation where we're optimizing for yield but not necessarily taste.

And how that came to be, I think in my estimation is that over time due to various factors such as deregulation and corporate consolidation, these larger conglomerates have come to take ownership over studios. And with that, I think the guiding principles of Hollywood have shifted away from quality storytelling and toward more quarter by quarter profit.

I'm not the first to observe that, but I think that's at the heart of the issue. I think that coupled with the phenomenon of the blockbuster has been both great and terrible for Hollywood. Starting in about the mid seventies and extending into our current era, blockbusters have expanded the scope of what people think is possible in terms of profitability.

And that's been true. That coupled with the emergence of new film going markets like China, it's amazing to consider that China in particular, back in 2005, their market was the size of Switzerland and now they're the largest movie going market in the world. That's an incredible growth. And I think that has affected the types of films that Hollywood wants to make and their incentives for making them. And now of course, that's in flux with the current trade war situation. So these kinds of influences for both good and bad ways have changed the nature of Hollywood over time.

Another thing that's happened is that the people that run the studios have changed over from people that appreciate the art of making films along with the art of commerce, which are both legitimate. It is a business, it is show business, and they've gone over into strictly people that think in terms of business and people that want to protect their jobs in the short term and make money in the short term. So to reach back into an agricultural analogy, I would say it's a little bit like slash and burn agriculture where you're just making as much money quarter by quarter that you can perhaps at the expense of the long-term health of the industry and the field.

So that's a long way of saying that's my personal armchair analysis of what's wrong with Hollywood at the moment.

Jon Stahl: I love the farming analogy. Have you thought about ways to return to that more organic model, so to speak, or cultivate a new way of doing things?

Alex Rollins Berg: Yeah, let me see if I can extend the analogy to the idea of biodiversity. You've got a situation where you have an ecosystem of movie makers, large and small, kind of like any kind of ecosystem. And what has happened is it's just become dominated by one large species. And the ecosystem then just ultimately inevitably suffers, dwindles and dies.

When there's no smaller fish to eat, there's no medium fish to eat. All of these medium sized players that we might have grown up loving the movies that they made in the mid-market, mid-tier range have all been absorbed or collapsed in the face of these larger beings. And I think what needs to happen is the same thing that needs to happen in the case of those situations is that we need to encourage more biodiversity to come back and make the place more vibrant and diverse in terms of smaller budget movies and mid-tier movies. I mean, I think that's what's gonna resuscitate and revive the industry. How that happens is anyone's guess, but it's just untenable the way that we've been going.

I think everybody is slowly starting to realize that and so it's pretty inevitable that something's gonna happen. We just don't know quite what.

Jon Stahl: Yeah. That leads to the next question. You teach at NYU Tisch and you have students who have not yet been exposed to the industry. What about the experience of teaching these students has made you hopeful about the future of filmmaking?

Alex Rollins Berg: Oh, it's made me hopeful about so many things. I have to tell you that one of the weirdest, strangest surprises of my life is how fulfilling and mutually beneficial teaching has been. I think everybody should know that, especially people in the creative industries. It's just amazing the kind of things you can learn from younger generations and the enthusiasm and energy, the creative energy you can absorb from them is amazing.

I started teaching there in earnest around fall of 2021, and I came into the situation with all of the negative, cynical prejudices that you would expect of an elder millennial stepping into a nest of Zoomers. Like this is a bunch of iPad babies or whatever.

And I couldn't be more wrong. We walk around with these glowing ideas of the greatest generation, right? And the reason why we think of the Greatest Generation as great is because they survived all this adversity. They survived the war. They started victory gardens. They made sacrifices, and through that they became stronger people. And we admire them. Well, who is surviving more adversity than the current generation of Zoomers? I mean, look at what they're up against. It's incredible. It's unprecedented. And I think we need to acknowledge, and I had to personally acknowledge seeing it firsthand.

There were times when I was trying to make movies with these guys at the height of the pandemic, and we weren't even allowed to roll camera without masks on, without us leaving the room. I would have to roll the camera, leave the room, shoot one side of a scene with one actor, unmasked, come back in, shoot the reverse, all sorts of crazy shit like that was going on.

And yet these students, not once did they really complain, they all just rolled with it. And so I think the thing that we're not really thinking about with them is how adaptable they really are. And how strong they must be becoming in the face of all this adversity. And we've gotta give them props for that and find ways to do what we can to give them the benefit of the privileges of how we were raised, both by exposing them to great movies and TV, showing them that there's a world outside of all the stuff that they've been fed through algorithms, because they're certainly capable of appreciating it, and they're certainly capable of generating really fresh and amazing creative work.

Jon Stahl: So you mentioned the idea of algorithms feeding content to this generation. How would you say Gen Z Zoomers are leveraging the technology they have at their disposal to tell the kinds of stories that you'd like to see come back?

Alex Rollins Berg: I wish I felt they were. I think that they have the capability of it. They might be doing it, and I'm just unaware, but I just think that there's this thing of a lot of bad incentives have been created through the nature of these new platforms.

I think we're all dimly aware of it at the very least, and we're becoming more and more acutely aware of it day by day almost. To a point that I think we're reaching a breaking point, where people are tired of it and people are, especially of that generation who have been raised with it, are becoming kind of disillusioned with it.

And they could speak to this obviously more accurately than I could, but I think they've become a little bit disenchanted with the cycle of content creation and all the ugly and narcissistic incentives they've been forced into, literally forced into. So I think we're at a point where maybe people a little older than them, if they're willing to listen to us, we could maybe provide a little bit of insight of what the world might look like based on what it used to look like.

So once those two things come together, I think incredible things could happen.

Jon Stahl: I love that. Now you and I have different views on the word content. I did read both you and Ted Hope have spoken about this in the past. Tell me why you think the word doesn't serve us well.

Alex Rollins Berg: Good question. I think the word has its purpose. It's not that we shouldn't use the word at all. I think the word applies to the stuff that we encounter online, it's very useful. It's more marketing. It's about sharing ideas, wisdom, thoughts, all that stuff in various multimedia formats that is content.

I think that where we run into trouble is when we start to apply the word to everything. Like if we apply the word content to fine arts and filmmaking, it's just a different animal. To me it has different goals than content does. Content is a lot in my mind about self-promotion and dissemination of information, tips, that kind of stuff.

It's a different thing. It's perfectly fine, legitimate, useful to pursue a career in content, but what we get into trouble when we blur those lines. I think about the way that in the world of healthcare doctors have started to be called providers. And I think that there's a nefarious incentive underneath that.

And it has to do with the people at the top, the people who are in the financial, capital markets trying to devalue the worth of a doctor by calling them a provider as a tool to drive down their value in the marketplace. And I'm worried about content applied to film and television work for that reason.

Jon Stahl: I understand your perspective a bit more, hearing that. So you are not just a teacher, you're also a screenwriter and a director. Talk about your own writing. What type of writing are you drawn to and why?

Alex Rollins Berg: Yeah, good. Thank you for asking. I'm a screenwriter. I'm really drawn to contemporary stories that aim to, this is my little mission statement, humanize not moralize. I'm really turned off by work that aims to sort of drive home a message or be didactic in some way. I think most people are pretty allergic to that at this point. We're all hip to it. But I don't think that means abandoning any kind of moral content. I think that work that aims to stir up a conversation or address these uncomfortable truths that aren't maybe addressed, but do so through the filter of genre or entertainment to make stories that are both meaningful and entertaining.

That to me is the intersection where I want my work to live, and that's where I aim. It's not easy because to talk about the world these days is tricky. It's a tricky target to hit because the target keeps moving and for that reason, I think a lot of people, a lot of screenwriters, a lot of filmmakers fall the retreat into the comforts of nostalgia or fantasy, which are fine, but for me are just not areas of interest. I really wanna do stuff. It's so hard to do. Everybody listening to this knows it's so hard to make movies and to make any kind of script come to life, to be produced. So my own personal taste and preferences aim at things that I feel like I can be proud of both as an object of entertainment and as something that I can say, I really said something that other people weren't saying, or that a million people haven't already said better than me. So that's a tough bar to clear, but it's what I aim for.

Jon Stahl: I like that. And I also appreciate the idea of you can explore a theme and explore character's humanity without being preachy is what I took from that.

Alex Rollins Berg: Mm-hmm.

Jon Stahl: When we spoke last, you mentioned the idea of perfectionism getting in the way of actually doing the work. What tips do you have to move forward and make progress without letting perfectionism get in the way?

Alex Rollins Berg: That's a really tough one. I think the best thing you can do is try to impose on yourself a schedule that emphasizes process over result. I think we live in a society culture that really lionizes results and really diminishes process. And that's more and more the case as we get closer and closer to AI. AI completely deletes process.

And that's a danger because the thing that I have learned over time is that the victories that you get from results are fleeting and few and kind of hollow when compared to the joy that you experience when you get together with a bunch of friends or collaborators and make something. You realize, I think if you get the opportunity to do that, how much more fun and fulfilling making stuff is than the actual result. The actual result is actually kind of abstract when you reach it. It really is about the journey. It's cheesy but true. It really is about the people and the journey and that anyway is for me what I do this for, what I suffer through the life of a creative for is to just the chance to collaborate with people and be on set and goof around and make discoveries. That's what I live for.

If you can realize that, you need to be making things now. You shouldn't just be sitting around planning or waiting for permission. You need to jump in and do something now with the tools that you have. A lot of us spend a lot of our days, myself included, on these devices, these smartphones, complaining about the death of our industry when you could just flip it over and notice that there are lenses on the back of this that are capable of shooting 4K video.

How crazy is that? I mean, that was not true a very short period of time ago. And I think that the more of us that wake up to the fact that we just need to be picking up those devices and using them to create rather than to complain, myself included, the better off we're gonna be, and the sooner we're gonna be better off.

Jon Stahl: I love that. Last time that we spoke, we also discussed pitching your project, putting your project out in the world. How do you think about getting something made if you're not already an established filmmaker with the backing of a major studio?

Alex Rollins Berg: Yeah, I will confess something to you, Jon, that this is the area I think I struggle with to this day the most. And I will just share with you, not from my successes, but from my failures and shortcomings.

Jon Stahl: Your challenges.

Alex Rollins Berg: Yeah, my challenges. You have to embrace it. Because the fact is, you already have a no from everybody that you're not reaching out to. So you might as well just swallow your pride and try to reach out to people. But when you're reaching out to people, there are a couple little nuggets I've picked up along the way that I can share with the audience here.

I think that there's a tendency, I'm speaking from experience, that artists and imaginative people, creative people assume that everybody has the same powers of imagination that they do. And when you're talking to the people with money, you have to come to them. You have to meet them where they are, and they don't spend their days daydreaming about creative projects, and as a result, they might not have the imaginative faculties that you might expect them to. So you need to be aware, first of all, that you really need to strengthen your message and speak their language. And what does that mean? That means embracing the ideas of providing comps, doing the research to provide case studies of projects that are similar to yours that have done well, and perhaps if you can, reaching out to line producers to make budgets for your short, for your films. Because that goes a long way in their eyes. That communicates that you're serious and that you understand that this is a business and this needs to be a real thing.

And it just paints a clearer picture and speaks their language basically. So those are a couple things to think about when putting together your decks and learning to craft your message.

Jon Stahl: How do you get others to trust your vision?

Alex Rollins Berg: Same idea, really. But again, if we're screenwriters, right, we have to get in the practice of stepping into another person's mind and experience. So if you can think about it that way, both for the financiers and for possible talent, you have to think about it from their perspective fully and think about what's gonna make this feel special to them and where are they coming from.

So I think one thing I would say to always remember is to reach out to them on a human level and with a deep knowledge of the work that they've done before. I think that goes a long way. I've seen a lot of people, and I think I've made this mistake myself in the past, of reaching out to people generically, kind of like spray and pray method.

I think you really owe them a really heartfelt, thoughtful letter when you're submitting something for their consideration, that demonstrates a deep knowledge of who they are, where they've been, and why you think that this project is good for them. It sells the project on their terms. A deeper investigation of that, I think leads to better results typically when reaching out.

Jon Stahl: Cool. I love that. So if you were building a studio from the ground up and you didn't have access to resources, apart from maybe a few connections, how would you approach that challenge?

Alex Rollins Berg: It's a very good question. I'm creative, but I'm not a genius business mind, but I will contribute what I have. I did think about this because Ted Hope posed this question. How would you dream up a studio?

So I did come up with some bullet points. I will share those with you now. Take them for what they're worth. I said to him, first of all, to establish a strong house style and development model. I think that's exciting. I think a lot of people step into the idea of making a studio just with whatever hits first, or I want to be all things to all people. I think as a creative, and I think as someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, that's probably not a winning strategy. So I would strive to create a strong brand identity, first of all.

And then secondly, I would be curious about exploring the concepts that Eli Roth is exploring right now with his model. He's a horror director who's had a lot of success and he's just set up a new studio that combines crowdfunding with private investment and it allows people that are fans of the genre and of him and what he's trying to do to be stakeholders in the projects. And I think that there's a lot of excitement there that could yield some really interesting results in the next decade or so. So I don't know how realistic that is, but that's got me excited.

Thirdly, I think we need to confront the fact that marketing is really antiquated and inefficient and expensive, and I think people that are gonna succeed in the future are gonna ditch certain, played out marketing techniques broadcast commercials and stuff and get more creative with it, especially if you're just starting out.

I think having merchandise and unusual ways to get in front of people that could be interested in your movie are gonna be really important and also just to make it valuable again. I think streaming has had a lot of really great effects to make things more convenient and accessible. But I think at the expense of the specialness of film and even thinking back to the era of DVD and Blu-ray, I just remember how exciting it was to actually hold the object in your hand and see the artwork and delve into the bonus features and buy the soundtrack on vinyl or on CD or whatever.

And I think to just restore some of that mystique, one way or another would go a long way to making it a worthwhile enterprise.

Jon Stahl: Yeah. That really speaks to me. You clearly have a passion for, I mean if you've read Underexposed, which if you haven't, I highly suggest you do, you will definitely come to understand Alex's deep appreciation for cinema in all forms. It's a really exciting publication to read, and gets me excited about the future of film. Last question, how do you think about the distribution of creative talent? What gaps or inefficiencies do you see in the marketplace between creatives and buyers, and how can people get exposed to the people with the checkbooks?

Alex Rollins Berg: Yeah, it's a good question and it kind of goes full circle, doesn't it? The first question is what's wrong with Hollywood, and how has it changed over the years? I think we're in a very, we're in a nadir. It's just a situation where the wrong people, in my opinion, have come into control and they're trying to run the business like a tech company, just another asset class.

I just don't think that film and TV really works that way. I think audiences demand novelty, demand originality. Maybe not always, but I think in the long term you can expect them to want to see some changes. And I think we've been locked in this era where people that are financing film and TV are thinking like accountants and they're looking at the data that streamers accumulate and they're thinking, okay. This worked in the past. This is a safe bet. So more of that, more of that, more of that, and I think it's shut out a lot of original voices, a lot of voices of people that deserve a seat at the table, but aren't nepo babies or aren't intimately connected in the system.

The good news for those people is that the way that things are right now, I believe, is untenable. That we are approaching a point when all of that is going to collapse or be forced to change. And I think that you can situate yourself best by, again, I'm gonna reiterate what I said before, producing what you can with what you've got now to demonstrate to those people that you're there, you're ready, your vision is clear and you can execute.

'Cause that's what holds them back. I think that's the friction between getting something made and getting something noticed and just getting ignored. I'll give you one little example. There's a filmmaker named Luke Barnett that some of you might be aware of. He's active on Twitter or whatever we're calling it these days, and he made a short film, 11 minute short film called The Crossover Express that got rejected from every single major festival. He released it online, it got millions of views. And now he gets to make the movie. And meanwhile, if you compare that to the experience of these people that are really lucky enough to get their film in these legacy film festivals or whatever, maybe they have prestige, whatever that's worth, which is a separate conversation. They're not really moving forward. They've successfully boarded what I see as a sinking ship.

So you can just keep bashing your head up against that wall, or you can just do what you can with what you've got, which is more than any other generation has ever had in terms of technology, in terms of distribution, and really embrace this weird moment, inflection point.

And I think you set yourself up for success much more. It's just gonna take one success and it's already starting to happen, like with Luke Barnett, it's just gonna take one success for all of those money people to suddenly jump over. I mean, you're seeing it right now with a level of investment in what's called new media and the creator economy.

A lot of us in the film business, we're just having so much trouble raising money for our films, but if we were to move two inches to the left, all of a sudden there's this fire hose of investment happening. And just getting those two worlds to touch, whoever's sitting at the center of that Venn diagram, we don't know quite what that looks like yet, but if you try to sit there, I think that's where success is gonna come in the future. That's my instinct anyway.

Jon Stahl: Well this has been great. Thank you so much, Alex, for joining. We will be back soon with another episode maybe if it doesn't crash and burn horribly. But thanks again, Alex. Stay tuned everyone.

Alex Rollins Berg: Thank you, Jon.

Jon Stahl: Take care.

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