In Episode 3 of What's Wrong with Hollywood, I sit down with filmmaker and creative development professional Ellis Jamal Sutton, who also writes the Substack newsletter Notes from the Studio.

In our full conversation, we cover:

🎬 The Hollywood innovation crisis - Why the current system isn't built to foster creativity and new voices, keeping the same writers, directors, and IP projects on repeat

📝 The secret script standards - Why your entry-level writing needs to be way better than what you see on screen, and how to write "calling card" scripts that get passed around the industry

🎯 Building audiences before festivals - How Ellis learned that putting your film's fate in programmers' hands is a mistake, and why creators need to build direct audience relationships from day one

🏷️ The film label experiment - Ellis and Taylor Lewis's innovative approach to creating collective branding and marketing for movies that don't exist yet, targeting the Letterboxd/A24 crowd

⚖️ Writing for yourself vs. the market - The delicate balance between unfiltered creativity and understanding your audience, plus why filmmakers now need to think like distribution and marketing executives

Full Transcript Below:

Jon Stahl

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the What's Wrong with Hollywood Podcast. I'm here with Ellis Jamal Sutton, who is a filmmaker and creative professional. He's worked in feature development at Warner Brothers, Netflix, and now works at Heartbeat, which is Kevin Hart's production shingle. Ellis is also the founder of All of a Sutton Productions, where he has produced and directed a number of short films and music videos.

He recently wrote and directed a short relationship drama called Game Night about a budding young couple whose relationship gets put to the test during a game night with close friends. It is out now. On top of all that, Ellis writes the popular Substack Notes from the Studio, which I am really enjoying.

Ellis, welcome to the show.

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Thank you for having me, Jon. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jon Stahl

Yeah. So we were just chatting a second ago about Substack and about the stuff that you're working on. But right from the top, I want to get into the big question, which is the name of the podcast. What's wrong with Hollywood? I know we talked about this. So what is wrong with Hollywood? What can you fill us in on there?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

What am I allowed to talk about? And then also, where do I begin?

Jon Stahl

Anything you want, you could start wherever you want. I mean, this is like an airing, you could use this as an airing of grievances, if that's what you want it to be.

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Well there's a lot of problems. But I think the biggest problem overall is that the system is not currently built to foster innovation and creativity. So we don't have people in positions of power who feel like they have the ability or strong incentive structure to champion new talent, new voices. And ultimately when you foster new talent, new voices, you lead to more creative things. And when you're not incentivized to do that, whether you're working with the same writers over and over, or going back to the same directors or greenlighting the same types of IP projects, you're going to ultimately lead yourself down a path that is going to be creatively bankrupt.

And it's no surprise that when people watch overall Hollywood movies, they feel like it's the same stuff. So I think that's the biggest problem is that we haven't figured out how can we make a way to champion creative voices without people feeling like their jobs are on the line. Or feeling like there's not a great path forward to get something innovative seen in front of a wide group of people.

Jon Stahl

Yeah. Well, I mean, you've been on both sides of that equation, right? You've been in the development role and you've been in the writer director role. From the development role, what are some ways to incentivize people, new voices to be brought into this ecosystem?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah, man. I mean, everything I'm about to say is going to be easier said than done. Right. You're dealing with big institutions at the forefront. But I will say that if you are a budding writer and maybe you have any aspirations to work in the Hollywood system, I think similar to trying to come up in social media or YouTube, you have to first show that you can sort of assimilate before you're allowed to innovate. So your scripts have to feel like they're Hollywood writer scripts. That's the first bare entry. And you have to have a few of them, right? My old boss used to always say, my old boss used to be an agent, and he didn't just go after a writer who just wrote one great script. You usually had to have two or three really great ones. And usually you're probably not going to sell any of those, but those are your scripts that are your calling cards.

So I'd say the very first step is trying to get your things to be similar to the things that are already accepted. And honestly, if you're watching movies or TV shows and you're saying, oh, that's crap, I can write something similar. I'm going to tell you this right now. The scripts that end up getting writers' careers are way, way better than anything you'll see on television or on a feature screen.

So just know that your entry point is not the television or what you see in the movies. It is the scripts that are getting passed around the industry that people are like, wow, that was super incredible. You got to read this. That's what I would say on the development side.

Jon Stahl

That's some great insight. You are also a creative and you literally just this morning, I know this is going to air a little bit later than today, but this morning I saw that you posted on Substack about the most recent short that you wrote and directed. Tell everyone about that. Where did it come from? What excited you about the concept and how did you get it made?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah, man. So Game Night is a short that I finished last year, and I was starting to write it almost three years ago now with my old roommate, one of my good friends from college. We had just worked on a movie together. And I said, yo, let's step it up. Let's get you a bigger role in the movie. And so because we're roommates, we were just sort of spitballing at night trying to crack the script. And so we had come upon this idea of like, hey, what's a scenario where we can talk about this issue? I don't want to spoil the movie, but how can we talk about what it is a modern couple sort of goes through and what is a modern friend group look like.

And the movie is basically about this couple who's having a little bit of a critical point in their relationship. And when a girl is invited to a game night amongst this guy and his close friends, she realizes that their relationship is taking a turn that she didn't quite anticipate and now she has a new layer of something that she's going to have to deal with. We were just sort of spitballing of like, what is the way we want to talk about these things? What's a setting that's fun? And we always talked about game night as being a cool, fun way to do some really fun things.

And so it took a while to write it. We worked really hard to write the draft and then because when we initially started writing the draft, I had just got my new job in career development at Warner Bros. And so we had to put it on pause, but then I was like, so I had to learn how to do my job and then once we started ramping up again, I was like, I think I got to handle this. Let's start writing again. I end up leaving my job at Warner Bros to my job at Netflix. And I had about a month's period of time in between Warner's to Netflix and I told my producers, I said, look, if we're going to shoot the movie, we have to shoot it within this window because I'm not going to be able to shoot it after that window.

And so we shot it right between my time, and then I just spent a bunch of time in my first year at Netflix editing the movie and then ultimately screening it there about a year later after shooting.

Jon Stahl

Yeah, that's really cool. Feel free to just say no or nothing, but was there anything that you learned from working in creative development at Warner Brothers and at Netflix that you brought to the either production or post-production of this short?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

I would say yes, I think the main thing was the professionalism. Which I wanted to carry into the production, so in my meetings and how I was dealing with cast and crew. I'm witnessing meetings a lot amongst executives and we're doing a lot of lingo and so I just sort of get wired a certain way about how you should be going about the process. And I just tried to bring that to the process. Every single time we had every meeting, every approach that I had into the movie.

The other thing too is the creative development job, especially if you work at a studio, is a lot of times the executives are supposed to be representing the audience. Whenever they're giving creative notes and creative discussions, they're representing who, what is the viewer actually going to be seeing? So if an executive is confused, right, that in a way that's sort of saying an audience member might be confused at certain points. And so I think learning, being in creative development really has started to wire my brain into thinking more like an audience member.

So when we were cutting the movie together, I think I had a better ability than others to be able to take a step back and be like, oh, this is what the viewer would be seeing. Now again, even if you do it enough times, you sort of get lost in the shuffle anyway. But I think on top of that, it also allowed me to realize how important feedback was. How critical it is. And so I took feedback very seriously during that process and I had to learn how to interpret notes in ways that like, hey, someone may have given me a note that I may not actually be able to execute, but is there another way I can serve that note in the editing of the movie? Because sometimes people give me notes like I just don't have the footage to be able to execute that note. So I had to figure out other ways to do it with what we had. And so I think my time in career development really helped sculpt that skillset that I wanted to hone in on.

Jon Stahl

I loved your post, switching gears a little bit, I loved your post about writing for, about designing your career like an architect. How do you think about people writing for audience or sale versus writing for themselves. Where do you draw that line?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah, I mean, I think you start from you, right? You start from like, what are your passions? What are your goals? What interests you? We want your first layer of creativity to be completely unfiltered, right? Then once you have that thing, then you can sort of, then you need to put on another hat, which we all need to start doing more. We need to put on another hat and we need to say, okay, this thing that I want, what is the right medium in which the amount of people who I want to be able to see it can go and see it. So your big passion piece at the end of the day might only have five people interested in it, right?

At that point, you have a choice, right? Do you want to still go about trying to fight tooth and nail to get that thing off the ground so that the five people can go watch it? Or do you want to figure out a new medium to tell that story that'll actually get that five people to go see it and or is there a way to tell the story that can have a much more massive appeal. I think that in general, Hollywood executives, that's all they're really trying to do is when they see someone's really passion product, they're really just trying to answer the question, like, how can we write this? Or circumvent in a way that is more that has a bigger, has a broader appeal.

But I think why people don't really like Hollywood a lot is because they don't like the choices that get made in lieu of trying to make the mass appeal. And I think that I would say, coming up, if you're a writer coming up, you do have to because, because if the new way of doing it is you have to figure out ways to control audiences. You have to figure out ways to get things directly to your audience, then that means you're now taking the role of distribution executives and marketing executives that a big conglomerate would typically have. And so you have to know how to think like them because there's a reason why they have the money and the resource to be able to do these things. And we just sort of have to do mini versions of that. And so it would behoove you to think about your audience if you're trying to grow your platform in a way that can lead to success.

Jon Stahl

Great. I have a question about this new film label you're starting with Taylor Lewis. What is a film label? How does it work? What's it going to look like? I'm really excited to hear more about this.

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah, man. Well, look, I'll start with where me and Taylor sort of came down with it. She had been one of, she had been a fan of my writing and we seem to be doing this thing where like we were writing about similar things at the same time without even telling each other about it. And so I was like, I wrote a post. She wrote a post about it and boom, boom, boom, boom. And then at some point I was just like, Taylor, we need to just hop on a Zoom call together and we need to talk. Then we end up talking and we talked about where our goals are and what we want to do. And she sort of is at a transition point in her life, in her career. And I'm also at a transition point where I'm trying to figure out what do I want to do? What do I want to get out the bigger picture of all of it. And so we were just like, you know what, let's try to figure out how to create something that is a mainstay.

And so what we, where we first started getting excited about the movies that we were interested in telling, and the things that we wanted to do and how to make those individual movies. We started getting back to like, okay, but what's step zero? Right? And for us, step zero is how can you create branding and marketing for movies that don't exist? That was sort of the thought process behind it, right? And so if you can figure out ways to build audiences based on, for lack of better way to put it, assets like a teaser. Like a really quality teaser or like a poster, a mockup poster or something, something computer generated or whatever it is. If you can figure out ways to collectively build excitement towards those types of things, right. And you can get genuine interest in it, that can potentially convert people to go see your movie.

Right. I think there are a lot of innovation to be made in there, but that was sort of our thought process. And so we said, okay, well, okay, that's, those are cool marketing ideas for an individual movie, but then what does it all tie back to? So then like what is step negative 0.5? And for us, we said let's build a collective brand around these movies to be under an umbrella where if you're thinking about it from streetwear, you're thinking about it from community events. You're thinking about it from content such as newsletters, such as YouTube videos where we're featuring people, we're spotlighting writers and filmmakers, and we're creating opportunities for people to get together and show curation. Before anyone would ever give us money to make a movie, then we can then hopefully activate people to come in and have ourselves be the audience that we want to see in the new cinema community.

So the other way to think about it's like, how can we get the people who have Letterboxd subscriptions, A24 memberships and MCA list memberships. How can we get those collective group of people together to buy into the types of movies that we want to make and the types of voices that we want to champion. Because as it's going to need to be getting cheaper to make movies. And as those particular big voices in the indie space get bigger and bigger, there's going to be room for who are, who is the Ryan Coogler that is making Fruitvale Station tomorrow? Right? Who is the Chloe? Who are the directors who got their first thing made? Who's making their first thing now? Right? Who's making Cord Jefferson's movie?

How can we sort of be that, be that new voice is sort of the goal of the label ultimately. And we're going to start by building a brand through our writing and through our video content and through our community events and our merch.

Jon Stahl

And do you have any kind of upcoming events or launch dates or, I mean, whatever you can share about this is going to, I think people will be interested in when are the first things dropping? Where can they learn more about this?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah. I mean, depending on when this thing airs, we're going to have our first newsletter is available Friday, June 6th. Our first newsletter is going to be available Friday, June 6th. And going forward, we're going to be having weekly newsletters from there every pretty much every week.

And the newsletters are going to include a bit of education about what the new, about what the new independent field space will look like. We call it NonDē. Ted Hope sort of coined that term NonDē. What does that look like? How do you build audiences in this day and age? What does a new marketing wave look like. So we want, so part of it is educating readers on what, on how to get invigorated about a new way of doing it. And then on top of that, we also want to be, we're going to be going forward in a few future newsletters. We're going to start featuring people who we feel are trying, who are already innovating in the space, and people who we feel are going to continue to be innovating in space.

So we're going to have interviews from YouTubers, we're going to have interviews from filmmakers, we're going to have interviews from business owners, we're going to have interviews from people who are thought leaders in the space. And so we want to sort of build an audience via that. And then we're going to do an in-person events later on in the summer as a way to invigorate some local activation. And we're going to convert some of those into YouTube videos. We're going to post some YouTube videos later on in the summer as well. So you'll see some writing from us in the coming weeks. And then eventually you'll see that writing convert into videos and some in-person events later on in the summer and into the fall.

Jon Stahl

Fantastic. And I mean, what other kind of projects do you have just creatively, shorts, scripts you're working on? Anything else? Do you have anything else in the pipeline personally for in that world?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah. Yeah, man. I'm always trying to develop things on my own. I read scripts a lot from my friends and some of my colleagues in the industry. I'm working on a few things, trying to get off the ground as a producer. Things that honestly don't immediately fit the label's brand, but are like, we definitely should cover them in a way. I still want to try to get those movies made. I'm also starting to write two shorts right now, and one of them I hope to shoot this summer. Another one I'm going to be shooting sometime later this year or next year.

As a way to experiment with all these cool AI tools that are sort of out there. And at least in pre-production, I'm not, I don't really want to make an AI movie, but I just came back from this conference and I kind of got really inspired by all the things that are out there for filmmakers to be able to utilize and make and maybe unlock creativity more. And so I definitely want to be able to see if there's a way that I can use storyboard tools, use creative development tools, use budgeting tools and figure out ways to streamline the production process to be able to make some really cool movies in the future.

So I'm working on a few more things in that space and I hope I'll be able to share my learnings and everything from there.

Jon Stahl

Could you go more into detail about the types of lessons that you learned while making the short film that you just released?

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Yeah, yeah. For sure. I learned a lot of lessons. I think maybe I'll just say a good chunk and you can figure out which ones are more important.

In development, I realize how important I care about planning. I'm a big planner, me and my friend talk, we just had a bunch of conversations about the different story avenues that the story could go in before we actually even started writing on the page. And at times my buddy was a little antsy because I really was trying to hone in on, hey, like, the script, we were asking character, what will this character do in this situation? And then if they're going to do this, then how will we make this happen? And you'll see in the movie, the movie unravels in a particular way that when ultimately gets revealed. You can then watch back the movie and see how all the different things were sort of layered in there in a really intentional way. And so that was probably one lesson I learned in development is being more planned. So that's why I'm curious to see what other development tools are out there that I can be even better planned for another go around.

And then on top of that, I also realized that at the end of the day, no matter how much planning you do, you're still going to change your mind when you're shooting and things are going to change when you're editing the movie. So at some point you got to put the planning down, you got to get to just actually making the movie. And so that was the biggest thing I learned in regards to making the movie itself.

And then in hindsight, I think I mentioned this, but the movie was too expensive, I think, in that, and I can't look back and be like, hey, here's how we could have cut costs. Because you'll see the movie. The movie does look well produced. I don't regret any of that, but in regards to sustainable filmmaking, I definitely feel like that's a movie that I put up a good chunk of my own personal finance to do, we raised money, but also you still have to sort of do your own thing. And I just can't make movies like that routinely. Now, I don't think really any filmmaker can make movies like that routinely, as much as we want to make high quality stuff all the time. I think that learning more sustainable production workflows is super important.

And then the other thing too is the movie really taught me what I feel like I should have leaned into earlier in my career. Is that at the end of the day, if you have something that is good and quality, the next step is trying to right size it for, or trying to get it to the right audience. And I think that typically how you do short films is you make the short film and then you go down the festival circuit. And while that is fine and most people do it, I found I didn't find a lot of success in the festival circuit. Even though we screen the movie in front of people, they love it. People will tell me, oh my God, this is a great movie. People in the industry are like, yeah, this is really well made. Can't get a programmer at a small festival to put this movie in front of people.

And so really what that mainly taught me though is like, hey, if you make good stuff, it's not a question about whether or not it should be getting laurels. It's like, no, you need to figure out how to create ways to get in front of your audiences, of the people who are going to be enjoying that movie. And so going forward, obviously I'm still going to do the film festival thing, but I'm also going to be more intentional like, okay, well, how can I do more event type screenings? How can I do more audience building from the ground up when I'm making any individual movie? And I think I should have been doing that from the jump. I think that this movie really taught me like, hey, don't put the fate of your film career in the hands of a screener. Put it in the hands of yourself.

Jon Stahl

Yeah. I love that. Finally, tell us where people can learn more about your Substack, the film brand that you're building, and the short that you just released.

Ellis Jamal Sutton

So my Substack, written by ellis.substack.com. And that's where you could pretty much find my notes and my posts from my newsletter, Notes from the Studio. I mainly talk about things on there that are either backwards facing, but now trying to be more forward facing in regards to the industry, mainly in the independent cinema space because I realize not a lot of people care about the Hollywood stuff. But how can I make movies? So I said, let me lean into writing more things in the independent cinema space. And we're going to be releasing the newsletter soon, the label, and you'll be able to check that out by the time this airs. Jon will have a link for it in the description and the short, you can find on YouTube right now. I'll send Jon a link to it as well. And you could check it out and if you can find me on any of those platforms, please subscribe and let me know what you think. Put it in the comment section of your thoughts on the movie. I'd be curious to hear what everyone thinks.

Jon Stahl

Well this has been fantastic, Ellis. Let's definitely do this again. Thank you everyone for joining and have a great day. I'll see you guys on the next one.

Ellis Jamal Sutton

Cool. Thanks for having me, Jon. I appreciate it.

Jon Stahl

Take care, Ellis.

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