In Episode 2 of What's Wrong with Hollywood, I sit down with Entertainment Attorney and Emmy Award-winning Producer Sam Widdoes, who also writes the Substack newsletter Widdoespeak.

In our full conversation, we cover:

⚖️ The rap lyrics as evidence crisis - How prosecutors use artists' creative work against them in criminal trials, and why this represents a massive intersection of art, law, and racial bias

🎬 From 8-year development hell to Emmy nomination - The incredible journey of getting "As We Speak" made, including false starts, patient IP owners, and a brutal 8-month production timeline

💰 The doom and gloom vs. booming business paradox - Why Sundance film panels were all about industry collapse while creator/brand panels celebrated explosive growth

🎯 Building audience before you build the film - Why starting a TikTok for your character or creating a podcast around your story can be more valuable than a perfect script

📺 The direct-to-audience revelation - How filmmakers are discovering that self-distribution provides not just money, but invaluable audience relationships and creative satisfaction

🤝 The creator-filmmaker bridge - Exploring how traditional filmmakers can learn from creators' audience-building expertise without abandoning their storytelling craft

Full Transcript Below:

Sam Widdoes The panels that were film and financing and distribution related, were almost all doom and gloom. The industry is in the dumps. We're not getting any money, we're not getting any distribution. I went to a couple creator and brand panels and they're like, business is booming. I know these guys will not want to associate themselves with creators with the word content, and the creators, they really don't know how to make films, nor do many of them want to.

Jon Stahl Hi everyone. Welcome back today. I'm joined by Sam Widdoes, an entertainment attorney and producer who specializes in helping creators navigate the intersection of creative strategy, financing and distribution. Sam writes the Substack Widdoes Peak, and was producer on the Emmy nominated documentary series As We Speak. He's here to discuss how the legal and business frameworks are evolving as creators increasingly bypass traditional Hollywood gatekeepers and tell us a little bit about his own creative journey on the stuff that he's working on. Sam, welcome. Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Sam Widdoes Thanks, Jon. It's awesome to be with you. I know we're fairly newcomers to the Substack universe, but have been enjoying just connecting with all the folks, especially who are coming from more of a traditional entertainment world and trying to really explore and understand where the creator world can help grow what we're making.

Jon Stahl Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you because you have a unique perspective on this space and how it's growing and evolving, coming from the legal representation side of things, but you're at a really interesting intersection of legal and creative. I think that very often, people who come from that legal background are really good storytellers just because that's how you have to think. Can you talk a little bit about what that intersection looks like for you and your career?

Sam Widdoes Yeah, so right now the majority of my time is spent with my legal clients. I work with mostly independent filmmakers. A lot of, probably more documentary than narrative, but altogether it's filmmakers, production companies who are raising money and then getting into production and then finding distribution, going to film festivals. So I get to work with filmmakers along that whole journey and look at how they want to build, not just the story they're telling, but how does that fit into a larger strategy.

I think as we've seen over the last several years, the mindset of, I'm going to make a great film, get it into a top tier film festival and get a global rights deal. That may have been a more feasible path five years ago, but it's really not these days. It's fun to be able to advise clients as early as possible and to work with them as more of a strategic partner, and creative partner and legal partner, along that journey so that they can start thinking and encouraging them to start thinking about the different opportunities they might have along with a streaming deal.

But then also the different opportunities that are starting to arise in terms of different ways to exploit their story even before it becomes a feature, and understanding what other elements might attract audiences and maybe even ways to release bits and pieces of it before and start trying to build and find that audience on different platforms.

I sort of encourage my clients to do that. But at the same time, communities like the one on Substack and then also just the different events and different film festivals, really trying to understand what are the use cases, what are the success cases of other films that have been able to go direct to audience, build relationships with brand partners, independent distributors, just all the various ways that more entrepreneurial producers and filmmakers are starting to think about the way that they tell stories.

Jon Stahl That's great. Can you, I have a friend who I spoke with yesterday who's producing, self financing and producing a horror feature film. And I have been thinking a lot since talking with this person about the kind of distribution pipeline and having a market in mind and an audience in mind. Can you give some advice to someone who's never really gone through that process of distribution for a feature before and strategies to implement as soon as possible.

Sam Widdoes Yeah, so I'll say at the top, I've never worked in horror. The genre space as they say, but I kind of wish I had, because it seems to be the one space that always has an audience. You can make the film, it's the Blumhouse model, right? He was making films for nothing and they were getting enormous returns because people love that genre.

So that specific audience, I'm not familiar with it, but I know it exists and so I would just encourage him first to say get to know what that audience looks like, understand how the most successful horror films have performed, where they performed. And some of the, let's just look at the marketing and distribution tactics that those films have used.

The other things have been little tidbits I've picked up from different conversations, whether it's Evan Shapiro, a couple filmmakers who independently worked with the Fian group to independently distribute their narrative film theatrically and the way that they just cold called a bunch of brands and said, hey, we have this movie about, it's a romantic comedy, but it takes place in Mexico. Whether it was sex forward brands or hotels, funny companies that wanted to partner and when it came time for distribution, they were giving, they were partnering for free giveaways to get audiences in seats.

Anyway, that's one funny example. But the one other example I would say about understanding your story and maybe getting it out early was the notion of creating an online presence for your character or for your story before it exists in feature length form, right? If you have a film about a character, start a TikTok for that character. And have, if you have an actor, if you're the writer, whatever, just like start putting that story out there and seeing how audiences respond. Build on that and see if you can generate enough interest and say, you like this character, I've got a screenplay. Eventually say I've got a screenplay ready to go and start crowdfunding and start understanding if it's about an issue or it's about a particular genre. Maybe there again, are brands or production companies that specialize, or studios that specialize in that sort of sector. But I think the notion of getting your story out there, even in little bits, it doesn't give away the whole film. It just starts giving a taste to the world of what storytelling might be to come.

Jon Stahl Awesome. I think that's very valuable, even if you don't have that experience in the horror world. I think it's universal and applicable across genres. So you were a producer on As We Speak, an Emmy nominated feature film. This is relatively recent development. This Emmy nomination happened mere weeks ago. Can you talk about your role in the feature and what that experience was like? Both producing it and receiving the Emmy nomination?

Sam Widdoes Yeah. It's been, I mean, it's a process that started eight years ago now in 2016 was when I first read about the issue that became the book that became the documentary. And the documentary concerns the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. Which on its face is sort of a, and specifically how it's used is someone's on trial for a crime, the course of their investigation finds that that person put out a song on YouTube or Instagram or had some rhymes written in a notebook that may or may not have anything to do with the crime in question.

But is still entered into evidence, either as a confession. See, this guy rapped about selling drugs and he's on trial for selling drugs. Therefore, he must have sold drugs, or as character evidence, right? To establish motive or intent. This person raps about selling drugs, therefore, and he's on trial for selling drugs, therefore he had the motive to sell the drugs.

In either instance, it's not just absurd that art is used as evidence, but it also is wrapped up in just flagrant racism, stereotypes, underlying implicit biases. And prosecutors know this, and they've used it in hundreds of cases over the years. And so when I first read about the issue, I realized there is a theatrical element and it's the reason why legal dramas do so well over and over and over again because there's just inherent drama when someone is on trial for their life. And 12 strangers are just hearing a story. And the best trial attorneys are really good actors. They know their, they know the law, but they also know how to convey a message, they know how to perform in a way that's really persuasive.

I knew there was that drama, but before that, I knew I, being a hip hop fan. And as someone who grew up in the LA suburbs, like my interaction with the black community was almost entirely through hip hop. I learned so much. Not literally, but figuratively, right? Through the music, I was exposed to an experience, a broad experience, and never took any of the words literally. So to think that those words were being used and presented literally in a court of law was not just an outrage, but I was like, oh, this is an opportunity to talk about what is hip hop? What is the black experience in America? What is the interaction between the LAPD and the communities of South Central, Los Angeles, like, all of these things were within the scope of what this, what became a book called Rap on Trial. And it was, so you could just tell this wide ranging story in the context of this sort of dramatic legal microcosm.

And because there were 700 known cases of this taking place, I was like, oh, we're going to have a wealth of storytelling possibilities here. And yeah, there's, we went through a series of versions of what the story might be. We thought of adapting it as a scripted, limited series, where you sort of take one season and dive into a case and maybe the case is actually an amalgam of five to 10 different cases and the facts of different artists who've been on trial over the years.

That got pitched, I've started a series on my Substack that is sort of going year by year, all the process of developing and pitching this project, and all the different ways that you think, okay, this is going to work. We got a really good pitch with Kerry Washington's company and she's in tears hearing the pitch and says she wants to do it. And then six months later, her team was like, we're just too busy. We can't do this now. And then you're back to square one. Like, okay, what's next? And we're, oh, we have this active trial in Los Angeles and we're in with the defense attorney and the experts and all these people, and you're there the day that he gets out of jail. And then he says, I don't want to do it unless I'm getting paid 25 grand. And you're like, oh, okay. Well we're not doing that either, so we're going back to square one. Right. And you're, it's this process of like at what point do you give up on a project? At what point do you say, no, we're making this no matter what.

Jon Stahl I've been following the series that you've been writing on your Substack and it's been really entertaining and interesting, and you talk about all the fits and starts, what it was like to go back to the owners of the IP and say like, just give us a little bit more time to hold on to option this IP. At what point, I'm sure that you started to feel like you were trying their patience with it. At what point do you say like, this is enough, or, no, this is a story worth telling and stubbornly stay ahead or do you kind of analyze things and determine, okay, maybe this is a sign.

Sam Widdoes The universe had some masochistic plan for us where just as we were about to give it all up, something would happen. Right? Just enough to keep you hooked where you said, no, this is going to happen. Whether it was just as one of the shopping periods for the rights was going to expire, like we have some really great meeting where some production company or studio or some part of the story starts to come alive and you realize like, oh my gosh, like this is the thing that's going to make it sell. And again, like there were just enough of those at just the right time that allowed. And granted, I'll say like there's a dozen times during the course of that seven years that certainly my then fiance and now wife would've been like, give this up and move on to the next project. And somehow it just, it kept happening that we moved it forward, inch by inch, came back and then moved it forward a foot and then the director says yes. And it's a guy who's literally the perfect person to tell the story. And then six months later, and that'll be what I'll write about next, because it's like when that happened, you're just like, oh my gosh, this is the person who has the vision, the clarity of storytelling to both tell a musical story, to tell a historical story, to tell a criminal justice story. And the artistic capability to do something that even having thought about this for five years at that point, like my mind couldn't have even comprehended. And so that's where I realized like my skill, my job as a producer, like I'm not that artist. I know I can sort of put the pieces together of a story. I can work my tail off to find the sources and sort of structure it the right way, but once you get a director who's got a vision and the talent to like bring it to life, I still get chills when I sit behind a monitor. I'm like, oh my gosh, it looks so much cooler than I ever thought it could.

Jon Stahl Can I ask about financing? Can I ask about how you raised the money to do the things you needed to do to get this produced?

Sam Widdoes For several years it was just, we were only pitching to the entities or the production companies that sold to streaming entities. Right? Like we were sort of in that ecosystem of the agencies that were like, this is how you do it. Independent financing was not really my skillset and also wasn't on my radar. We were sort of get it to big name producer who sells to Netflix or Amazon or whatever. And we took all those meetings. They were generally positive, but it didn't result in a yes.

About the time that finished and other things lined up where it was like, we finished our first documentary for Quibi. And the series premiered right after the launch of Quibi and was drowned out by the soon demise of Quibi and the fact that it was the middle of a pandemic and all these things, but like, had that not happened, the reviews we got for that series were spectacular. And so it's like everything that was planned on using that premier as the launch for this next project was squandered.

So it was one of those like, best laid plans in hindsight and in 2025, understanding like all the avenues that we really did have at our disposal that we weren't really thinking about, I would've started with a podcast, or I would've started with some short form interviews and getting some, just getting sort of the word out and owning the IP and trying to build the audience. And then also going to independent financiers, going to people in the world of criminal justice reform, of social justice of hip hop advocacy and saying, hey, will you put in this amount of money? That amount of money? This is where we're going. This is the plan. All that stuff.

2021 was when we really started to pursue independent financing, and we had one company that was interested and basically strung us along for about 11 months up until the point that our director signed on a studio came on and was like, we want, we're ready to take this to the next level. The studio then was the one that facilitated a pitch to Paramount Plus and Paramount ended up acquiring, commissioning the whole film. So it wasn't until literally went into production that we got any money in the door, but that money was the full budget to actually make the film. So had we gone for independent financing much earlier on, maybe it would've come in in chunks of 50 to a hundred thousand dollars along the way, and we would've been able to start making it. But it just so happened that we ultimately pitched it, and the buyer was the streamer that said, great, we'll pay for the whole thing. Here's your budget. Deliver this in 10 months. And then all of a sudden we're like, oh crap, we got to get this whole thing done like that.

Jon Stahl And when you went to produce this thing and you knew you had this kind of clock on it, how did that impact the actual production of it? How did that impact your role and how did it impact the project as a whole?

Sam Widdoes Yeah, production was so, the studio had an outrageously fast delivery date, delivery timeline. They greenlit it in February and said, delivered by October. And so I think actually because we had done six years of development at that point, like we knew exactly who we needed to interview, where they were located. The director and I had at that point been working on his version of what the film would be for a year and a half. So we had, the outline was more than just an outline. It was like, this is who we're interviewing in these places to go with this timeline and these are the cases that we're going to look at.

And we had shoots in Atlanta, LA, Chicago, Houston, New York, and London. It was all, I think on like a two and a half month schedule, but post-production started like a month into production. So we had editors working while footage was coming in, and because the director, Jason Harper, who's just incredible, he was an editor, that was his background. So he was literally, he was shooting the film as he's cutting it in his head almost, right? He knows every scene that he needs. He knows all the coverage he needs, and was feeding that to his editors and saying, this is how I want to build this scene. This is how I want to build that scene. Getting all the coverage in each spot. So it was a really amazing, like precision production process. And I think because we had spent so much time developing it and really working through what ideas worked, what didn't work, what storylines paid off for the ultimate conclusion of the film, we were able to actually execute it on such an expedited timeline.

Jon Stahl Wow. I mean, good on you. That is, that's really terrific to hear. And encouraging they were able to pull that off.

Sam Widdoes It may be encouraging, but it was like, not for the faint of heart. I definitely will tell people like, don't do what I did.

Jon Stahl I mean, sometimes you don't have the option. Sometimes it's just, it's foisted upon you.

Sam Widdoes And you don't have the option. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I will say like, it wouldn't have been made had we not had so much different episodes in terms of redeveloping and reworking the story. It's an interesting thing to develop an idea like it's, it wasn't like the story of one trial case. It was like the issue of rap music on trial. Right? Rap lyrics used as evidence. How do you tell that story? You could do it in a really sort of academic way and just have, cause there's plenty of lawyers who spoke on it and there's plenty of lawyers who had written about it. You could do it in a purely musical way, just interview a bunch of rappers and you could.

And Jason just had this amazing vision of weaving it together through the first person perspective of a rapper whose name is Kemba, a guy who had released a couple albums and had like some notoriety, but certainly wasn't famous. And also isn't, gang affiliated, has no criminal record. A criminal in any way, shape or form. But by virtue of being a black man in America, could at any point arrested and at any point during that process, his backlog of, his library of songs, some of which referenced drugs, some of which referenced guns, but all in the context of his own experience of growing up in the Bronx and understanding like he's telling stories of his surroundings and the people he grew up with.

And so Jason had this brilliant idea of like, this whole thing is going to be Kemba's journey, going from city to city, talking to artists, talking to attorneys, and trying to figure out like, is this a thing that could ever impact me? I'm just an artist sharing stories about my experience in the world. This is an issue that clearly only affects other people. But wait a second. At some point could I get hit with something like this and have, and be faced with being in a defendant's seat where I can't speak for myself because my lawyer's going to tell me not to open my mouth, and I'm going to have to watch as a prosecutor and defense attorney interpret my words against me. That was the sort of meta approach and I was like, shit. That's the best version of anything we had come up with in development.

Jon Stahl I love that and I love hearing about the journey and how this thing developed. Real quick before we wrap it up, tell everyone about your Substack, tell me what you are most interested in gaining from writing the Substack and what the experience has been like as a content creator in that space.

Sam Widdoes Yeah, so I think the seed of the Substack probably started last year when we premiered As We Speak at Sundance, and the experience of, grateful for Paramount Plus and their financing of the film and releasing it. We turned in a project file, it went on the platform a month after Sundance. That was it. And I still to this day don't know who watched it. When they watched, where they are. There's no sort of feedback really from Paramount nor from an audience. And it was a project that I just knew would have an audience if it was marketed, if we were given an opportunity to engage with those people. I know Jason and Kemba were eager to do in-person events and just engage with the conversation about what we were talking about and how it would impact artists and filmmakers and writers and anyone in that space.

So that was sort of the dissatisfaction with a lack of engagement or really understanding of who the audience was that started planted the seed of my desire to get that direct audience engagement. Next was last summer. I saw the director of a film, a documentary called Your Fat Friend. She and her producer did a presentation about their self distribution of their film and the ways in which their audience directly communicated with them after they had premiered Tribeca and didn't get a sale. Their audience was like, we want to watch the film. How can we do it? How much money can we spend? We want to give you our money. And they started using different platforms like gather and understanding like there's more value in the direct to audience connection than just the money that you'll receive. You'll get personal satisfaction and you'll also get a continuing relationship that you can leverage for your next project. And those filmmakers were like, I'm never going back. This is the way that I'm going to engage from now on. That's how I'm going to start thinking about my projects from the outset, from the development stage. How do I find, how do I connect directly with an audience early and just keep building that so that they feel like they are invested in me in this story.

And then, I think last fall I was like. I was still sort of straddling this producer, legal world, and I was, the conversation I was having with clients, with executives, with financiers, with everyone, were all sort of swirling in my head with a bunch of different thoughts. And I thought, why don't I just start getting these out into the world? And Substack seemed to be a really great platform. And it has been, and it's been really rewarding to be involved in sort of the film stack world, as a non filmmaker, but like active participant in this conversation that's around where especially where's independent film and television going.

I went to Sundance this year just as an observer, and went to a handful of different panels. The panels that were film and television film and financing and distribution related, were almost all doom and gloom. The industry is in the dumps. We're not getting any money, we're not getting any distribution. I went to a couple creator and brand panels and they're like, business is booming. We're getting all this audience data. We're getting brands that want to participate. We're expanding our reach, we're growing our studios. I'm like, okay. Something's happening over here that these guys can learn from. I know these guys will not want to associate themselves with creators with the word content, these guys, the creators, they really don't know how to make films, nor do many of them want to. Long form filmmaking is a different skillset. Long form television is a different skillset. Creators, the creator community is wide variety of types of creators, right? There's people who do unboxing videos, there's people who do game shows. There's people who do comedy. There's people who do whatever Jake Paul does. There's people who do video podcasts.

It's a whole, but what is true of all of the creators is they have a direct relationship with their audience and they have a direct connection to the feedback that their audience gives them in terms of what is working, what is not. And over time, what that builds more than anything is trust. And a creator knows that if they continue to feed the things that the audience wants, they might be able to build the trust to go branch out and try new things. Anyway, it's just all these different things that I'm seeing, like, okay, how can the indie film world learn from the creator world and on the business side. Really start thinking about their stories as universes of storytelling, universes of content that can be broken up into different pieces. And if they don't, if the filmmakers don't want to make the podcast or the short form, or the merch or the live event, well, where are the partnerships that we can make? Right? Where are the people that want to get involved in that and be part of that storytelling world.

So that's kind of what I'm writing about and putting ideas out there and getting to meet great writers and producers and people in all different walks that a lot of, I think my followers and the people that I've interacted with are kind of from the traditional film and television space that are engaging with Substack because they want to know more about the creator world and they want to know more about how can I really think about the way that I want to interact with my audience as I tell my story, tell the story, work with the collaborators that I want to work with and grow that brand.

Jon Stahl To wrap it up, how can people find you and find your work and find both the feature and your Substack.

Sam Widdoes Yeah, thanks. My Substack is Widdoes Peak. My last name, Widdoes Peak. And then the film is called As We Speak, Rap Music on Trial. It's on Paramount Plus. There's a handful of other clients that are also doing great work. I'd love to promote them too. It's cool to be able to work on both sides of these projects and be part of a lot of really interesting storytelling.

Jon Stahl Amazing. Well, thank you, Sam, for joining. Everyone stay tuned for the next one and yeah, we'll catch you on the next one. Bye.

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.