People are taking out a second mortgage on their house. Draining their 401k to pay rent. Moving back in with their parents in their 40s. These are not folks on the margins of this industry. These are producers, high level writers, executives, department heads with impressive credits and deep relationships.

And almost all of them are extremely embarrassed by contending with this reality.

It honestly breaks my heart. Feeling debilitated by things outside of our control is one thing, but the embarrassment, which deeply impacts ego, self-esteem, and maybe even self-worth, is quite concerning. People seem to be bearing the burden of a structural collapse as if it were a personal failure, grieving alone behind a curated feed, convinced they’re the only one drowning.

I imagine the majority of this town is having the same conversation in one way or another.

So, I wanna ask you.

Are you OK?

Are we OK?

I don’t think we are.

Subscribe now

The Side Effects of the Last Three Years

This industry has never been easy; we all accepted that deal at some point, willingly or not. But what’s happening right now is not the normal churn of a tough business. It’s a structural collapse, and the numbers back up what every one of us feels in our bones.

National employment in motion picture and sound recording has fallen from roughly 455,000 jobs in mid-2022 to about 337,000 by early this year¹. LA County alone lost 42,000 entertainment jobs between 2022 and 2024, nearly a third of the local workforce ². Shoot days in Los Angeles have been cut in half since 2022. And even with the boost in local production thanks to the tax credit, it’s still not enough to employ the thousands of talent, crew, and vendors who have been out of work for far too long.

Layer on top of that the mergers and consolidation. Every acquisition means “redundancies,” which is a code for thousands of careers ending in a single memo. The entertainment and media sector cut over 17,000 jobs in the first eleven months of 2025 alone, an 18 percent jump over the year before³.

And then there’s AI. Not the theoretical version debated on panels two years ago, but the version that’s here now, reshaping how many people it takes to make a film while simultaneously screening the résumés of the people it displaced.⁴ This isn’t just a feeling, either. Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI found that roughly 90% of U.S. employers now use AI tools to sort and rank job seekers, and a 2026 SHRM survey of nearly 1,900 HR professionals found that 19% of organizations using hiring automation admitted their own tools had screened out qualified applicants⁵.

I know so many brilliant folks, predominantly women, trying to pivot into adjacent industries who can’t get past that filter. Almost two decades of producing means you can run a P&L, manage a hundred-person team, negotiate vendor contracts, and deliver under impossible deadlines. But an algorithm scanning for keywords sees “film” and moves on.

The machine can’t see transferable skills; only what it was trained to look for.

Read more

I remember my dad turning to the person next to him and saying, “That’s my daughter’s film! She directed it!”

Except I didn’t. I produced it.

That’s when it first started to dawn on me how little people actually understand about what a producer does. And after years of that same conversation on repeat, at networking events, at family dinners, in casual industry small talk, I decided to channel the frustration into something useful.

In 2018, I launched Angle on Producers, or the podcast formerly known as Life with Caca. My singular goal back then was to talk about the messy parts of life as it pertained to producing, which consumed, and very much was my life back then.

My earliest guests were all in my immediate network and helped demystify what the job actually is, spotlighting the sheer number of career paths under that one deceptively simple word.

Eight years later and I still…get asked. “yeah, but what does a producer actually do?” It seems that even with 165 episodes and tens of thousands of hours logged are still insufficient at getting to the root of it. I don’t blame anyone, though. After almost two decades in this industry, I still find myself pausing before I answer, because the honest answer is: it depends entirely on which decade or slice of Hollywood you’re asking about.

The title “producer” has meant wildly different things at different moments in this industry’s history. It’s been a job description, a power position, a financing mechanism, a vanity credit, and, for a lot of us doing the actual work, a form of blue collar labor that keeps a two-hundred-person circus from collapsing in on itself. More recently, it’s become something else entirely: a launchpad for building your own thing.

So let’s go back. All the way back. Because I think understanding the origins can help us make sense of how we got here and where we may be headed.

Before There Were Producers, There Was Edison

The producer role is actually older than Hollywood itself. Thomas Edison’s company started producing short films in the 1890s out of the Black Maria, a tar-paper studio in New Jersey widely considered the world’s first purpose-built film studio. Edison was, functionally, the first American film producer: he financed the operation, controlled the technology, and decided what got made. Film historians who study this era (David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema is the definitive text) describe how the job of organizing production evolved through distinct systems: first the “cameraman system,” where one person shot, developed, and edited everything; then the “director system” of the late 1900s; and then, as films got longer and companies scaled, something new.

Around 1914, the industry landed on what scholars call the “central producer system.” One person, who was not the director, would plan the entire production in advance via a detailed continuity script and a managed budget, then oversee dozens of films at once. That structural shift, separating the person who manages the making from the person who directs the scenes, is the actual birth of the producer as a distinct job.

Everything since has been variations on that theme.

The Mogul Era: When “Producer” Meant “The Guy Who Runs Everything”

By the 1920s and 30s, the central producer had become a throne. Think Irving Thalberg at MGM, the original “Boy Wonder” who ran production for the studio in his twenties (imagine that!) and supervised its entire slate. Think David O. Selznick, Darryl Zanuck at Fox, Hal Wallis at Warner Bros. These men (and it was almost exclusively men) had creative and financial control over entire slates of films. They picked the material, cast the stars under long-term contract, dictated final cut, and answered to almost no one but the studio head.

Sometimes they were the studio head.

And the whole thing was propped up by an economic structure most people have never heard of: vertical integration. The Big Five studios (MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, and RKO) didn’t just make the movies; they distributed them and owned the theaters that showed them. Through a practice called block booking, studios forced theaters to buy their films in bundles, sight unseen, often twenty or more at a time, one A-picture packaged with a pile of B-movies. Guaranteed distribution meant guaranteed revenue, which meant the producer’s job carried enormous power but relatively little financial risk.

The house always won, and the producer ran the house.

This is the era that built our cultural image of “the producer” as a cigar-chomping mogul barking orders in a screening room. It’s not entirely wrong. It’s just about seventy years out of date.

The Breakup: One Supreme Court Case Changed Everything

Here’s the part of the story I wish more people knew, because you cannot understand the modern producer without it.

In 1938, the Department of Justice sued the major studios under antitrust law. And crucially, independent producers helped push that case forward. Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Mary Pickford, and Orson Welles organized as the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP) because the studio monopoly was locking them out of theaters. In May 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures that the studios had violated antitrust law.

The studios were forced to end block booking and sell off their theater chains.

The timing could not have been worse for the old system, because television arrived at the exact same moment. In 1948, roughly 90 million Americans went to the movies every week. By 1958, that number had fallen to 46 million. The guaranteed audience evaporated, the guaranteed distribution pipeline was legally dismantled, and the studio contract system collapsed with it. Talent went freelance.

And into that vacuum stepped…you guessed it…the agencies.

This is when “packaging” was born, and it fundamentally rewired what a producer’s job was. Agencies like MCA and William Morris would assemble a director, a script, and a star, then sell that package to a studio for financing and distribution. Film historians call this the shift from the “producer-unit system” to the “package-unit system,” and it’s the world we still live in: every film assembled as a one-off company of freelancers. Suddenly a producer’s core skill wasn’t running a studio. It was assembling elements and securing money which redefined the producer as the dealmaker.

Out of this same period came the independent producer as we’d recognize them now: people who weren’t studio employees at all, who, on spec, found the material, attached the talent, chased the financing, and partnered with a studio only for distribution. It’s the model that gave us the American independent film movement of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and it’s the lineage most of us working today descended from.

A strange footnote: the Paramount Decrees were formally repealed in 2020 and fully sunset in 2022, on the theory that the old monopoly could never be recreated. Whether the vertically integrated streamers of today would like a word is a whole other newsletter…

Where the Line Producer Comes From

Somewhere in this same evolution, the job started splitting into specialties, because running a production is genuinely too much for one person to do alone once budgets and crews scaled up. The line producer emerged as the person responsible for the physical, on-the-ground execution: the budget, the schedule, the logistics of actually getting a film shot on time and, hopefully, on budget. If the producer is thinking about the deal and the vision, the line producer is thinking about how many trucks you need in Griffith Park on a Tuesday, and whether the AD department has enough PAs to lock down a residential street.

This is a distinction I care about a lot, because it’s also where the labor of producing mostly lives, and it’s a part of the job that gets almost none of the cultural glamour. And since the lifestyle of the capital-P Producer usually means you either come from wealth or you’re stitching together a dozen odd jobs to make ends meet, I pivoted into line producing myself after my capital-P producing experience on Autism in Love. I quickly did the math: over the three years it took to go from idea to screen, I made $30,000 on that documentary. And even though we sold it to streamers, got an Emmy nomination, and received critical acclaim, we never broke even.

That is not a livable wage. It dawned on me that no matter how lean a budget, the line producer will always be paid because production literally can’t afford to make a movie without one. So, I made it my business to learn how to become great at it.

Nobody makes a movie about the line producer. But nothing gets made without one.

And Then Came Television

Here’s where it gets confusing for people outside (and even inside!) the industry: television built its own, almost entirely separate producer hierarchy. It’s the reason “producer” means something different depending on whether you’re on a film set or in a writers’ room.

In TV, the person running the show creatively, breaking story, rewriting scripts, managing the writers’ room, often driving tone and casting, is typically credited as an executive producer, and colloquially called the showrunner. This lineage comes out of the way television was historically financed and staffed: writers were given production authority because the format demanded someone stay creatively consistent across dozens of episodes and multiple seasons, in a way a single film doesn’t require.

So in TV, “executive producer” frequently means “the person actually making the creative decisions,” which is nearly the opposite of how that same title often functions in film, where an EP credit can just as easily mean “person who helped finance this” or “actor’s manager who negotiated a credit.”

And of course, there’s also the non-writing executive producer, typically a title given to a development executive who has pivoted into being a right hand to the showrunner. This person can also come from a physical producing background. Regardless of how they got there, the NWEP is generally a right hand to the key creatives on a show, keeping the whole machine running.

Same word. Two completely different professions, essentially.

And, hold onto that distinction ladies and germs, because this next part? Oh, this next part is reaalllyyy nifty.

The Streaming Era and the Great Credit Inflation

Which brings us to now. If you’ve looked at the opening credits of literally anything in the last ten years, you’ve probably noticed there are sometimes eight, ten, twelve executive producers listed on a single project. This is not because producing got twelve times harder. It’s a byproduct of packaging culture colliding with the streaming financing model. Actors’ companies get an EP credit as part of their deal, financiers get a credit, a book’s original author gets a credit, a podcast IP holder gets a credit.

Some of these people are deeply involved in every creative decision.

Some of them you only meet at the premiere party.

Deal-driven credits are a reality of how projects get financed and IP gets attached in 2026. And because of that, the title has been diluted and a vague signal of what someone actually does. It’s part of why I’ve spent so much of my time on AOP trying to pull the curtain back on what real producing labor looks like.

Everyone wants to be a producer, but few actually want to do the work of a producer.

Why It’s Harder Than Ever to Be an Independent Film Producer

In 2021, Rebecca Green (producer of It Follows and founder of ) published the first Producers Sustainability Survey, polling 474 working U.S. producers, all of whom had a producer or “produced by” credit on at least one commercially released feature in the prior decade. These weren’t hobbyists. These were folks who had already been grinding it out for quite some time. And the numbers were brutal: 41% earned $25,000 or less exclusively from producing in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2020, that figure jumped to 56%, with more than a quarter earning under $2,500. Nearly 78% of respondents called for minimum producer fees to even exist.

It’s rare if not a miracle for a producer to get a development fee at all, regardless of how many hours go into a project, because we don’t get paid until official preproduction. There are years of development work, optioning material, attaching talent, chasing financing which are essentially unpaid labor. Producers routinely spend thousands of dollars of their own money just to get a project started. And this isn’t just a U.S. problem: a 2025 survey of UK independent producers found 89% saying the job is not sustainable as it currently exists.

Folks often ask me what is a fair rate to pay a producer for development and it’s honestly an impossible number to estimate. And who elects to pay that fee?

Now contrast that with the TV side. A writer/producer in television is covered by the WGA. There are negotiated minimums, weekly compensation during a staffing engagement, script fees, residuals, health insurance thresholds, a union that strikes on your behalf. A non-writing EP is typically on an overall deal or a negotiated services agreement, salaried against the show. The TV producer ecosystem, though also riddled with it’s own challenges, at least has floors.

Independent film producing has no union, no minimums, no residual structure, and no development compensation.

The Producers Guild is wonderful, but it’s a trade organization, not a labor union, and it cannot collectively bargain. If you’re wondering why many great film producers migrate to television, streaming, branded content, commercials, verticals, or out of the industry entirely, this is why.

It’s not a talent drain; it’s an economics problem that depletes us.

And the economics have gotten worse on the revenue side too. Everyone is well aware that the independent theatrical market has contracted sharply: indie box office shrank double digits in 2024, and independent film’s share of the global box office has been sliding. The streamers who once wrote eight-figure checks at Sundance have largely retreated into making their own originals, and industry analysts have been documenting the collapse of the “Pay One” window, the post-theatrical licensing revenue that used to function as a safety net for independent films. Theatrical windows have compressed from roughly 90 days to 30.

And remember, home video used to be a real business. The rental era of Blockbuster and mom-and-pop video stores, followed by the DVD boom that peaked around $16 billion a year in 2005, gave films a genuine second life and a backend that could turn a theatrical underperformer profitable. Straight to DVD alone was a sustainable model that employed hundreds of people.

All of it, gone.

So the independent producer of 2026 is asked to work unpaid for years, invest their own money, defer their fee when financing gets tight, and then sell into a market with fewer buyers, lower prices, and fewer downstream revenue options than at any point in the modern era.

If the 1948 decision that liberated the independent producer created a swell in the marketplace; then streaming consolidation of the last decade has dried up all those channels.

I don’t say all of this to discourage anyone. We cannot fix a problem people refuse to name and pretending the producer’s path is glamorous is exactly how we ended up with a generation of brilliant producers burning out.

And don’t even get me started on all the mental health implications of this…which I will write about in a future post.

The New Chapter: Producer as Builder

But hey kid. This is Hollywood. It’s the wild west! It’s a place that’s constantly changing and evolving. You either get with the times or you get out. Depressing as it all may be, that exact pressure is producing (pun intended) the most interesting evolution of the role in a hundred years.

For a century, “producer” has been defined entirely in relation to a project. You produce a film, you produce a show, and your identity as a producer exists inside the boundaries of that one credit. But increasingly, producers aren’t just attaching themselves to other people’s IP or waiting on a marketplace that keeps shrinking.

We’re building our own things from scratch: platforms, brands, companies, communities, education businesses, live events. We’re entrepreneurs in the truest sense, people who identify a gap, build the infrastructure to fill it, and figure out how to sustain it financially, often with none of the studio backing the moguls of the 1930s took for granted.

In a strange way, it’s a return to our origins. Chaplin, Pickford, Disney, and Goldwyn didn’t wait for the system to make room for them either. They built United Artists, they built SIMPP, they built their own companies and then sued the system into opening up.

AOP itself is proof of this shift. It started as a response to a gap: the fact that few understood what producers actually do, or the range of paths available under that one title. Building AOP has meant producing in a completely different sense. Producing content, producing a community, producing a business.

It’s the same instinct: find the gap, assemble the pieces, get it made, get it out into the world.

While the role has started to feel limited to a lot of us, even as our actual work has expanded, widening the definition isn’t just semantics. It’s how the industry starts to recognize and value everything producers are actually doing now.

And frankly, given the economics I just laid out, it may be the only way the career survives.

Really Then, What Is a Producer?"

If you force me to give you one definition, it’s this: a producer is the person who makes something possible. Financially, logistically, or creatively, and usually some combination of all three. Everything else, the mogul, the dealmaker, the line producer, the showrunner, the vanity EP, the builder, is just a different flavor of that same core function, shaped by whatever era’s financing model, or platform, or opportunity happened to be dominant at the time.

What hasn’t changed since Edison’s tar-paper studio is that behind every film, every show, every brand, every platform you’ve ever loved, there was someone, often several someones, mostly unrecognized in the culture even when they’re credited on screen, who turned an idea into a scheduled, budgeted, built, actually-happening thing.

That’s the job. It always has been. Or would you define it differently?

Thanks for reading and as always, thanks for doing this life thing with me!

Resources

If you want to go deeper, these sources worth your time:

On the history:

• The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson.

• United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948)

• The National Constitution Center’s overview of the Paramount case and its aftermath

• The SIMPP Archive, a deep independent-producer history of the antitrust fight.

• The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz.

On the state of independent producing today:

• Dear Producer’s Producers 2021 Sustainability Survey

• The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the survey

• TheWrap, “Film Producing Is ‘Not a Sustainable Career’”

• Screen Daily on the UK Producers Roundtable survey

• NPR from Sundance: “Filmmakers say the space to get indie films made is shrinking”

• TheWrap’s state-of-the-industry read out of Sundance 2025

• Filmmaker Magazine’s annual “Hits & Misses” distribution case studies

They say behind every great director is an exhausted producer. And behind some producers, there’s an adorable toddler with a bubble gun pointed directly at their face. So give everyone some grace!

Game show pitch: adults try to do normal life tasks, but the catch is they have 30 seconds and a toddler in their way.

• Heading up the elevator, arms full of grocery bags, with a toddler who demands to be carried

• Trying to put groceries away while the toddler keeps turning off the light and shutting the pantry door

• Frying bacon while the toddler tugs at your pants, desperate to participate

Any takers? HMU.

Since I’m deep in teaching mode for the Green Light Ready masterclass this week, it’s a good time to share some of the hardworking faces behind your favorite directors.

These five episodes from the AOP archives are excellent nuggets on how these producers got their start, how they linked up with the directors they’ve worked with, and the unique challenges they’ve faced along the way.

Upgrade your subscription today!

Sev and I go way back... like to before he made Searching. During our time together, we talked about his first foray into filmmaking: an $800 micro-budget film shot on his dad's home video camera, how his working relationship with Coogler came to be, and the trials and tribulations of shooting on location in the swamps of Louisiana.

Watch on YouTube

An OG guest, Maggie came on the show back when it was audio only from my living room. When we recorded, she was still in her music video producer era, and we went deep on how lonely freelancing can be, why kindness on set is crucial, and growing from our mistakes. These days, she's out here real fancy, now running Kristen Stewart's company. And they have a really fun film coming out in August. We are overdue for a part two... stay tuned!

Listen on Apple or Spotify

Hours before we recorded, Alex found out he was an Oscar-nominated producer. It was special to capture this pivotal moment in his career, and he had also either just had a baby or was about to have one! He's delightful and extremely candid about making commercials to pay the bills and buy himself the freedom to produce films.

Watch on YouTube

Ali and I met in a mom group, as one does, when she was in an in-between phase of her career. She's impressive and inspiring, and I found her so even before her new post as President of Film at Miramax. We discuss the evolving definition of a producer's role in Hollywood, the power of women in their 40s, and how the making of this film changed her life.

Watch on YouTube

This was 5 years ago... in my pre-married and pre-baby life when I was still recording on Zoom, and Mollye had recently won an Academy Award for Chloé Zhao's Nomadland. We discuss her origins, what it's like to accept that gold statue, and how working with Chloé shaped her.

Watch on YouTube

Can’t wait to hear what gold you mine from these episodes. And as always, thanks for doing this life thing with me!

Of the dozen or so scripts submitted, I could tell within 15 pages that pulling it off at that price point, while honoring what made the script special, would be nearly impossible. Not because of the writing, but because of the cast, locations, and elements that seem simple on the page but would require far more resources than a $1M budget realistically allows.

After reading through everything, one script rose to the top. It scored highly on the Black List, and I knew it was the perfect material for this course. Not just because it’s a great concept, but because I genuinely believe it can be made well for under $1M — and I’m going to show you exactly why.

The class kicks off next week!

We arrive having read the script, discuss the tricky elements, build the schedule, and construct the budget from scratch, look at financial projections, and peep at a sample waterfall. By the end you’ll see not just what it costs, but how even a script like this — contained, specific, with a clear point of view — is doable but still no cake walk.

I’m excited too that the writer is walking away with a basic schedule and budget built by me to help them on take their next step. That’s what supporting indie film looks like!

The ability to read a script and gauge cost takes years to develop. But there are signposts. And those signposts can be taught.

What does it actually mean to write for a price point?

Screenwriting courses teach craft: structure, character, dialogue, scene work. This course does something adjacent but different. It helps you understand what your script is actually asking the world to do in order to exist.

Every scene you write is a production decision. The barn at dusk with six speaking roles and a working tractor isn’t just a dramatic choice. It’s a specific location, a permit, probably a company move, maybe a split shoot day, a trained animal wrangler, and six contracts. An intimate two-hander in a single apartment is a gift to a producer, but can also be a cinematically underwhelming experience. The cross-country road trip with twenty locations across three states is a beautiful idea that will eat your budget before you hit page 60.

This doesn’t mean don’t write the barn scene. It means understand what you’re asking for when you do, and know when it’s worth it and when there’s a smarter way to get to the same emotional truth.

A schedule and budget is not a cage. It’s a creative constraint. And constraints, as any seasoned filmmaker will tell you, are often where the most interesting work lives.

Jaws was full of constraints.

Obsession was full of constraints.

It also shot in 20 days in LA on a $750K budget. (caveat: six reshoot days were added, so the total spent is likely a bit higher).

Sign Up For Class

What Green Light Ready gives writers specifically

If a screenwriting course makes you a better writer, then Green Light Ready makes you a more empowered one.

When you understand how a schedule is built, you start to see your own script differently. You notice the company moves. You feel the night exteriors. You understand why consolidating locations isn’t just a budget decision. It’s often a storytelling one too.

When you understand what things actually cost, you stop writing with vague ambition and start writing with intention. You can choose to go big on one scene because you know where to pull back somewhere else. You understand the trade-offs before you’re sitting across from a line producer hearing them for the first time.

And when you understand the basics of financial projections and what distribution actually looks like for a sub-$1M film, you stop writing for an imaginary greenlight and start writing for the real one. The one that’s actually possible, and that sets your producers up to raise financing for a movie that can get made.

Knowing the limitations is where creativity flourishes.

KEY TAKEAWAYS 🔑

• How to read a script like a line producer

• How to create a basic schedule and budget

• How the schedule impacts the budget

• Pros and cons of union vs. non-union

• How to get a film made for under $1M

• Basic financial projections and recoupment waterfalls

Sign Up

Green Light Ready — a 3-part live and virtual masterclass

The class runs July 15, 17, and 22 from 10A - 12PM PST. A recording will be sent out after if you can’t make it live! Thanks to our partners at Cinapse, you’ll get a free trial of their scheduling platform plus 15% off when you sign up.

Enrollment closes July 10th. Sign up!

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

I guess all along we just needed a respected, well known actor to talk about the value of producers for the algorithm to care about us. 😬 I’m elated tbh.

And Bob isn't wrong. But the reality of making a living as a producer is complicated.

In other noteworthy news, Brazil is crushing it in the World Cup, I’m embarking on a new chapter that I’ll share more about next month, and my adorable toddler, who missed me immensely, gave me the best welcome home gift: a summer cold that turned into an ear infection and took my actual voice.

Ahh children, they are so magical! So precious! So gross!

So if you noticed I went quiet in your inbox or on the Substack app, lo siento mucho. And if you didn’t notice, no offense taken. We are all so overstimulated already that a little less noise was probably my white elephant gift to you. You’re welcome.

While my voice is still not fully returned, I have much to say, so let’s get into it.

Obsessed with Obsession

It started when art director Sally Choi shared on social media how little she actually made on the film. That set off a wave of conversation, and a lot of outrage.

Then producer Mynette Louie, an OG AOP guest, stepped in and created a mock waterfall to quiet down the loud people who don’t really understand how waterfalls function, or how much money filmmakers actually take home once everything is said and done. I posted about her breakdown, and reading the comments was wild.

It became clear to me that there are a lot of blind spots and gaps in people’s knowledge about how the entire cycle of a film actually functions. Most people seem to never really think beyond locked picture. And then there’s the rhetoric that all you have to do is make a movie for under $1 million (hard), make it exceptional (exceptionally hard), and then you too can be an outlier like Obsession and make over $371 million at the global box office, on a $750,000 budget!

That is such a great unique story for that team. I’m happy for them and even happier they shot the film in LA. But…sorry to burst your bubble, the reality is that most indie films rarely break even. And no trade publication is writing about that. And no producer or financier is showing you the books to dissect what, if anything, course have been done differently.

I’ve felt that gap from both sides of the table. Filmmakers who confidently think their film can be done for under $3M, when one look at the script tells me it’ll land closer to $5M. Or creative execs who have pivoted into producing and are exceptional at development, but struggle to back a $3M script into a sub $1M price point without losing what makes the idea unique. Or worst, upsetting a filmmaker who can’t conceive of making their film for a number they consider creatively stifling.

That gap is where the blind spots live. And it’s exactly where I want to meet you.

Masterclass: Green Light Ready

Last fall I ran two short film budgeting workshops, born out of learning that many established TV writers I knew wanted to direct and were unsure how to begin, or how much a short should even cost. So I taught these small, scrappy, proof of concept classes on Zoom. I figured a handful of people would show up curious. Instead they filled up fast, and the question I kept hearing afterward was: can we do this for a feature?

A feature is such a big undertaking, and I was struggling with how to make it dynamic and fun for creatives without getting too deep in the weeds of scheduling and budgeting. Those are courses onto themselves for a reason!

However, a lightbulb went off and I’m excited to share how I can share my knowledge with you.

Sign Up For Class

Green Light Ready is a three part live masterclass for producers, writers, directors, executives, and anyone who has ever wondered if the number in their head was doable.

Over the course of one week, we’ll read a kickass unproduced script, build a schedule, and construct a budget from scratch, together. By the end you’ll understand:

• How to read a script like a line producer

• How the schedule drives the budget, not the other way around

• The pros and cons of union versus non union work in the sub $1M space

• What it actually takes to get a film made for under $1M

• How to read basic financial projections and recoupment waterfalls

This isn’t about shrinking your ambition to fit a spreadsheet. It’s the opposite. The filmmakers and producers who get more at bat than others understand the economics and financials of the biz side of showbiz. They write within those constraints intentionally, and it helps producers raise financing proportionate to the risk, whether that’s a first time filmmaker, an execution dependent sci-fi film, or a newcomer lead in a drama.

I’m pricing this course at $999, which is a steep discount for 6 focused hours of 15+ years of knowledge. Sign up before Friday for $25 OFF using the code EARLYBIRD.

My dream is that you take these principles into your creative process, so you feel empowered to write, produce, and fundraise for a price point that’s actually doable for your film. [cue Alexandre Desplat’s “The Shape of Water” score]

Green Light Ready runs July 15, 17, and 22 from 10A - 12PM, live and virtual. Thanks to our partners at Cinapse, you’ll get a free trial of their scheduling platform plus 15% off when you sign up.

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

Not a shabby start to a Sunday morning in NYC! (Go Knicks!!!!)

The Most Elite Hike Club

Over 1.5 million people visit Machu Picchu every year, but of that number, only 25,000 hike in. That's roughly 1.6% — less than the crowd at a mid-sized music festival. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross are among them.

And so am I.

Three years ago, I hiked the Inca Trail on my honeymoon. It was an epic adventure where I often felt, well, bamboozled. (proof below) It rained the entire time. The upside, however, is that we basically had the whole trail to ourselves because protests in Lima had kept most hikers away — just me, my husband, and an Italian named Federico who became our accidental third wheel. Volllaarreee!

Yes, it was a very sexy honeymoon, thank you very much.

So, I knew I was uniquely positioned to have this chat.

And when I tell you that moderating a 45-minute conversation with Bob and David in front of 100+ people is its own kind of altitude sickness — I mean that affectionately. These two have been cracking each other up for thirty years. Keeping them on a clock is a fool’s errand.

Is there anything more a producer loves than delightful, chaotic, completely worth it fool’s errand?

The Wrap called the film “a warm and affectionate home movie” and compared it to The Trip series — high praise for a documentary shot on narrow mountain paths with a skeleton crew and two guys slowly losing oxygen. The Tribeca programmer’s note described it as a “coca-fueled meditation on friendship, mortality, and profoundly absurd comedy.” Both are accurate.

During our chat, we tackled the realities of the hike, why David felt compelled to invite Bob, how the trip cracked them both open, and how Bob’s heart attack during the final season of Better Call Saul quietly gave the whole journey a different kind of weight.

When my husband and I finally made it to the Sun Gate above Machu Picchu, the skies parted and revealed the most stunning marvel — one of the seven wonders of the world, and every bit worthy of the title. No video or photo does it justice. Not even in 4K.

The Industry Is a Mood-Altering Substance

One of my favorite moments in the documentary comes near the end when Bob and David share an honest conversation over dinner. Bob reflects:

“I always hated how Hollywood made me care about things I don’t care about.”

When I brought this up during our panel, he connected it directly to social media. We think we are meant to create with the same velocity we consume, and it just doesn’t work that way. If comparison is the thief of joy, then who in Hollywood isn’t entitled to file a formal complaint?

There’s clinical language for what Bob was describing. Psychologists call it extrinsic motivation — when your sense of worth becomes tethered to external reward. Prestige. Validation. The box office number. The billboard on Sunset. The follower count. The deal that closed or didn’t.

Dr. Ali Mattu, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University Medical Center who has consulted for HBO, Netflix, and PBS, writes and speaks extensively about how anxiety loops form when we outsource our self-assessment to things we can’t control. The entertainment industry is almost uniquely designed to trigger this and welcomes tortured souls from all walks of life. Success is invisible until it suddenly isn’t. The rules change, the goalposts move, and the device in your pocket gives you a real-time score that never stops refreshing.

Bob put it plainly:

“That was never a priority for me in my world and my life, but this thing, this device... made me have anxiety and neediness towards... what the fuck is that?”

Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a licensed clinical psychologist named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and a consultant on A Million Little Things, has built her career around the idea that talking about emotional pain honestly is the first step toward cultural change. She’d recognize what Bob was articulating: the entertainment ecosystem doesn’t just reward extrinsic motivation, it manufactures it.

Dr. Sherry Walling, a clinical psychologist and burnout expert, writes about how high-performing creatives are especially vulnerable to identity collapse when the work slows down or the industry shifts. Because when your career is the dream you had, it becomes almost impossible to keep it separate from who you are. The industry doesn’t take you aside and say, “hey, chill out, this is just a job.”

No, sir.

It says things like “we are family!” and “it’s all about relationships.” Until it’s no longer convenient — then it says, “hey, it’s showbiz, kid.”

A 2024 Deadline piece on Hollywood on-set therapists captured the growing crisis: with layoffs, strikes, and continued contraction reshaping everything, therapists in production noted that people are cracking in new ways. Deeper than career stress. The foreboding existential question of whether the life they built still makes sense.

Bob’s antidote used to be Europe — going somewhere between seasons where no one knew who he was, where he could exist completely outside the vortex. Then life changed. Kids. LA. The distance disappeared. He’s still working on getting it back.

A Very Personal Panel

One of my many survival jobs early in my career was working for Bob and his wife Naomi as their nanny. This was around 2009, aka season 2 of Breaking Bad, and the kids were 10 and 11 at the time — that’s how I know exactly how many years have passed. Bob was always around, and many evenings were spent cooking dinner together, particularly tilapia, which he taught me how to make. I still make it today.

During our exchanges about career and ambition, he would often remind me: You have to think about who you’re becoming in the meantime. Because you don’t want to get to the destination and be miserable.

The concept of the meantime has stuck with me ever since. How do we hold on to our internal values when extrinsic motivation is so tempting, so loud, so everywhere?

There was something poetic and surreal and quietly emotional about sitting across from Bob on that Sunday morning at Tribeca — as a producer, a mother, the creator and host of AOP. Still in my meantime, because when do any of us actually arrive? But different. Changed. Able to hold that early version of myself with some tenderness instead of just embarrassment.

It’s pretty cool.

What the Film Is Really About

While it follows two old friends hiking the Inca Trail, Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu (which is still looking for distribution) is actually about perspective. It examines what happens when you remove yourself completely from the noise and are forced to put one foot in front of the other to reach the other side.

They didn't set out to make a mental health film. They set out to do something hard together, to see if they still could. What they made is a meditation on friendship, aging, meaning, and the quiet terror and deep relief of discovering that the person you are on the mountain is the person you actually are.

Near the end of our conversation, David talked about his nine-year-old daughter — how fatherhood changed how he thinks about his choices and how he looks in the mirror differently now. It was quiet and honest and it landed.

If only we had more time together.

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

Resources:

• Dr. Ali Mattu, PhD — Columbia University Medical Center: psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/ali-mattu-phd

• Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, PhD — Give an Hour / Inner Space Podcast: dcpofficial.com/barbara-van-dahlen

• Dr. Sherry Walling, PhD — ZenFounder: sherrywalling.com

• Hollywood’s Mental Health Crisis: On-Set Therapists Speak Out — Deadline, 2024: deadline.com

Kate Bolger is one of them. We met in 2017 on the set of Gillian Jacobs’ short film, Curated — she was working for Refinery29, I was producing. We’d been talking on the phone for months before we ever met in person. And when we finally did, she was p…

Read more

That is what I love about going to a festival. You leave with your head and heart fully inspired. It was great to support friends’ films, discover new ones, and frolicking around the city.

If you caught any of these, or others, I want to know what you thought. Drop a comment below or reply to this email!.

Oh, and stay tuned — our live recording with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, which was wild and so much fun, goes live next Tuesday! There will be a whole post on that.

The Accompanist

Kudos to Zach Woods on a stunning directorial debut that pulled at my heartstrings. I know how hard these indie films are to get made. The financing, the scheduling, the sheer tenacity it takes to get a personal story off the page and onto a screen.

The story follows young Emily, whose grandfather’s dementia has gotten too severe for him to care for her, and the unlikely older woman, Sylvia, who becomes her foster mother. Susan Sarandon is wonderful, and what a tender debut for Everly Carganilla, the eleven-year-old who plays Emily. It is a performance of real depth and presence.

Zach based Sylvia on his own grandmother and you feel that love by him and all the talented collaboratos involved to bring the story to life in every single frame.

Via Negativa

Hannah Peterson is two for two at Tribeca. Her 2023 debut, The Graduates, was very memorable, and she returns this year with an adaptation of Daniel Hornsby’s novel following a young priest named Dan who gets essentially pushed out of his parish after a crisis of faith and hits the road.

Young Mazino quietly delivers a compelling, slow-burn performance. He barely speaks. He carries this wounded, searching energy that the camera just lives inside of. The film picks up a wounded coyote along the way, which serves as a kind of mirror for Dan’s own state. The heartland landscape is gorgeous. The supporting characters he meets feel textured and real.

Shot on 35mm, this film puts audiences in a slow, meditative state. It trusts silence and stillness. I was moved by it. I truly believe Hannah Peterson is a filmmaker to watch closely. She has a specific sensibility that is uncompromising and a softness with difficult subjects that pulls me in.

Jail Time Records

This film reminded me that art and talent exist in the most unexpected corners of the planet, and that music heals.

Shot inside New Bell Prison in Douala, Cameroon — which was built to hold 800 people and currently houses nearly 6,000 — this documentary profiles three incarcerated musicians and the first recording studio inside a prison on the African continent. Directors Dione Roach and Steve Happi used their extraordinary access to capture the intimacy and kinetic energy of this rarefied space.

The three subjects, Stone, Emperor, and Transporter, are fully realized human beings. Men with complicated inner lives who happen to be making music in circumstances most of us cannot imagine. The film blends vérité with performance footage and it pulses.

This line struck a chord with me:

“The only advantage of being in prison is that you have time. That’s all you have.”

In an oversaturated world where the timeless currency of time slips through our fingers, here’s a man in one of the most overcrowded prisons on the continent nurturing the one thing no one can take from him and turning it into art. I think about how many of us complain about not having enough time to make the thing we really want to make. And then I think about that line.

The power of this story is palpable, and it’s no wonder that Taika Waititi came on as an executive producer to use his platform and help this story be seen.

As someone who has produced three documentaries, I know this power firsthand. The most recent of which, The Honorable Shyne, took me to parts of Brooklyn I never would have seen otherwise. Documentary filmmaking is the ability to teleport into a life, a place, an experience that will likely never be yours, and to meet people you would never otherwise meet.

AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About

Okay so I had to see this one. You know I had to.

This UK documentary bills itself as the definitive account of AI’s origins, told by the people who actually built it, including Geoffrey Hinton, the often-called Godfather of AI, who left Google specifically because he wanted to be able to speak freely about what he thinks is coming. The film is paced like a thriller, which is a smart choice. It keeps you engaged even when the material gets dense.

I appreciated Hinton’s framing of AI as a dual-purpose technology; as an amplifier for human input; the good and the bad. The intentional and the careless. And if superintelligence is potentially 10 to 20 years away, as he suggests, then the urgent question is not what will AI do.

The urgent question is: who are we? What does it mean to be a being? What are we actually amplifying?

He says at one point: “History belongs to the doers.”

I believe that’s the answer for people in our industry right now. Not waiting to see how this plays out. Not outsourcing the question to the tech companies. Doing. Making. Deciding what kind of storytellers we want to be and building toward that before someone else builds it for us.

Film like this either present AI as all good or all bad; but as I’ve yapped on and on, it’s no binary. This doc made me want to ask harder questions and think about what I want my own relationship to these tools to look like going forward.

Even Hinton himself, when asked if he could go back in time and press a button undoing his initial discoveries on AI, couldn’t answer that. It’s too complex, he hinted, because there is so much good intertwined with the bad.

The Revisionist

Alex Vlack’s debut feature is a good-looking, intriguing one that I am still processing. Based on his novel of the same title, the film plays with our perception of truth in a tantalizing way. A dear producer friend is working with him on another project and shared a bit about how difficult his journey was to make this film and step into the director role — which of course made me appreciate his work that much more.

The setup is rich: Elise, a novelist with writer’s block, has her long-time friend John come back into their lives right as her husband Jacob is trying to write a biography of his aging, impossible father David, played by Dustin Hoffman. What follows is a story about writing, about whose stories belong to whom, about the ethics of transforming real people into fiction.

Dustin Hoffman is excellent — though I wish they had given him just a bit more. He plays a legendary raconteur who refuses to be pinned down and he is fully alive in every moment. André Holland is equally magnetic as John, someone who walks back into a room and recalibrates everything.

Alison Brie, who also produced this film, is given so little to work with that it borders on baffling. Her character carries the central conceit and yet the script keeps cutting away from her. Tom Sturridge is a terrific actor who is similarly underserved. I loved the film’s ambition, and while the architecture to support it is largely there, I found myself wishing for just a smidge more.

Still, I’d rather see a debut feature that swings big and doesn’t land everything than one that plays it safe. Alex Vlack’s psyche pulled me in and I am eager to see what he does next.

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

I pour a lot of time and heart into every post I publish here. If AOP has brought you value, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

Upgrade your subscription today!

Five months ago, on January 5th, my dad lost his 18-month fight against pancreatic cancer. Days before he passed, we had one of those heart-to-heart exchanges in his hospital room that often shows up in movies and leaves us a puddle on the floor — but this was a moment of strength.

I asked him if he felt satisfied with the life he’d made, with his choices, if he had any regrets. And he said absolutely not. He lived his life to the fullest — which meant daring to leave his home country in his 30s with his wife and three young children so that we could chase any dream we wanted.

He looked at me and reminded me — as long as you are following your bliss, that’s all that matters.

This was his favorite line, one he said often. But this time, I felt my stomach sink.

I considered, for the first time in a long time, whether I was indeed following my bliss. Why did I move to LA almost 20 years ago? What was I after? And even though dreams morph as the path meanders, the question gnawed at me:

Is the life I’m living today representative of my bliss?

There’s much to be grateful for. I’ve carved a path in an unrelenting industry that did not embrace me, and I have much to show for it. I’ve stood on many mountain tops of professional achievement — though of course there are always bigger, fancier mountains to climb. I’m proud of that 19-year-old who ventured west on her own. She’s gotten very far.

I have a beautiful family: a loving, funny, and hot husband, and a toddler I’m crazy for. But we contain multitudes, right… We can have all the things and still feel restless. Still feel untethered.

And perhaps you, my dear reader, look at me and think I have it all figured out. Let me be the first to tell you: I have some things figured out. And what I know, I’m happy to share. But as I feel myself entering a new era, there’s a new figuring it out — and this time, I’m doing it in public with all of you: through the podcast, this Substack, my ramblings on Instagram.

I hope you’ll follow along.

Because it takes courage to be vulnerable enough to show you the process on the way to becoming.

My Kindred Spirits

Today, I’m spotlighting three women in my life who are doing the damn thing — betting on themselves, building on their own terms, and refusing to wait for permission.

Hannah Peterson — A filmmaker who has worked closely with Chloé Zhao and Sean Baker, whom Filmmaker Magazine named one of 25 new faces of independent film back in 2018, and whose second feature premieres at Tribeca tonight.

Kate Bolger — A producer-turned-entrepreneur who is one of my lifelines/ride or dies, who pivoted from Hollywood to open a candy store and is about to become the next Ina Garten. Mark my words.

Maryam Mehrtash — A courageous former executive who spent years building teams and growing revenue for someone else’s dream, then decided to bet on herself. Last July she launched her Substack , grew her Instagram from scratch to 60K+, and stepped fully into her own vision.

Oh, and these women also happen to be incredible moms.

Continue reading below — this one’s for paid subscribers!

Subscribe now

Read more

First was AI on the Lot, and I shared my takeaways from day one. Then The Hollywood Creator Summit — hosted by Colin and Samir, where I got to be in the room with some of the most interesting minds at the intersection of YouTube and Hollywood.

The timing was peculiar. In the best possible way.

Because while we were sitting in sessions talking about the future of creators in Hollywood, that future was happening in real time — at the box office.

By Sunday, the top two films globally were directed by YouTube creators. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms broke the record for the largest opening weekend ever for an original horror film — $118M, A24’s biggest opening in history, and Parsons is now the youngest filmmaker to ever top the box office.

Curry Barker’s Obsession, made for $750K and shot in 20 days, has grossed $148M worldwide and is on track to become one of the most profitable films of all time.

And Markiplier’s Iron Lung, which was made for under $5M, self-financed, self-directed, and clocked $52M globally before dropping on YouTube for rent and purchase this weekend.

I actually filmed a reel earlier this year when the Iron Lung box office story first broke. Because I felt it then. Something was shifting.

Being surrounded by people actively trying to understand and build that shift — and then watching it validated at the global box office in the same 72 hours — is the kind of coincidence that stops you in your tracks.

Here are three things that stayed with me:

Subscribe now

1. Believe in Yourself Enough

Markiplier spoke at the Hollywood Creator Summit, and the number that stuck with me wasn’t $52 million.

It was one.

He said going in that Iron Lung would feel like a success if it was just one person’s favorite movie. The most valuable thing anyone can give you is their time, and having one person love the movie was his win. When creators “crossover” to film, folks get real curious as to how they do it. There’s no real mystery here according to Mark:

“I don’t think there’s that much of a difference from a technical perspective of making a movie versus a YouTube video. It’s just the scale at which it is done.”

What was the most inspiring was Mark’s bravado; the quiet confidence of someone who has learned that problem solving is the skill set. He reiterated that the most valuable thing you can develop as a director isn’t any single technical ability. It’s the capacity to figure things out as they fall apart around you. To not need all the answers before starting:

“I believe in myself enough to make up for the shortcomings that are there.”

We’ve spent years watching Hollywood treat YouTube as a pipeline — a place to scout talent, option IP, test audiences. But what Markiplier demonstrated is that the skillset was never the barrier. It was the belief. He just went and made the movie.

2. Momentum is the most undervalued resource you have

Ideas are fragile when they’re new, but they also have tremendous potential and momentum. The longer an idea sits between your head and the world, the more it decays. Or, worse, they go visit someone else entirely. And Hollywood development has historically been the most efficient system for killing good ideas slowly.

Comedian Tom Segura got tired of Hollywood’s “development hell” so he did what creators do: he went straight to his audience. Built his own platform. Sold directly to fans. That led to his company, YMH Studios, inking a multi-project partnership with Fox Creator Studios.

The creator-to-Hollywood shift right now is about closing the distance between having an idea and pressing go. The three filmmakers who topped the box office this weekend all had different routes — one partnered with A24 and Blumhouse, one self-financed everything, one had a script picked up and shot in 20 days. They all blazed their own paths forward and that’s hella inspiring.

But of course it comes with a ton of uncertainly, solitude, and an insane work ethic. It’s not for the faint of heart. You have to pour all of yourself into into the thing, and that comes at a price that not all are willing to pay.

3. Worlds Colliding

The people in the room at AI on the Lot were optimizers. That’s not a criticism — it’s the DNA of the tech world. Find the inefficiencies, build systems, reduce variables. There’s enormous value in that. And AI, in the right hands, genuinely does make production faster and leaner. Though, my main criticism of this years conference is that no one was able to show us under the hood of just how much it saves.

The folks at The Hollywood Creator Summit are just built a little differently; they are the ones comfortable feeling around in the dark. They were curious in a way that isn’t always efficient. They start things without knowing where they’ll land. They iterate in public, in real time, and grow alongside their community.

Optimization asks: how do we do this better? Curiosity asks: what happens if we try this?

Both rooms were full of smart people who care deeply about the future of this industry. But the energy was different. And I think the creators who are winning right now — at the box office, on YouTube, in the culture — are the ones leading with curiosity first. The ones who are genuinely enchanted by the challenge of learning something new, not just the satisfaction of solving it cleanly.

Underneath both conferences was the same question: who gets to make things, and how?

The barriers are lower than they’ve ever been and the weekend’s box office numbers prove that Gen Z audiences show up to theaters to see creators they already trust try something new.

As the OG indie filmmaker Mark Duplass put it:

“We’ve got examples of creators woodshedding things, putting them online, building an audience, and now the people with the purse strings are going to notice.”

They’re noticing.

And what they’re noticing isn’t just the numbers. It’s what’s underneath them. As Leah Walker, head of influencer and creator marketing at Adobe, simply put:

“Reach can be bought. But trust can’t.”

That’s what Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, and Markiplier walked into those theaters with. Years of trust, built one video at a time. Hollywood can provide the budget, the distribution, the screens. But it cannot manufacture what these three already had before a single frame was shot.

Hollywood traditionally moves at a glacial pace; one that 3 years often feels fast. This moment denotes a shift in trust and alignment. The questions being asked in Hollywood are finally starting to sound like the questions creators have been asking for a decade.

It’s about time.

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

I pour a lot of time and heart into every post I publish here. If AOP has brought you value, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

Upgrade your subscription today!

There's a lone genius in a dark room, lit by candlelight or the blue glow of a screen monitor, with a vision so singular and complete that it arrives fully formed, needing only time and will to bring it to the world. It's Kubrick alone with his obsessions. Spielberg with a storyboard and a certainty. The auteur myth is seductive because it's clean. One person. One vision. One masterpiece.

But the research tells a different story.

Musician Brian Eno has a word for what actually drives great creative work: scenius. The idea is that breakthroughs don’t come from isolated individuals. They come from an ecology of talent. People who support each other, challenge each other, steal and refine each other’s ideas. The individual still matters. It just turns out they were never really alone.

Walter Isaacson spent years tracing the origins of the digital revolution for his book The Innovators and found the same thing. “There are thousands of books celebrating people we mythologize as lone inventors,” he wrote. Every major breakthrough he investigated — every invention we’ve credited to a single name — was actually built collaboratively.

MIT researcher Alex Pentland took it even further. After studying what actually predicts creative output, he found it wasn’t talent, or knowledge, or raw intelligence. It was how often people casually bumped into each other. The hallway conversation. The coffee pot. The accidental collision of two people thinking about different problems. That’s where the breakthroughs were born.

And in his book Group Genius, researcher Keith Sawyer spent 15 years studying jazz ensembles, theater companies, and corporations and reached the same conclusion: every invention we attribute to a lone genius actually originated in collaboration. Not some of them. All of them.

So, when people hear “AI filmmaking” and picture someone typing a prompt that spits out a masterpiece like Avatar, they are carrying the same myth into a new era.

And of course it couldn’t be further from the truth.

What Ron Howard and Wes Walker are actually doing with their AI-assisted documentary is not that. It’s a team that helped a renowned director with two decades of experience choose between a menu of looks that AI helped generate, then working with artists to refine the one that serves the story. The iterations are faster, which leads to more options and thus more creative freedom, but it is still deeply, fundamentally human work. The tools may look different, but the collaboration is inherently the same.

Here’s a 2 minute preview of how Ron and Wes used AI to elevate the artwork in recreations on an upcoming documentary:

That was the through line of my second year attending this conference. Last year felt like an industry asking questions, this year felt like an industry in motion. The crowd was bigger (overwhelming), the sessions were denser (one big sales pitch after the other), the wifi was ironically down for most of it.

It was genuinely overwhelming and draining. Multiple talks or demos running simultaneously in packed soundstages. I was at least grateful to run into some familiar female faces.

There’s a palpable sense that something has shifted.

So, let’s dive into what what I took away for from the 4th Annual AI On the Lot conference yesterday.

• Albert Cheng of Amazon MGM Studios on copyright, crew size, and why he’d rather make 10 shows than one

• O.T. Fagbenle and Rob Friedman on responsible AI use, indie filmmaking, and why data never greenlit La La Land

• Justin Wilkes and Wes Walker on the AI Super Bowl commercial that started a DGA investigation and ended a partnership — and the Ron Howard moment that reframed everything

• Six AI studios on the business models, workflows, and house styles defining the next era of production

Subscribe now

Keynote Chat: Amazon MGM Studios, AI, and the Future of Filmmaking

The day kicked off with Albert Cheng, who oversees AI strategy at Amazon MGM Studios, and Jay Tucker, Executive Director of UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment and Sports, where he has spent more than 20 years bringing c-suite executives and industry leaders together to explore the future of entertainment. He’s a familiar and trusted voice at these kinds of convenings — exactly the right person to be asking the hard questions.

The conversation centered on Project Nara, Amazon MGM’s internal AI production initiative, and what it actually looks like to build AI infrastructure inside a major studio that is also a major IP owner. That dual identity, Cheng made clear, shapes everything.

“We are an IP owner and a tech company, so we understand all these aspects of it.”

On the question of copyright, something a lot of AI conversations conveniently sidestep, Cheng was clear and concise. For content to be copyrightable and thus monetizable, human authorship has to be provable at every step. NARA was built to track provenance for exactly that reason.

“If it’s a high-level prompt that says I want a kid who goes to space and then you let AI make the whole movie — that is not copyrightable. No one would buy it. No one needs to pay for it.”

He also pushed back hard on the narrative that AI replaces human crews. Every production they've done has had 100-plus people working on it. And while I appreciate the notion that it doesn't replace humans, it certainly reduces the need for certain positions.

“Every production we’ve done, we have industry people. We have VFX professionals. We have annotators. They’re just working differently.”

What piqued my interest was his argument that AI-assisted production could actually be the thing that brings work back to LA. Not by making fewer, bigger shows but by making smaller ones with more turnover. More jobs throughout the year.

“I’d rather make 10 shows in one sound stage than one.”

And for anyone still debating whether to engage with the tools at all, he had a simple answer:

“You can’t actually have a strong opinion about AI if you haven’t tried it. There’s no excuse for having a position if you haven’t tried it.”

Getting the Greenlight on Your Indie

Next, I power walked to the Culver Theater to catch this chat between actor-writer-director O.T. Fagbenle, actor/writer Reza Safai, and legendary Hollywood executive Rob Friedman.

Fagbenle is fascinating as he’s living both sides of the AI conversation. He’s currently starring in The Old Story: Moses at Wonder Studios, an AI-hybrid production, while simultaneously developing his own AI-assisted indie film.

His take on responsible use was refreshingly honest:

“I am yet to watch a full AI movie that I’m moved by. I can watch something where I’m like, wow, look at the effects. But emotionally moved? It’s so rare.”

For him, the responsible move is using AI to expand scope, not replace performance. Giving indie filmmakers access to spaceships, animals, scale — the things that were previously out of reach.

He encouraged filmmakers to keep experimenting and predicts that eventually, creatives will have to choose when to take the easy path by asking Claude to solve a challenge, and when to take the hard road, which uses your human brain.

Then Rob Friedman put the whole moment in context. This is the studio head behind billion-dollar franchises and Oscar winners including The Twilight Saga, John Wick, The Hunger Games, La La Land, and The Hurt Locker. When he talks about what makes this business work, you listen.

Rob has seen every wave of disruption our industry has faced. Cable, streaming, digital cinema, VFX. The technology always changes the process. What doesn’t change is what you’re making it for.

His read on AI’s role? It’s a tool. Full stop.

“It always comes down to filmmaker driven. It’s a tool to benefit the process. Story is something that comes out of the human creative mind. I don’t think AI is going to do that.”

And on the data-versus-gut question, whether AI changes how the next generation greenlights projects:

“You would have never made La La Land if you had run the numbers. Data does not drive the creative process at all.”

Brands as Commissioners of Culture

This one was the highlight of the day.

The question isn’t whether brands belong in premium storytelling anymore. It’s how to do it at scale. Justin Wilkes, President of Imagine Entertainment, the company behind work for Nike, Ford, Coca-Cola, and Apple, built alongside Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, sat down with Wes Walker, founder of Obsidian, to talk about exactly that.

Their meet cute story is pretty epic as well.

Two years ago, Wes directed the first AI commercial for Under Armour which aired during the Super Bowl. People went bananas. The outrage was real. Many called him a sellout. The DGA had a whole committee looking at it. Ron Howard, who sits on that committee, watched it frame by frame trying to understand how it was actually made.

Justin’s version of events: “We were like, who is the mastermind behind this diabolical scheme to tear down the filmmaking industry?”

So they tracked Wes down. Brought him in. And what started as an investigation turned into a series of real conversations about how Wes was using AI as a filmmaker. Not as a shortcut, but as a tool alongside cinematography, actors, and lighting. Using the full craft.

From there, Imagine decided to lean in. Justin was clear they wanted to understand best practices and worst practices both, so they could form an educated opinion as storytellers.

But the moment that tied the whole conversation together came when Ron Howard pulled Wes aside after all the DGA controversy. Ron showed him a newspaper clipping, a piece vilifying George Lucas for using digital projection when Star Wars came out in the 70s.

The message was clear: we’ve been here before.

Wes’s background is worth knowing and he should absolutely be on everyone’s radar.

A Stanford grad who started his career in tech, Wes worked at Tesla on the Model 3 before making a full pivot into filmmaking. He came up shooting car commercials, literally strapping himself to Teslas to get the shots he needed, eventually leading Elon to approve the purchase of a Russian arm — a gyro-stabilized camera crane mounted to a vehicle, used to capture those impossibly smooth high-speed shots you see in car commercials and action films. The full rig runs anywhere from $200,000 to $550,000...Because that's how ballers ball.

He's a cinematographer and director who fell in love with craft first, built serious technical chops along the way, and found AI later.

That combination — Stanford engineer, Tesla insider, working filmmaker — is exactly why his approach to these tools feels different. He’s building from inside the craft.

He started paying attention back when Runway could only hold an image for half a second. Now he’s stitching 15-second clips into minute-long sequences using six or seven tools inside a node-based workflow builder called Weave, combining Nano Banana Pro, Seedance, Cling, and others into custom pipelines.

But his frustration with where the space is right now was sharp:

“The world is lost in aesthetics. It’s just cool. It looks flashy. They pay attention for 10 seconds. What’s a 30-second ad? It’s quite disposable.”

What he and Justin are both pushing toward is brands commissioning actual stories. Five-minute films. Ten-minute short films. Work that makes people feel something.

As Justin said,

“Technology doesn’t drive the storytelling. The storytelling drives the storytelling. It’s not about, oh my God, we use this tool versus that tool. It’s this is how we’re going to make dinosaurs seem real. It was claymation and now it’s CGI. That’s a better way to do it. Let’s do that.”

Inside the AI Film Studios

The final session was a lightning round with six AI-forward studios presenting their business model, workflow, and house style. The range was wide: viral content, Hollywood VFX, and even the controversial “gray-box” production techniques used on Doug Liman’s latest film.

They included:

• Pouya Shahbazian — Founder & CEO, Staircase Studios AI (producer of the Divergent franchise)

• PJ Accetturo — Founder & CEO, Genre.ai (300M+ views across AI ad campaigns for Popeyes, Google, Qatar Airways)

• KJ Kim (Kwang Jib Kim) — CEO, Studio Meta-K (South Korean AI content studio specializing in dramas, films, and virtual artists)

• Ryan Kavanaugh — Co-founder, Acme AI & FX (producer behind Doug Liman’s Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, the AI-assisted thriller that cut a $300M budget down to $70M)

• Rupert Cresswell — Chief Creative Officer, Elevado, a creative studio built at the intersection of AI, VFX, and production, founded in 2025.

• Tejas Shah — Co-founder, Gennie (generative AI studio focused on documentary and non-fiction storytelling)

I caught three of the five. The one that piqued my interest most was Elevado.

Founded just last year in 2025, Elevado doesn’t feel like a tech startup that wandered into filmmaking. It feels like seasoned creatives who chose to build something new.

Part production company, part innovation lab, they sit at the intersection of AI, VFX, and production. Their tagline, “powered by AI, elevated by artists.”

Their demo for Summer Walker showed what the hybrid approach actually looks like. Technology in service of an artist’s world, not overwriting it. It was a good note to end the day on. A young studio already doing the work, not just talking about it.

The Ron Howard Moment

Walking out of AI on the Lot today, I kept coming back to the Ron Howard moment. A newspaper clipping of George Lucas from 1977 harboring the same fear, the same resistance, the same question underneath it all: is this going to kill what we love about this?

It didn’t then. And I don’t think it will now, not if the people in that room have anything to say about it. What I saw today was an industry in process. Asking hard questions, learning, experimenting, and attempting to, protect what matters while reaching for what’s next.

So here’s what I’ll leave you with: if you haven’t tried the tools yet, what are you waiting for? Not because AI is the future but because your point of view on it matters. And you can’t have one from the sidelines.

What would you make if the only limit was your imagination?

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

I pour a lot of time and heart into every post I publish here. If AOP has brought you value, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

Upgrade your subscription today!

A fun fact about me is that I’ve sat on the same toilet that has graced the butts of many comedic legends… such as Kristin Wiig (who was also a nanny for Bob and Naomi!) and, of course, Bob Odenkirk himself.

Which is my way of telling you that I have been in this industry a very, very long time.

One of my many jobs back in the day was as a nanny for Bob and and his wife, manager/producer, Naomi Odenkirk. This was the Breaking Bad season 2 era, so you can do the math on the timeline. I was young, I was grinding, and doing whatever it took to stay here and keep building. I did not know then that my first feature film set would be on the Netflix Original Girlfriend’s Day, starring… Bob Odenkirk.

We just keep meeting, ya know?

Bob was an early supporter of the show since its Life with Caca days, so it’s pretty meaningful that in mere weeks I’ll be sitting across from him and David Cross with 165 episodes behind me.

Life is funny like that.

Their documentary, Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu, explores thirty years of their friendship through one brutal hike, and the kind of comedy that can only come from truly knowing someone.

Subscribe now

The whipped cream on top

Coincidentally, Alex and I hiked the Inca Trail for our honeymoon three years ago. Not exactly a swim-up bar toasting to our early marital bliss kind of sexy, but I’m so glad we did it.

The hike is no joke. The classic Inca Trail is about 26 miles over four days, and the altitude is the thing nobody really prepares you for. You top out at Dead Woman’s Pass — yes, that’s the actual name — at over 13,800 feet above sea level. Your lungs just don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Every uphill feels twice as long as it should. There are stretches of uneven stone steps that go up and up and up with no logical end. We got rained on for the majority of the hike. Nature becomes your bathroom. You rejoice at the sight of an already-set-up tent and fall asleep by sunset. And then you wake up, sometimes before sunrise, sore, and do it all over again.

On the final morning, though, you walk through the Sun Gate at dawn and Machu Picchu appears below you in the mist. It’s breathtaking, show-stopping, miraculous — like, HOW did they build all of this? You marvel at the love and care Peruvians have placed in maintaining this heritage site, and you realize it was all worth it.

Blisters. Altitude headaches. Montezuma’s revenge and all. (ask me about it and I’ll spill all!) It’s absolutely spectacular. 10/10, a must-do life experience.

The cherry on top

But wait, there’s more. To make it all even more miraculous: about a week after we got home, I found out I was pregnant. So I did the whole thing unknowingly carrying the earliest formation of a new human at 13,000 feet. When I say this documentary induced a visceral reaction in my body, I mean it. And also, a slow clap for women. We are preeettttty phenomenal.

Needless to say, this will be an up-close and personal conversation about how Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu got made, about comedy and friendship, and what it means to keep creating across decades.

This one means a lot to me. I hope you’ll be there.

CLICK TO RSVP

Capacity is limited. Please RSVP as soon as you can. Paid Substack subscribers get VIP priority. DM me if that’s you. :)

Presented by our pals at GreenSlate with Portrait and Theorem Media. Brunch and beverages will be served after so you’ll have time to connect with fellow industry folks.

As always, thanks for doing this life thing with me!

It’s been a great week over here. I’m currently in Mammoth Lakes (attempting) some time off with my family. I may or may not be typing this from a toddler-induced Thursday evening. Turns out cookies and ice cream too close to bedtime is NOT advisable. Time is such a remarkable thing. Theo was due the Friday before Memorial Day two years ago... and simply opted to come a week later. Meu amorzinho (my love) was own timeline from the the jump.

But I digress! I couldn’t let Friday come and go without dropping into your inbox. I’ve been giddy and eager to share this chat since we recorded.

Our second cafecito is here!

Brit MacRae is a sharp producer who sees around corners. She’s got that left brain/right brain quality and refuses to sit around waiting for permission. Is she my long lost sister? Time will tell.

She is also the Chief Marketing Officer of KINO, a new company taking the indie scene by storm. They’re reimagining what it means to finance, market, and release independent film in a moment when so many of the old models are cracking under pressure.

Upgrade your subscription today!

Brit and I first crossed paths briefly at Cannes last year when she attended my fireside chat with Eva Longoria. Having a proper sit down was a long time a coming.

We recorded on the heels of Undertone, the A24 film that KINO helped finance — a $500K film that went on to gross $18 million at the box office with a first-time writer-director and no star attachments. The kind of result that makes people pay attention and validates a whole philosophy about how you make, fund, and get films seen in this industry.

It’s always special to capture a convo with someone mid-upswing! Over coffee, we discussed:

1. How KINO is changing the game for indie filmmakers

2. Tips on marketing a film in 2026

3. What it looks like to co-finance with a distributor like A24

4. Brit’s POV on building a brand with no playbook

5. Why the old model of “make it and they will come” is over

And here’s a taste of what’s waiting on the other side: Undertone ended up in a six-studio bidding war. One studio said they’d do it if KINO agreed to reshoot the whole thing with a name attached. They said no. Brit also shares her 2026 hot take on what every filmmaker needs beyond a script and a deck that most have never thought about it.

This one is for paid subscribers only.

The cafecito format is intimate by design. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. Truly. Your support is what makes this possible, and I can’t wait to hear your takeaways. Wishing you a beautiful long Memorial Day weekend. Hope you do something that fills you up…just keep an eye on the sugar.

And as always, thanks for doing this life thing with me!

Read more

• Shared an invigorating chat with Jonah Feingold who is behind launching a rom-com focused company called It’s Romantical.

• Recorded our second cafecito with Brit MacRae, co-founder of KINO Studio, a Sequoia-backed film company built on transparency, equity, and creative empowerment. (Drops next Friday 5/22!)

• Dropped my deep dive with writer Colby Day who is the oxygen tank we all need

It is fitting, and also perhaps alarming, that I chose this theme before knowing I would be accepted into an AI Safety training intensive course curated by Blue Dot. This non-profit was put on my radar by a dear friend who is pivoting out of the industry. There are many opportunities bubbling up for us to use our storytelling talents to help shape conversations around policy, governance, and the future of AI.

The course ends tomorrow and holy cow my head is spinning. Perhaps I have seen one too many sci-fi doomsday films, but it is quite difficult to not fall prey to defeatist thinking when AI will soon, very very soon, be able to self-generate. Whoever controls the data that it’s learning on, controls the narrative.

AI Inbreeding

Research already shows that when you let AI consume its own output, the results degrade fast. Imagine the Habsburg royal family, who famously inbred across generations of European nobility in pursuit of power and purity, only to produce strange ass heirs with increasingly severe physical and cognitive complications until the line essentially collapsed under the weight of its own closed loop.

That could likely happen as AI eats its own tail. The output gets stranger, weaker, and less human with every generation. So the question I keep sitting with is: if we already know this, what exactly are we going to do about it?

Which brings me, somehow perfectly, to The Comeback.

If you are watching the third and final season of Lisa Kudrow’s HBO masterpiece, you already know. The show, which was honestly way ahead of its time when it first aired twenty years ago, dedicates this last chapter entirely to the threat AI poses to writers, creativity, and our industry. Valerie Cherish, forever chasing relevance, finally gets what she has always wanted: to be the lead in her own sitcom. The catch? It is written by AI. The show essentially hands Valerie the dream and then quietly asks: but what does it mean if no human made it for you?

It turns out, we did want to see that!

The finale gave Valerie the perfect moment. When Jane, the documentarian, tells her how impressed she has been watching her survive twenty years of humiliation in this industry, Valerie asserts that she never agreed to be humiliated, stating:

"I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up. I just did the best with what I was given. And isn’t that what being a human being is, though?

This resonated deeply. One because I’m creeping up on my 20 year LAverssary, and two because I’ve been reflecting on doing our best with what we are given.

Hope Is a Discipline

It would be very easy right now to look at everything happening in our industry, everything the AI Safety course is jam packing into my brain, even Demi Moore at Cannes urging us to embrace AI, and decide that the walls are closing in.

Move to Bali!

Go run a vineyard somewhere!

Escape this hellhole!

And some days, ok most days, I’m actually quite tempted. But, as activist and philosopher Cornel West says: hope is a discipline. Not a feeling. Not a wish. A practice.

So, the timing is quite fitting to share this very hopeful episode with this week of all weeks.

The Writer Who Shows Everything

Colby is a new dad who also happens to be an Emmy-nominated writer whose credits include the Netflix film Spaceman starring Adam Sandler and In the Blink of an Eye, which just premiered at Sundance and is now streaming on Hulu. He also served as a writer and story editor on Apple TV’s For All Mankind season five. His directorial debut The Comedy Hour with Tim Heidecker and Tatiana Maslany is up next.

He is also the creator of , a Substack where he publishes a radically transparent account of life as a working writer in Hollywood.

Our shared entry point into the industry was unexpected to both of us. It was, you guessed it, theater.

Look, Nicole Kidman was speaking directly to my soul. I came to that dark place for magic, and I still do. But theater is what made me fall in love with performing, with entertaining, with the process. Early in my LA journey, when I realized how long everything takes in film, how much it costs to do anything, and how often the ball is in someone else’s court, I leaned into what I knew. And thus, the first project I ever produced was a licensed six week run of the contemporary comedy Spike Heels by Theresa Rebeck.

I played the feisty Georgie in a show that reimagines Pygmalion, exploring themes of sexual harassment, class, and relationships through a four-sided love triangle in Boston. It was not until I was deep in the memory chest searching for a photo that it dawned on me this was fifteen years ago. The show opened May 21st, 2010.

The elders were right…life goes by so fast.

For Colby, the theater origin was almost identical and completely unintentional. He came to NYU wanting to make movies. His friends were actors. They kept saying: just write a play, we will do the play. His first stage piece was a creature feature about slugs attacking a town, monsters played by puppets, very Little Shop of Horrors vibes.

He did not mean to become a theater guy, but the collaboration and problem-solving in real time consumed him. He looked up six years later and realized he was one.

What theater gave him, he says, was “the ability to answer questions.” Film writing is solitary by design. You send the script, you wait, you hear nothing. Theater forces you to sit across from the director, the actors, the designers, and defend every choice. Why does this happen here? Is it essential? Could we do it differently?

The Long Road In

He got here eventually. His first few weeks were the kind of LA fantasy people love perpetuating. He moved to LA, signed with his manager, optioned his slug musical to Lionsgate the year La La Land came out, signed with agents, sublet an apartment, all within weeks.

Then, he realized the option money would not even cover a year of rent. The movie never got made, and just like that, he descended from grace just as quickly as he was elevated.

That honesty became Hollyweird. It started as annual year-in-review posts that really landed with writers from all levels has grown to a platform of sorts. Though he considers himself shy, he opted to put himself out there on the socials because of his deep awareness of how much this industry does not prize honesty.

It’s all about the heat, baby. The siiiizzle. The appearance of momentum.

Being candid about how hard and slow and uncertain it all is is not exactly a power move. He does it anyway, because it matters. I applaud him because I’m out here on these streets doing the same.

We talk about many things, but all roads point back to the fact that this is 100% a career for maniacs. Either you have the gene or you don’t. The boulder goes up the hill and at the top there is… a bigger hill. You either find that energizing or you find a different career.

Make the Thing Anyway

I hope you find this conversation as energizing and delightful as I did. Colby’s film In the Blink of an Eye is streaming on Hulu, btw.

I also want to leave you with this.

Write the script. Paint the painting. Make the short film with your friends and a borrowed camera. Choreograph the thing you have been turning over in your head. Fill the page. Tell the story only you can tell, in the way only you can tell it, with all the mess and specificity and humanity that no model trained on existing data will ever be able to generate from scratch.

The world does not need more output. It needs more of you. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

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

Subscribe now

AOP Mixer - TONIGHT!!!

Come by and meet new friends, say hi to some familiar faces, and make new connections within the AOP community. RSVP via this link!

🗓️ Thursday, May 14th from 7 - 9 PM
📍 All Season Brewing | 800 S La Brea Ave Los Angeles, CA 90036

Carolina’s 5 Takeaways (For Paid Subscribers)

The full episode is worth your time, but if you need the highlights, here’s what you can’t miss:

1. Why the decade it took to get In the Blink of an Eye

2. What director Andrew Stanton said in the room that no one else had said in years

3. What Colby learned about Hollywood heat versus Hollywood substance

4. His distinction between taste and craft, and why it matters for how you protect your own work.

5. The one thing he does every time a project falls apart that keeps him from losing his mind.

   Upgrade your subscription today!

Read more

So I invited Jonah on for a special Substack live recording exclusively for paid peeps last month.

Coincidentally, Jonah is exactly the kind of person that theme was made for. Not just because of what he’s building, but because of why. He’s not innovating for the sake of a headline. He’s thinking seriously about real sustainability for himself, for his collaborators, and for a genre that deserves better than being an afterthought.

That kind of ambition is contagious.

Jonah has directed five features, including Busboys starring David Spade and Theo Von which is currently in theaters. His first, Dating & New York, raised $200K from 30 out of 300 investors, premiered at Tribeca, and sold to IFC for triple the budget. Paramount+. Amazon. By any traditional measure, that’s a solid indie success story that you’d think would be a stepping stone to building a career.

However….the ugly truth is that he still couldn’t reliably pay his rent or predict where his next job was coming from. He shared:

“I looked in the mirror and I was like, this has been awesome. This is a dream come true. How come it’s still a struggle to pay rent? And how come I don’t know what my next job is? This isn’t sustainable.”

The math wasn’t mathing…and that clarity inspired him to build Romantical; a media company raising $3M to make rom-coms sustainable. His plan is to generate a compounding IP engine built around the genre, with brand partnerships, live events, digital series, and theatrical films all feeding each other.

His pitch to investors was compelling:

“This is not investing in a movie. You’re investing in an emotion. Romantical in 10 years will be a feeling.”

We got into how the ownership structure actually works. What he’s offering talent and crew. Why he’s talking to a former Resy exec and a serial entrepreneur instead of traditional film money. How pitching VCs compares to pitching studios — and what that difference tells us about the system we’ve all been operating in. And what his advice is for the filmmaker who isn’t ready to raise $3M but needs to make something now.

The genre argument alone is worth the conversation. Less than 3% of theatrical releases in recent years have been romantic comedies. And yet Anyone But You grossed $220 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. Materialists made nearly $108 million on $20 million in 2025.

The audience is here — yearning, SO MUCH YEARNING, and hungry for more.

Just look at what’s happening on streaming: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before launched a Netflix franchise and made Lana Condor a star. Set It Up, the 2018 Netflix sleeper that made people believe the platform could do the genre right. Purple Hearts, while not a comedy, s a romantic drama that quietly became one of Netflix’s most-watched films of 2022.

And this June, Jennifer Lopez returns to the genre in Office Romance, written by Ted Lasso creators Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly who reportedly came up with the idea by asking themselves who the best rom-com star working today was, and landed on Lopez.

I am fully, completely seated for this one.

There is nothing I love more than a successful, stunning woman at the top of her game — clutching her Chanel, sippin’ on Sauv Blanc, and staring out at a cityscape from a penthouse that has everything except the one thing she actually wants.

Netflix dropping a star-driven rom-com as a summer tentpole certainly helps Jonah’s mission. I hope it’s a sign that the genre is indeed bouncing back.

The IndieWire piece ends with the Mark Duplass line from his 2015 SXSW keynote: “The cavalry isn’t coming.” That sentiment echoes loudly for me — I even called back to it in this piece last year with the wonderful actor Jennifer LeFleur. And it confounds me that eleven years later, it’s less a rallying cry than a fact of life.

The question is what does one build in its place?

I truly hope Romantical is one of the answers. Time will tell. And until then, I am just a girl...standing here...rooting for him.

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

Subscribe now

Come Thru To Our LA Mixer!

We are BACK with our first mixer of 2026! Come by and meet new friends, say hi to some familiar faces, and make new connections within the AOP community. RSVP via this link!

🗓️ Thursday, May 14th from 7 - 9 PM
📍 All Season Brewing | 800 S La Brea Ave Los Angeles, CA 90036

The 5 Biggest Takeaways (For Paid Subscribers)

The full episode is worth your time, but if you need the highlights, here’s what you can’t miss:

1. Why pitching VCs hits different than pitching studios — and what filmmakers can steal from startup culture.

2. The exact ownership structure Romantical offers talent and crew

3. The mistake first-time filmmakers keep making and what Jonah says to do instead.

4. Why the rom-com isn’t dead and where Jonah thinks it lives now.

5. The one thing you should be doing today, before your movie is done, before you have anything to sell.

   Upgrade your subscription today!

Read more

It’s honestly just part of the job…and I’m not mad at it. Producers talk over coffee. We pitch over coffee. We debrief, strategize, sometimes just survive — over coffee. And somewhere along the way, I started thinking: why not record these?

So that’s what AOP Cafecito is. A new short-form series where I grab a coffee with someone fascinating, turn on the mic, and let you in on the conversation. It’s the kind of quick hit real that happens over a latte

Special shoutout to our friends at Civil Coffee for hosting us!

And for our first ever Cafecito, I brought in someone I met at the Rise Literary event I attended here in LA a few months ago — Hillary Povar, EVP and Chief Creative Officer at Smith House Strategy.

Hillary has spent 20+ years at the intersection of entertainment and culture, contributing to hundreds of campaigns. She’s most known for her work on Schitt’s Creek (Rest in Power, Queen Catherine!) in helping it go from a small comedy to a full-blown cultural behemoth that broke Emmy records and set the world on fire.

We talked about:

• What PR actually is (and why it is nothing like Samantha from Sex and the City)

• Why bad press is not, in fact, always good pres

• What filmmakers get wrong when they come looking for a publicist

• The Timothée Chalamet ballet situation and what a smart publicist actually does in a moment like that

• How AI is impacting e PR world (her answer might surprise you)

This episode is exclusive to Substack. It’s truly the cafecito vibe: intimate, conversational, just for us here.

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

Upgrade your subscription today!

Read more

The numbers also make that pretty hard to argue with. Generative AI adoption among U.S. adults jumped 10% in a single year and reached 54.6% by August of last year. In our industry specifically, the global AI market in media and entertainment is projected to grow from $15 billion in 2024 to nearly $196 billion by 2033. And the World Economic Forum estimates that while AI may displace 92 million jobs, it’s also expected to generate 170 million new ones.

So, the question isn’t whether our industry is changing but more how are you preparing yourself to not get left behind? It’s our responsibility to stay (cautiously) curious, informed, and in the room where tech and entertainment professionals are converging.

Which brings me to AI on the Lot.

I shared my takeaways from last year’s conference here and here. It’s billed as the largest AI media conference bringing together artists, filmmakers, innovators, media execs, startups, creators, and developers. Every year the room gets more interesting. More studio execs are showing up, which means the conversation is shifting from “we’re ignoring this!” to “should we pay attention to this?” to “okay, fine, how do we actually use it?” This year, all the trades will also be on the ground.

Check out this impressive ad created for the conference off the brief "a wild and fun love letter to LA." The filmmaker used Luma's AI agent to brainstorm shot concepts, generated images in bulk to find hero shots, then animated them using Dreamina Seedance 2.0. The whole thing was produced in a fraction of the time a traditional shoot would take.

Whatever your feelings on AI, it's a genuinely fun showcase of Los Angeles and a real demonstration of what these tools can do right now:

The conference is May 27–28 in Culver City. The co-founder kindly extended a 15% discount for my AOP peeps: use code AOP at checkout: aionthelot.com

Yes, it’s an investment. But if you’re looking to network intentionally with people who are actually building and thinking in this space, then juice is worth the squeeze. The conference is still small enough that you get real access pretty much everyone.

If you end up going, come find me. And let me know either way — I’m always curious who in our community is paying attention to this stuff.

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

It’s where a rough cut becomes a story. Where silence becomes tension and music becomes memory. Where the color grade makes you feel something you can’t name and the sound mix pulls you so deep into a world you forget you’re sitting in a theater. It’s where a TV show gets its bells and whistles and a short film finally feels real. Anyone who has ever made a project with no money for a proper mix knows exactly what I mean. It doesn’t feel real yet.

Not until post.

And yet for years, despite being one of the most skilled, highest-paying sectors of the industry, one that California spent over a century building, post has been the blind spot in the state’s fight to keep production here.

A few weeks ago, I shared a quick overview of where things stand at the local, state, and federal level. Between 2021 and 2025, on-location production days in LA dropped from 18,560 to 6,582 for TV and from 3,406 to 1,999 for features. That is a 65% drop in four years.

Today I want to freeze frame on the part of the industry that doesn’t get enough credit.

Literally.

I recently sat down with Marielle Abaunza, President of the California Post Alliance (CAPA) and EVP of Business Development at Signature Post, to talk about AB 2319: a proposed standalone post-production tax incentive that could change the game for an industry that has quietly been bleeding out.

California is Leaving Money on the Table

California’s existing film and TV tax credit, now $750 million annually after Program 4.0 passed last year, is a real win. Hard-fought, important, and overdue. But it has a catch almost nobody talks about.

Post workers are only covered if 75% of the overall budget is spent in-state. If the production shot in Georgia, the UK, or anywhere else? Post doesn’t qualify. Which means the editors, sound designers, colorists, and VFX artists doing the finishing work in Los Angeles are left out entirely.

The state has lost over 1,800 post jobs since 2012. Our share of the national post workforce dropped from 53% to 42%. And that data is probably already outdated.

New York has had a standalone post incentive for 16 years. In a single quarter of 2024, New York issued $10 million in post credits, which generated $54 million in state spend. A net $47 million in revenue. From one quarter! We have been giving that away.

A new bill aims to change that.

What AB 2319 Actually Does

AB 2319, authored by Assemblymember Nick Schultz, proposes a standalone post-production tax incentive for editing, VFX, sound mixing, and related work, regardless of where principal photography happened.

So simple, right? Shoot anywhere and then be incentivized to finish in California. It means the people who live here, whose kids go to school here, who want to sleep in their own beds, could actually do that.

This isn’t a Hollywood bailout.

Let’s be clear here. The people who most benefit from this bill are not above-the-line. They’re editors and engineers and post producers and music supervisors. They’re in dark rooms trying to log enough hours to qualify for health care. They’re the ones who can’t afford their mortgages. The ones who’ve already left the state or the industry entirely because they couldn’t find work.

Georgia launched a 20% standalone post credit. The UK removed its VFX spending cap entirely. We are not competing on a level playing field, and we haven’t been for a long time.

The best time to fix that was years ago. The second best time is now.

Where the bill stands

The bill has already cleared two significant hurdles. It passed the Arts, Entertainment, Sports, and Tourism Committee 8-0, bipartisan and unanimous. Then on April 20th it cleared the Revenue and Taxation Committee, which was arguably the harder conversation given that the state just committed $750 million to the entertainment community.

Now it heads to Appropriations. This is where things get real.

Appropriations is not about whether the bill is a good idea. That debate is over. This committee looks at one thing: what does it cost the state? Bills with a significant price tag get placed on a “suspense file”, essentially a holding pen where the committee decides all at once which bills live and which ones quietly die. Sadly, no public explanation is required.

If it survives that, it goes to a full Assembly floor vote, then repeats the entire process in the Senate. Policy committee, appropriations, floor vote. If the Senate amends it, it goes back to the Assembly for concurrence. Then it lands on Newsom’s desk.

AB 2319 is roughly halfway there. The policy argument has been won. Now it is about money and political will. That is real momentum. And it means the window to make noise is open right now.

Newsom is term-limited and he has staked real political capital on keeping production in California. There is a genuine opportunity to get this signed before he leaves office. A new governor means new priorities, and there is no guarantee the next administration picks up where this one left off.

If we lose this window, I fear we won't get another one for a very long time.

Union Concerns

The Editors Guild supports AB 2319 but has raised concerns that the wage language isn't strong enough, specifically that it could reward employers who undercut union standards. It's a valid concern.

The bill is still being written and CAPA is in active conversations with Local 700 and AFM Local 47 to get the language right. Local 700 mobilized 1,300 letters of support in 48 hours ahead of the arts committee hearing! That’s incredible and proof that the sentiment from all sides is one of unity. The goal is a bill that protects union labor while keeping a door open for independent voices, too.

Subscribe now

We Are Running Out of Time

By end of May we will know if the bill passes the Assembly. By fall we will know if it is law.

That is not a lot of time.

Go to californiapostalliance.org and join or donate. Sponsoring a bill requires resources. Look up AB 2319 in the assembly, track it, and submit a public comment with your personal story of how this impacts your livelihood. Legislators read those letters. Your story matters more than you think. Don’t underestimate the power of contacting your district representative directly. You are a constituent. Use that.

We are all storytellers and nobody is better positioned to make the case for why this is dire than us. Use your voice!

Tune in for the full episode below and subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

Angle on Producers is a podcast demystifying the role of producers and spotlighting the magic makers in Hollywood. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you’re a producer (or aspiring to be one), join our community for exclusive resources, networking opportunities, and more insights like this!

Upgrade your subscription today!

When poking my network, many reported back that: “He’s one of the best.” That kind of quiet endorsement from people I respect means more than any trade mention. So, I promptly invited him to record an episode. While we attempted to make our schedules align, we snuck in an off mic coffee meeting and I was delighted.

He was genuine, engaging, and dare I say stubbornly optimistic? Not in a performative, everything-is-fine kind of way, but as someone who has withstood with undulations of this business and still chooses to believe. We bonded over many things, including parenthood, and when I asked him how often he pumps himself up by telling himself I’m a bad bitch, he didn’t hesitate to humor me.

A few times a week, he said.

No Connections, No Problem

David started making films at eight years old in the Bay Area. After NYU film school, he realized the real power in Hollywood wasn’t just in making movies — it was in understanding the business behind them.So he mailed his resume across town. He landed an internship at Jerry Bruckheimer Films during the height of blockbusters like Bad Boys, Armageddon, and Pirates of the Caribbean. He then worked his way through some of the most iconic agencies in the business, and eventually became one of the most prolific spec script sellers in the industry.

Now a partner at Verve Talent & Literary Agency representing top writers, directors, and showrunners, he was named one of The Hollywood Reporter’s Next Generation 35 Under 35, one of the youngest agents to earn that recognition. He built all of it from nothing. No connections. A rejection from UTA’s mailroom that he now calls the best no he ever got.

What makes David’s perspective particularly valuable right now is that he hasn’t just witnessed the market shift. He helped reshape it. When the traditional spec world started contracting, he and producer-manager Scott Glassgold excavated the internet for interesting voices where you least expected them. They found them on Reddit. That short story-to-Hollywood pipeline is now a legitimate and fast-growing market, with stories landing in heated bidding wars.

Chasing Waterfalls

In our conversation, he describes an electric, magical moment that every producer, writer, and creative chases. I mean, TLC did a terrible job convincing us NOT to chase them, don’t you agree? Around year three or four of being an agent, a client handed him a script right before he boarded a flight, the same client who had given him good-but-not-quite-great scripts before. Almost apologetically, the client said: I don’t think this one’s going to be the one either. But take a read.

Ten pages in, David looked around the cabin and thought: Does anyone else know what I’m holding right now?

As we all know, it just takes one. One script, one idea, one win…to make all the doubts and fears melt away. (temporarily, of course. Perpetual happiness? In this economy?) That script was Safe House by David Guggenheim. It landed on the 2010 Black List, sold to Universal in a heated bidding war, and became the 2012 action-thriller starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds.

Guggenheim is still David’s client to this day.

The Market is Alive

Last fall, we experienced a headline-grabbing resuscitation of spec sales. So many deals got everyone out here feeling like the spec-mania days of the 1990s and early 2000s. Studios and streamers purchased a total of 23 feature original spec scripts and pitches; with nine of those sales happening in August alone, the greatest monthly volume since March 2017.

These numbers tell a story the trade headlines don’t always lead with. For example, in late 2024, Natan Dotan, an unknown writer with almost no Hollywood connections, sold a spec script called Alignment to Fifth Season and Makeready for $1.25 million against $3 million if the film gets made, after a feeding frenzy that saw over 20 producers chasing the project within days of it going out.

Amazon won a separate bidding war for Love of Your Life by Julia Cox for around $2 million, with Ryan Gosling attached to produce. Another spec, Renegotiate, sold to Lionsgate out of a three-way bidding war. Though, I would love some data sharing that maybe one or two of these sales were from writers of color?

Sigh. A gal can dream, City of Stars.

It’s a market that rewards people who know how to move the chess pieces effectively.

People like David.

Dive in and I can’t wait to hear your takeaways from this episode!

Subscribe now

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

The 5 Biggest Takeaways (For Paid Subscribers)

The full episode is worth your time, but if you need the highlights, here’s what you can’t miss:

1. How he creates heat for bidding wars.

2. How he built the short story market.

3. What exceptional representation looks like.

4. How to stop being paralyzed by what you can’t control.

5. Why it’s the most exciting time to be in the business.

   Upgrade your subscription today!

   

   Angle on Producers is a podcast demystifying the role of producers and spotlighting the magic makers in Hollywood. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you’re a producer (or aspiring to be one), join our community for exclusive resources, networking opportunities, and more insights like this!

Read more