The Pioneer Newsletter #23

Monday, June 10th

Jun 10, 2024

This is a photo of me with Boyd Tinsley, aka the violinist from The Dave Matthews Band. I met him about 10 years ago, just a few days before a DMB concert at The Saratoga Performing Arts Center. I went to that concert. Don’t remember much of it, though. Not because of any sort of mushroom or water bottle vodka experience, Instead, because I just didn’t really care about Dave Matthews Band too much. I liked them. Boyd Tinsley was friendly enough. But not until quite recently have I realized how legit it was to meet Boyd, thanks to a new and incredibly specific morning ritual.

Here it goes.

Upon arriving at work, I make the necessary eye contact with each colleague and assume my swiveling throne. Then, before anything else, I lock into the 18 minute live version of Two Step and mainline three cups of coffee. A few notes about this experience. First off, the coffee’s free as I jack it from the post-production facility next to my building. One time I was joe’ing down at their luxury coffee machine and Anyone But You’s Glen Powell walked in. He asked me where he was going. I responded by singing I am no Superman. That’s a lie and a poorly forced Dave Matthews Band reference. I told Glen I had no idea. Moments later, director Will Gluck walked in and told Glen where Anyone But You was being mixed. So yeah, the coffee is free as fuck. Secondly, I get absolutely no work done during the 18 minutes of Two Step. Like literally nothing. Instead, I’m staring straight through my screen as funk chords and caffeine penetrate my bloodstream. Nobody taps me on the shoulder or asks me how my weekend was. They can’t put their finger on why, but they know it’s not the time. Don’t talk to a pitcher in the seventh inning of a no-hitter. Don’t talk to me when I’m listening to Two Step.

*showed you this credit goes to Randy, listen below*

No babe, The American Cinematheque isn’t simply a movie theater…It’s a non-profit that programs screenings throughout Los Angeles. There’s the Los Feliz 3, The Aero, and The Egyptian. I’m a Film Club patron so I could get you into some unreal Q&As if that’s something you’re interested in. I saw Charlie Kauffman speak after a 25th anniversary showing of Being John Malkovich last week. Next week I’m watching Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen on 35mm for six hours straight.

Half-Baked Rant: Independent TV

Hulu's 'Everyone Is Doing Great' is a great pandemic binge: Interview | Mashable

There’s this show. I’m sure you haven’t seen it because it only aired one season three years ago and was met with relative silence from both you and critics. But it’s an important show nonetheless. One of the more important shows in the last five years. Maybe ten years if I’m really spot on. But in the rare case that I’m certifiably incorrect in my predictions, this show and more importantly the idea of this show will be regarded with the same amount of reverence that Susie and Jess, Sub Shop, or Buddies is regarded with - absolutely zero reverence. In fact, Susie and Jess, Sub Shop, and Buddies aren’t even real shows. I just made them up. That’s how little you’ve thought about Everyone Is Doing Great, the very real show I’m speaking about.

Everyone Is Doing Great aired on Hulu in January of 2021, however, I assure you it doesn’t look, feel, or play out like anything released by Hulu and especially The Walt Disney Corporation at large. It follows two actors, once stars of a popular teen vampire series, adjusting to their newfound irrelevance in both the business and popular culture. It’s only fitting that such a specific idea comes from James Lafferty and Stephen Colletti, two actors who co-starred on legendary teen soap One Tree Hill. Lafferty and Colletti described their approach towards the series as an attempt to make the “anti-Entourage” - an idea that I imagine got them absolutely nowhere in pitch meetings. Why? Because instead of glorifying the ascension to Hollywood stardom, featuring Beverly Hills Hotel poolside meetings and your 5’5” friend in a fitted Zoo York flatbrim hooking up with Victoria’s Secret models, the series instead focused on two once-heartthrobs sweating out traffic and draining royalty checks on daunting mortgages and pedestrian amounts of cocaine. No overt style or musical drops, no A-list cameos or Emmy-worthy monologues, and especially no grand set pieces. This show is literally two guys and two girls hanging around their harshly lit homes, offices, and public parks. What are they doing? Mostly trying and failing but still getting out there and trying again. They’re living, everyone! Exactly what we’re out here doing. Exactly what I couldn’t seem to find anywhere else. Three years ago, no one described Everyone as groundbreaking television. But its simplicity sure felt novel in the thick of Peak TV - when comedy was not allowed to be just comedy. So how did these teen-show vets suddenly become the Fellinis of streaming sitcoms? It’s simple. They were bound by the constraints of independence.

Independent Television might be semi-foreign concept to the casual television fan. Many know what independent film is and most, if not all, human beings know what television is (no matter how hard it is now becoming to exactly define), yet the two words together, “independent television” even if somewhat related, are rarely combined - such as “desert scooter” or “crackers and salsa”. But independent television is having a moment at the moment and Everyone Is Doing Great was my unintentional introduction to this moment. Defining indie TV is tricky as I believe “indie” refers far more to an aesthetic or spirit rather than the source of financing. I’d argue the “big five” studios (almost big four if not for last week’s Paramount-Skydance merger), now folded 10 times over into global conglomerates, can no longer be the distinction between studio and independent work. Rarely is work purely funded by grassroots campaigns or outliers of the industry. A24 may finance work far more subversive than The Walt Disney Company but the backing isn’t coming from patrons of the arts, it’s coming from Stripes LLC, a private equity firm looking to strategically (if only marginally) capitalize off the growing incompetence of A24’s larger competitors. So rarely is indie, well…independent. It’s just smaller. But funny enough, Everyone Is Doing Great actually was pretty independent. First, Lafferty and Colletti self-financed and shot a pilot. But like I said previously, an anti-Entourage Entourage is not at the forefront of any studio’s mandates. Unsurprisingly, they were unsuccessful in receiving a series pickup. The two first-time show creators then turned to crowdfunding platform, Indiegogo and set up donation tiers with included perks. For $15, your name will be listed on jameslafferty.com. For $20, you’ll be invited to a digital One Tree Hill live-watch with the two. For $100, an Instagram thank you. For $250, a private video conference. For $3,000-$,5000 you could hang with James and Stephen on set or in post-production. And for a whopping $10,000, the cast would come to your hometown for a screening and party. Want to know how popular One Tree Hill is? The show raised $267,422 off of only 5,330 backers making the average donation just over $50. I hope there was a secret menu fans could pick from. I’d shell out 500 bucks to play Lafferty one-on-one while Gavin Degraw belts “I Don’t Wanna Be” from the sideline. But that’s just me. Regardless, crowdfunding from their fervent crowd was a clever move. The financing was also reflexive of the show’s subject matter, as their super-fan base cared far more about the project than any studio in Hollywood. But the strategy was just as risky. Everyone is Doing Great would shoot with first-time showrunners, on a shoestring budget, and without the structural notes of a studio’s development department. What resulted was the obscurely human and ordinary slice-of-life comedy I praised previously. In return, Hulu picked up the show and streamed it not as a Hulu Original but instead just as an original show only on Hulu. If this reminds you of a more recent and far more high-profile situation, it should. Like I said, indie television is having a moment.

I’m referring to Shane Gillis’s new Netflix comedy, Tires. I admittedly have not finished it yet but I did enjoy Tires V.1 - a 12 minute YouTube pilot from Gillis and John Mckeever before Gillis’s meteoric rise in stand-up comedy. A rise, mind you, that was super-charged by a self-financed special, Shane Gillis: Live in Austin. Tires V.2 feels incredibly similar to Everyone Is Okay. I refuse to say the shows feel cheap even if both do look like they cost a fraction of, let’s say, Game of Thrones, because cheap suggests they look bad. The last season of Game of Thrones looked terrible and that sure as shit wasn’t cheap. Tires wasn’t crowdfunded as Gillis’s capital isn’t found in nostalgic teen fandom but instead cold hard touring revenue. The series was completely self-funded, shot in the middle of Pennsylvania, then sold to Netflix as a complete series. Gillis, a comedian whose only acting credits have come within his own sketch comedy and now Tires, has far more juice than both Lafferty and Colletti, but similarly found the need to independently carve out his space in comedy, first with Live From Austin and now Tires, after his martyr-making firing off Saturday Night Live.

After hosting 'SNL,' Shane Gillis expands his resume – but not his act – with Netflix's worn-out 'Tires' | CNN

Ten years ago, before the convergence of linear television and the internet, either of these projects would have been known as “web series”. A form of television, while incredibly dated, was at the crux of a 99 day WGA strike back in 2007. I guess the hope was once that the internet could democratize TV development - especially comedy. Some made little impact, like HBO digital originals that are still buried on the Max app. Check out Single Long - a 15 minute formatted dramaty about singles in Chicago drinking Old Style and texting on iPhone 3GS’s. Others went from the little web series that could to fully formed prestige comedies. Issa Rae’s Misadventures of An Awkward Black Girl became HBO’s Insecure. Broad City became well, Comedy Central’s Broad City. But the internet’s comedy pilot farm system faltered when Peak TV and its 10 hour, 100 million dollar projects about Harrison Ford and Jason Segel in therapy, for example, began defining the endangered genre. That was until stock corrections followed by a dual strike put the business smack in the middle of its current state of contraction. Blame it on Wall Street’s preference for stock growth over revenue, comically inflated production costs, or movie star salaries paid by ad-free streamers deep in the red. Whichever you choose, I’m sure it’s been written about by far more credible scribes than myself. I’ll instead focus on a not-so-discussed development throughout the decade of expensive prestige television - as Succession, a show where someone accidentally sent a dick pic to his father, won Emmys for Drama, and Ted Lasso, a show brave enough to make jokes about British people drinking tea, swept up trophies for comedy. The advancement of DIY filmmaking. Just go on YouTube and watch one of the thousands of videos in which an amateur filmmaker teaches you how to copy a famous director’s style. You’ll doubt they can actually do it before realizing this jackass just made a not-so-terrible Wes Anderson ripoff from his basement in Milwaukee. The baseline technology gap between what’s used on a studio lot and what some guy has in his van is increasingly less existent. 8K consumer cinema cameras, ridiculous post-production software, and supercharged laptops have made studio-quality filmmaking possible (with a steep learning curve) at a fraction of the expected cost. In the right hands (cannot stress to you enough still how incredibly hard it is to pull off), a well done pilot no longer looks like a web series but instead a cable series that Comedy Central or MTV would’ve aired when they still made scripted programming.

I’m not saying $10k and a quirky script will get you a Netflix deal. But real players with real representation, whether it’s Lafferty and Colletti or Shane Gillis, are proving their ability to circumvent the slow and stock-mandated world of development. Especially with the help of power agencies’ growing arms of media financing. Shops such as CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film not only provide clients a cash source for such endeavors but also a sales division (Gillis is repped at CAA). Everyone is Doing Great is still doing okay as well, shooting a second season independently once again and bringing on Fifth Season (formerly Endeavor Content) for representation in their distribution sale. Time will tell if another streamer scoops up the second season or both as the show has since left Hulu. Unmentioned until now is Mark Duplass, whose upcoming series, Penelope, premiered at Sundance this January and was acquired by Netflix. This will be Duplass’s THIRD indie show after HBO’s Togetherness and Room 103. Duplass has long been putting his League and now Morning Show checks to use, financing and producing both film and television with his brother and fellow actor Jay, on shoestring budgets. Duplass brought on CAA for the Penelope sale and I imagine, like always, has structured his residuals far better than most Netflix originals could pay when financed in-house.

Lead actress Megan Stott (left) and director Mel Eslyn (right) shooting *Penelope*

Obviously, television’s future, comedy or not, won’t solely rely on independent production. There is, after all, a graveyard of pilots from unfunny hacks now in mountains of credit card debt. Also, this is really small scale stuff we’re talking about. But the constraints that bred Everyone, Tires, or Penelope expose an arguably better formula for creatively successful television. If not independent from agencies or private equity, these productions are still independent from their distributors - and that’s the key. All of this reminds me of a great conversation on The Town with Matt Belloni about vertical integration in Hollywood. Belloni speaks with Matt Stoller, research director for the American Economic Liberties Project, about the dissolution of the Fin-Syn rules - anti-trust regulations that limited a TV network from producing their own series. The regulations were lifted in the early 90s but it took the break up of the cable bundle for vertical integration to truly run amuck during the streaming era. Much of the WGA’s contract demands revolved around the arguably anti-competitive pay structures and absence of a hiring ladder that resulted from development and distribution operating in-house at most media companies. But as I hinted at in my piece on scale a few months back, vertical integration hasn’t really worked for streamers. There’s simply too much risk involved in doing both at a consistent rate. “Indie” TV seems to have provided at least one avenue for streamers to mitigate this risk - especially with comedies from unproven creators and talent. And if the much talked about Tires is any indication, audiences are starving for this type of show. The absence of Comedy Central, MTV, and NBC Thursday Nights has left a gaping hole in the scripted comedy landscape and with all due respct to the legend of legends, we don’t need Harrison Ford to fill it. We need the freaks who mastered iMovie before receiving a driver’s license and have since learned how to make whatever weed ad they’re shooting to make ends meet, look like it could play at the Super Bowl. We need them to circumvent the insanity of bloated studio production costs, raise money however possible, and shoot great pilots with all of the 8k cameras, LED light boxes, and powerful post-production software that’s readily available. What can result, due to the obvious limits, are grounded pieces of work that might feel a little more human. No doubling Toronto or Atlanta for every city ever or the creative pressure to make a comedy that’s “important” by chalking up more trauma points than punchlines. So get out there people! Procure $250k, agency representation, and a sustained relationship with a solvent streamer…and make your dreams come true.

I beg of you to share this post with everyone you know. I need the attention, badly.

Pioneer Family Recs

Two Women Make a Lunch Plan (SHORT FILM) - Congratulations to filmmaker and more importantly newsletter subscriber Elizabeth Archer on this great short that has just been accepted into the Palm Springs International Short Fest. Big deal, people. Check it out before it makes its way to the desert.

To The Lights (SHORT FILM) - Also congratulations to filmmaker and more importantly newsletter subscriber Emily Kim on her great short, To The Lights, which just premiered on Omeleto. Rack up the views folks. Let’s break records.

This week on Elevator Pitch…

Jon Bernthal - 2024

Today is a special day on Elevator Pitch. Not only are we welcoming in our first guest pitcher, writer/actor Winston Salk, but our celebrity guest is none other than the lord of the prison yard, tennis court, US Mexican border, borough of Queens, and city of Baltimore - JON BERNTHAL. First, a discussion as colorful and wide ranging as Bernthal's own career. Then, we pitch three movies to Jon for this year, 2024. Our first modern pitch session yet - because Bernthal's time is right about now.

Conclusion

The Underseen History of New York City's Parks | The New Yorker

Parks are so legit. I’ll most likely be there next weekend because here’s everything I’ve accomplished there thus far:

Eviscerated three crosswords
Played catch
READ A BOOK
Ate sushi and listened to Coldplay
Partook in organized kickball (this was technically on a Thursday)

So in conclusion, put on some Mescal shorts, grab a Rawlings Heart of the Hide, and don’t forget your tacky beach towel. Just get to the damn park people. The last bastion of third spaces.