In the second episode of What's Wrong with Hollywood, I sit down with Entertainment Attorney and Producer
, who was recently nominated for an Emmy Award for his work on the Paramount+ Feature As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial.He’s also the writer of the Substack
, on which Sam has been documenting the 8-year journey from first optioning to getting the Emmy nom.To note:
We had some technical difficulties with the recording software and Sam’s video feed cuts out pretty early in the recording, but we got a good image of him quietly judging us in there as a placeholder.
Some context: This was recorded prior to the announcement of the Emmy winners last week, and sadly, As We Speak did not come home with the award.
- I definitely designed the 8-bit thumbnail before listening to your podcast, but I got huge inspiration from (read: “stole”) your title music vibe and preview intro. Thank you.
You can listen to What’s Wrong with Hollywood on any of the following streams:
In our full conversation, we cover:
⚖️ The rap lyrics as evidence crisis - How prosecutors use artists' creative work against them in criminal trials, and why this represents a massive intersection of art, law, and racial bias
🎬 From 8-year development hell to Emmy nomination - The incredible journey of getting "As We Speak" made, including false starts, patient IP owners, and a brutal 8-month production timeline
💰 The doom and gloom vs. booming business paradox - Why Sundance film panels were all about industry collapse while creator/brand panels celebrated explosive growth
🎯 Building audience before you build the film - Why starting a TikTok for your character or creating a podcast around your story can be more valuable than a perfect script
📺 The direct-to-audience revelation - How filmmakers are discovering that self-distribution provides not just money, but invaluable audience relationships and creative satisfaction
🤝 The creator-filmmaker bridge - Exploring how traditional filmmakers can learn from creators' audience-building expertise without abandoning their storytelling craft
The full transcript can be found in the show notes.
The below transcript has been edited using AI for length and clarity.
Jon Stahl I'm joined by Sam Widdoes, an entertainment attorney and producer who specializes in helping creators navigate the intersection of creative strategy, financing and distribution. Sam writes the Substack Widdoes Peak, and was producer on the Emmy nominated documentary As We Speak. He's here to discuss how the legal and business frameworks are evolving as creators increasingly bypass traditional Hollywood gatekeepers.
Sam Widdoes Thanks, Jon. I work with mostly independent filmmakers along that whole journey and look at how they want to build, not just the story they're telling, but how does that fit into a larger strategy. The mindset of, I'm going to make a great film, get it into a top tier film festival and get a global rights deal. That may have been a more feasible path five years ago, but it's really not these days.
I encourage clients to start thinking about the different opportunities that are starting to arise in terms of different ways to exploit their story even before it becomes a feature, and understanding what other elements might attract audiences and maybe even ways to release bits and pieces of it before and start trying to build and find that audience on different platforms.
Jon Stahl I have a friend who's self financing and producing a horror feature film. Can you give some advice to someone who's never really gone through that process of distribution for a feature before?
Sam Widdoes I've never worked in horror, but I kind of wish I had, because it seems to be the one space that always has an audience. You can make the film, it's the Blumhouse model, right? He was making films for nothing and they were getting enormous returns because people love that genre.
I would encourage him first to get to know what that audience looks like, understand how the most successful horror films have performed, where they performed. And look at the marketing and distribution tactics that those films have used.
The one other example I would say about understanding your story and maybe getting it out early was the notion of creating an online presence for your character or for your story before it exists in feature length form. If you have a film about a character, start a TikTok for that character. Just start putting that story out there and seeing how audiences respond. Build on that and see if you can generate enough interest and say, you like this character, I've got a screenplay ready to go and start crowdfunding.
Jon Stahl You were a producer on As We Speak, an Emmy nominated feature film. Can you talk about your role in the feature and what that experience was like?
Sam Widdoes It's a process that started eight years ago in 2016 when I first read about the issue that became the book that became the documentary. The documentary concerns the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. Someone's on trial for a crime, the course of their investigation finds that that person put out a song on YouTube or Instagram or had some rhymes written in a notebook that may or may not have anything to do with the crime in question.
But is still entered into evidence, either as a confession or as character evidence to establish motive or intent. In either instance, it's not just absurd that art is used as evidence, but it also is wrapped up in just flagrant racism, stereotypes, underlying implicit biases. And prosecutors know this, and they've used it in hundreds of cases over the years.
When I first read about the issue, I realized there is a theatrical element and it's the reason why legal dramas do so well because there's just inherent drama when someone is on trial for their life. I knew there was that drama, but I was also a hip hop fan. As someone who grew up in the LA suburbs, my interaction with the black community was almost entirely through hip hop. I learned so much through the music, I was exposed to an experience, and never took any of the words literally. So to think that those words were being used and presented literally in a court of law was not just an outrage, but I was like, this is an opportunity to talk about what is hip hop? What is the black experience in America?
Because there were 700 known cases of this taking place, we had a wealth of storytelling possibilities. We went through a series of versions of what the story might be. We thought of adapting it as a scripted, limited series. We got a really good pitch with Kerry Washington's company and she's in tears hearing the pitch and says she wants to do it. And then six months later, her team was like, we're just too busy. We can't do this now. And then you're back to square one.
Jon Stahl At what point do you say like, this is enough, or, no, this is a story worth telling and stubbornly stay ahead?
Sam Widdoes The universe had some masochistic plan for us where just as we were about to give it all up, something would happen. Just enough to keep you hooked. Whether it was just as one of the shopping periods for the rights was going to expire, we'd have some really great meeting where some production company or studio or some part of the story starts to come alive and you realize this is the thing that's going to make it sell.
There were just enough of those at just the right time. There's a dozen times during the course of that seven years that my then fiance and now wife would've been like, give this up and move on to the next project. And somehow it just kept happening that we moved it forward, inch by inch, and then the director says yes. And it's a guy who's literally the perfect person to tell the story. That's where I realized my job as a producer, I'm not that artist. I know I can sort of put the pieces together of a story. I can work my tail off to find the sources and sort of structure it the right way, but once you get a director who's got a vision and the talent to bring it to life, I still get chills when I sit behind a monitor.
Jon Stahl Can I ask about financing? How you raised the money to get this produced?
Sam Widdoes For several years we were only pitching to the entities or the production companies that sold to streaming entities. Independent financing was not really my skillset and also wasn't on my radar. We took all those meetings. They were generally positive, but it didn't result in a yes.
In hindsight and in 2025, understanding all the avenues that we really did have at our disposal that we weren't really thinking about, I would've started with a podcast, or I would've started with some short form interviews and getting the word out and owning the IP and trying to build the audience. And then also going to independent financiers, going to people in the world of criminal justice reform, of social justice of hip hop advocacy.
2021 was when we really started to pursue independent financing, and we had one company that was interested and basically strung us along for about 11 months up until the point that our director signed on, a studio came on and facilitated a pitch to Paramount Plus and Paramount ended up commissioning the whole film. So it wasn't until literally went into production that we got any money in the door, but that money was the full budget to actually make the film.
Jon Stahl When you knew you had this kind of clock on it, how did that impact the actual production?
Sam Widdoes The studio had an outrageously fast delivery timeline. They greenlit it in February and said, deliver by October. But I think actually because we had done six years of development at that point, we knew exactly who we needed to interview, where they were located. The director and I had been working on his version of what the film would be for a year and a half. So the outline was more than just an outline. It was like, this is who we're interviewing in these places with this timeline and these are the cases that we're going to look at.
We had shoots in Atlanta, LA, Chicago, Houston, New York, and London. It was all on like a two and a half month schedule, but post-production started like a month into production. So we had editors working while footage was coming in, and because the director, Jason Harper, was an editor, that was his background. So he was shooting the film as he's cutting it in his head almost. He knows every scene that he needs. He knows all the coverage he needs, and was feeding that to his editors. So it was a really amazing precision production process.
Jason had this amazing vision of weaving it together through the first person perspective of a rapper whose name is Kemba, a guy who had released a couple albums and had some notoriety, but certainly wasn't famous. And also isn't gang affiliated, has no criminal record. But by virtue of being a black man in America, could at any point be arrested and at any point during that process, his backlog of songs, some of which referenced drugs, some of which referenced guns, but all in the context of his own experience of growing up in the Bronx.
Jason had this brilliant idea of like, this whole thing is going to be Kemba's journey, going from city to city, talking to artists, talking to attorneys, and trying to figure out like, is this a thing that could ever impact me? I'm just an artist sharing stories about my experience in the world. This is an issue that clearly only affects other people. But wait a second. At some point could I get hit with something like this and be faced with being in a defendant's seat where I can't speak for myself because my lawyer's going to tell me not to open my mouth, and I'm going to have to watch as a prosecutor and defense attorney interpret my words against me. That was the sort of meta approach and I was like, that's the best version of anything we had come up with in development.
Jon Stahl Tell everyone about your Substack, what you are most interested in gaining from writing and what the experience has been like as a content creator in that space.
Sam Widdoes I think the seed of the Substack probably started last year when we premiered As We Speak at Sundance. We turned in a project file, it went on the platform a month after Sundance. That was it. And I still to this day don't know who watched it. When they watched, where they are. There's no feedback really from Paramount nor from an audience. And it was a project that I just knew would have an audience if it was marketed, if we were given an opportunity to engage with those people.
So that was the dissatisfaction with a lack of engagement that planted the seed of my desire to get that direct audience engagement. Next was last summer. I saw the director of a film, a documentary called Your Fat Friend. She and her producer did a presentation about their self distribution of their film and the ways in which their audience directly communicated with them after they had premiered Tribeca and didn't get a sale. Their audience was like, we want to watch the film. How can we do it? How much money can we spend? We want to give you our money.
And they started using different platforms and understanding like there's more value in the direct to audience connection than just the money that you'll receive. You'll get personal satisfaction and you'll also get a continuing relationship that you can leverage for your next project. And those filmmakers were like, I'm never going back. This is the way that I'm going to engage from now on. That's how I'm going to start thinking about my projects from the outset, from the development stage. How do I connect directly with an audience early and just keep building that so that they feel like they are invested in me in this story.
I went to Sundance this year just as an observer, and went to a handful of different panels. The panels that were film and financing and distribution related, were almost all doom and gloom. The industry is in the dumps. We're not getting any money, we're not getting any distribution. I went to a couple creator and brand panels and they're like, business is booming. We're getting all this audience data. We're getting brands that want to participate. We're expanding our reach, we're growing our studios.
I'm like, okay. Something's happening over here that these guys can learn from. I know these guys will not want to associate themselves with creators with the word content, and the creators, they really don't know how to make films, nor do many of them want to. Long form filmmaking is a different skillset. But what is true of all of the creators is they have a direct relationship with their audience and they have a direct connection to the feedback that their audience gives them in terms of what is working, what is not. And over time, what that builds more than anything is trust.
How can the indie film world learn from the creator world and on the business side. Really start thinking about their stories as universes of storytelling, universes of content that can be broken up into different pieces. And if the filmmakers don't want to make the podcast or the short form, or the merch or the live event, well, where are the partnerships that we can make? Where are the people that want to get involved in that and be part of that storytelling world.
Jon Stahl How can people find you and find your work?
Sam Widdoes My Substack is Widdoes Peak. And the film is called As We Speak, Rap Music on Trial.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to watch the whole thing at the top of this post!
Stay tuned,
Jon
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