In the third episode of What's Wrong with Hollywood, I sit down with Filmmaker and Creative Development Professional
, who recently launched with and wrote and directed the short film Game Night, which you can watch below:He’s also the writer of the Substack
, which recently advocated for creatives to start thinking like studio executives.To note:
Some context: This was recorded prior to the launch of The Label, but it’s out now and you can check it out at the link above!
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 here with Ellis Jamal Sutton, who is a filmmaker and creative professional. He's worked in feature development at Warner Brothers, Netflix, and now works at Heartbeat, which is Kevin Hart's production shingle. Ellis is also the founder of All of a Sutton Productions, where he has produced and directed a number of short films and music videos.
He recently wrote and directed a short relationship drama called Game Night about a budding young couple whose relationship gets put to the test during a game night with close friends. On top of all that, Ellis writes the popular Substack Notes from the Studio. Ellis, welcome to the show.
Ellis J. Sutton
Thank you for having me, Jon. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jon Stahl
Right from the top, I want to get into the big question, which is the name of the podcast. What's wrong with Hollywood?
Ellis J. Sutton
There's a lot of problems. But I think the biggest problem overall is that the system is not currently built to foster innovation and creativity. So we don't have people in positions of power who feel like they have the ability or strong incentive structure to champion new talent, new voices. And ultimately when you foster new talent, new voices, you lead to more creative things. And when you're not incentivized to do that, whether you're working with the same writers over and over, or going back to the same directors or greenlighting the same types of IP projects, you're going to ultimately lead yourself down a path that is going to be creatively bankrupt.
And it's no surprise that when people watch overall Hollywood movies, they feel like it's the same stuff. So I think that's the biggest problem is that we haven't figured out how can we make a way to champion creative voices without people feeling like their jobs are on the line. Or feeling like there's not a great path forward to get something innovative seen in front of a wide group of people.
Jon Stahl
You've been on both sides of that equation, right? You've been in the development role and you've been in the writer director role. From the development role, what are some ways to incentivize new voices to be brought into this ecosystem?
Ellis J. Sutton
Everything I'm about to say is going to be easier said than done. You're dealing with big institutions at the forefront. But I will say that if you are a budding writer and maybe you have any aspirations to work in the Hollywood system, I think similar to trying to come up in social media or YouTube, you have to first show that you can sort of assimilate before you're allowed to innovate. So your scripts have to feel like they're Hollywood writer scripts. That's the first bare entry. And you have to have a few of them, right? My old boss used to be an agent, and he didn't just go after a writer who just wrote one great script. You usually had to have two or three really great ones. And usually you're probably not going to sell any of those, but those are your scripts that are your calling cards.
So I'd say the very first step is trying to get your things to be similar to the things that are already accepted. And honestly, if you're watching movies or TV shows and you're saying, oh, that's crap, I can write something similar. I'm going to tell you this right now. The scripts that end up getting writers' careers are way, way better than anything you'll see on television or on a feature screen.
So just know that your entry point is not the television or what you see in the movies. It is the scripts that are getting passed around the industry that people are like, wow, that was super incredible. You got to read this.
Jon Stahl
You are also a creative and you literally just this morning posted on Substack about the most recent short that you wrote and directed. Tell everyone about that. Where did it come from? What excited you about the concept and how did you get it made?
Ellis J. Sutton
So Game Night is a short that I finished last year, and I was starting to write it almost three years ago now with my old roommate, one of my good friends from college. We had just worked on a movie together. And I said, yo, let's step it up. Let's get you a bigger role in the movie. And so because we're roommates, we were just sort of spitballing at night trying to crack the script.
And the movie is basically about this couple who's having a little bit of a critical point in their relationship. And when a girl is invited to a game night amongst this guy and his close friends, she realizes that their relationship is taking a turn that she didn't quite anticipate and now she has a new layer of something that she's going to have to deal with.
We took a while to write it. When we initially started writing the draft, I had just got my new job in career development at Warner Bros. And so we had to put it on pause. I end up leaving my job at Warner Bros to my job at Netflix. And I had about a month's period of time in between and I told my producers, I said, look, if we're going to shoot the movie, we have to shoot it within this window because I'm not going to be able to shoot it after that window.
And so we shot it right between my time, and then I just spent a bunch of time in my first year at Netflix editing the movie and then ultimately screening it there about a year later after shooting.
Jon Stahl
Was there anything that you learned from working in creative development at Warner Brothers and at Netflix that you brought to the production or post-production of this short?
Ellis J. Sutton
I would say yes, I think the main thing was the professionalism. Which I wanted to carry into the production, so in my meetings and how I was dealing with cast and crew. I'm witnessing meetings a lot amongst executives and we're doing a lot of lingo and so I just sort of get wired a certain way about how you should be going about the process.
The other thing too is the creative development job, especially if you work at a studio, is a lot of times the executives are supposed to be representing the audience. Whenever they're giving creative notes and creative discussions, they're representing what is the viewer actually going to be seeing? So if an executive is confused, that in a way is sort of saying an audience member might be confused at certain points. And so I think being in creative development really has started to wire my brain into thinking more like an audience member.
So when we were cutting the movie together, I think I had a better ability to take a step back and be like, oh, this is what the viewer would be seeing. I think on top of that, it also allowed me to realize how important feedback was. How critical it is. And so I took feedback very seriously during that process and I had to learn how to interpret notes in ways that like, hey, someone may have given me a note that I may not actually be able to execute, but is there another way I can serve that note in the editing of the movie? Because sometimes people give me notes like I just don't have the footage to be able to execute that note. So I had to figure out other ways to do it with what we had.
Jon Stahl
I loved your post about designing your career like an architect. How do you think about people writing for audience or sale versus writing for themselves. Where do you draw that line?
Ellis J. Sutton
I think you start from you, right? You start from like, what are your passions? What are your goals? What interests you? We want your first layer of creativity to be completely unfiltered, right? Then once you have that thing, then you need to put on another hat, which we all need to start doing more. We need to say, okay, this thing that I want, what is the right medium in which the amount of people who I want to be able to see it can go and see it. So your big passion piece at the end of the day might only have five people interested in it, right?
At that point, you have a choice, right? Do you want to still go about trying to fight tooth and nail to get that thing off the ground so that the five people can go watch it? Or do you want to figure out a new medium to tell that story that'll actually get those five people to go see it, or is there a way to tell the story that can have much more massive appeal.
I think that in general, Hollywood executives, that's all they're really trying to do is when they see someone's really passion product, they're really just trying to answer the question, like, how can we write this or circumvent in a way that has broader appeal. But I think why people don't really like Hollywood a lot is because they don't like the choices that get made in lieu of trying to make the mass appeal.
And I think that if you're a writer coming up, you have to figure out ways to get things directly to your audience, then that means you're now taking the role of distribution executives and marketing executives that a big conglomerate would typically have. And so you have to know how to think like them because there's a reason why they have the money and the resource to be able to do these things. And we just sort of have to do mini versions of that.
Jon Stahl
I have a question about this new film label you're starting with Taylor Lewis. What is a film label? How does it work? What's it going to look like?
Ellis J. Sutton
She had been a fan of my writing and we seem to be doing this thing where we were writing about similar things at the same time without even telling each other about it. And then at some point I was just like, Taylor, we need to just hop on a Zoom call together and we need to talk. Then we end up talking and we talked about where our goals are and what we want to do. And she's at a transition point in her life, in her career. And I'm also at a transition point where I'm trying to figure out what do I want to do? What do I want to get out the bigger picture of all of it.
And so we said, okay, but what's step zero? Right? And for us, step zero is how can you create branding and marketing for movies that don't exist? That was sort of the thought process behind it, right? And so if you can figure out ways to build audiences based on assets like a teaser. Like a really quality teaser or like a poster, a mockup poster or something computer generated. If you can figure out ways to collectively build excitement towards those types of things, and you can get genuine interest in it, that can potentially convert people to go see your movie.
I think there are a lot of innovation to be made in there, but that was sort of our thought process. And so we said, okay, well, those are cool marketing ideas for an individual movie, but then what does it all tie back to? So then like what is step negative 0.5? And for us, we said let's build a collective brand around these movies to be under an umbrella where if you're thinking about it from streetwear, you're thinking about it from community events. You're thinking about it from content such as newsletters, such as YouTube videos where we're featuring people, we're spotlighting writers and filmmakers, and we're creating opportunities for people to get together and show curation. Before anyone would ever give us money to make a movie, then we can then hopefully activate people to come in and have ourselves be the audience that we want to see in the new cinema community.
So the other way to think about it's like, how can we get the people who have Letterboxd subscriptions, A24 memberships and Metrograph memberships. How can we get those collective group of people together to buy into the types of movies that we want to make and the types of voices that we want to champion. Because as it's going to be getting cheaper to make movies, and as those particular big voices in the indie space get bigger and bigger, there's going to be room for who is the Ryan Coogler that is making Fruitvale Station tomorrow? Right? Who are the directors who got their first thing made? Who's making their first thing now? Who's making Cord Jefferson's movie?
How can we sort of be that new voice is sort of the goal of the label ultimately. And we're going to start by building a brand through our writing and through our video content and through our community events and our merch.
Jon Stahl
And do you have any kind of upcoming events or launch dates?
Ellis J. Sutton
Our first newsletter is available Friday, June 6th. And going forward, we're going to be having weekly newsletters from there every week.
And the newsletters are going to include a bit of education about what the new independent field space will look like. We call it NonDē. Ted Hope sort of coined that term. What does that look like? How do you build audiences in this day and age? What does a new marketing wave look like. So part of it is educating readers on how to get invigorated about a new way of doing it. And then on top of that, we're going to start featuring people who we feel are already innovating in the space, and people who we feel are going to continue to be innovating in space.
So we're going to have interviews from YouTubers, we're going to have interviews from filmmakers, we're going to have interviews from business owners, we're going to have interviews from people who are thought leaders in the space. And so we want to sort of build an audience via that. And then we're going to do in-person events later on in the summer as a way to invigorate some local activation. And we're going to convert some of those into YouTube videos.
Jon Stahl
Could you go more into detail about the types of lessons that you learned while making the short film that you just released?
Ellis J. Sutton
I learned a lot of lessons. In development, I realize how important I care about planning. I'm a big planner, me and my friend just had a bunch of conversations about the different story avenues that the story could go in before we actually even started writing on the page. I really was trying to hone in on, hey, what will this character do in this situation? And then if they're going to do this, then how will we make this happen? And you'll see in the movie, the movie unravels in a particular way that when ultimately gets revealed. You can then watch back the movie and see how all the different things were sort of layered in there in a really intentional way.
And then on top of that, I also realized that at the end of the day, no matter how much planning you do, you're still going to change your mind when you're shooting and things are going to change when you're editing the movie. So at some point you got to put the planning down, you got to get to just actually making the movie.
And then in hindsight, the movie was too expensive, I think. I can't look back and be like, hey, here's how we could have cut costs. Because you'll see the movie. The movie does look well produced. I don't regret any of that, but in regards to sustainable filmmaking, I definitely feel like that's a movie that I put up a good chunk of my own personal finance to do. And I just can't make movies like that routinely. I think that learning more sustainable production workflows is super important.
And then the other thing too is the movie really taught me what I feel like I should have leaned into earlier in my career. Is that at the end of the day, if you have something that is good and quality, the next step is trying to get it to the right audience. And I think that typically how you do short films is you make the short film and then you go down the festival circuit. And while that is fine and most people do it, I found I didn't find a lot of success in the festival circuit. Even though we screen the movie in front of people, they love it. People will tell me, oh my God, this is a great movie. People in the industry are like, yeah, this is really well made. Can't get a programmer at a small festival to put this movie in front of people.
And so really what that mainly taught me though is like, hey, if you make good stuff, it's not a question about whether or not it should be getting laurels. It's like, no, you need to figure out how to create ways to get in front of your audiences, of the people who are going to be enjoying that movie. And so going forward, obviously I'm still going to do the film festival thing, but I'm also going to be more intentional like, okay, well, how can I do more event type screenings? How can I do more audience building from the ground up when I'm making any individual movie? And I think I should have been doing that from the jump. I think that this movie really taught me like, hey, don't put the fate of your film career in the hands of a screener. Put it in the hands of yourself.
Jon Stahl
Finally, tell us where people can learn more about your Substack, the film brand that you're building, and the short that you just released.
Ellis J. Sutton
So my Substack, written by ellis.substack.com. And that's where you could pretty much find my notes and my posts from my newsletter, Notes from the Studio. I mainly talk about things that are either backwards facing, but now trying to be more forward facing in regards to the industry, mainly in the independent cinema space because I realize not a lot of people care about the Hollywood stuff. But how can I make movies? So I said, let me lean into writing more things in the independent cinema space. And we're going to be releasing the newsletter soon, the label, and you'll be able to check that out by the time this airs. Jon will have a link for it in the description and the short, you can find on YouTube right now. And you could check it out and if you can find me on any of those platforms, please subscribe and let me know what you think. I'd be curious to hear what everyone thinks.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to watch the whole thing at the top of this post!
Stay tuned,
Jon
Share this post