Want to talk some Film & TV? Maybe chat some development, production, and pitch decks?

Well, come out the coast, we’ll get together, and have a few laughs and talk all things Entertainment! If you want to sign up, you can join here!

When: Wednesday, May 20th @ 1pm Pacific.

Cost: Zero US Dollars! Who said you can’t still get something good for free?

Who is this for: Anyone who wants to talk about the Film & TV Industry on the unscripted/documentary or scripted side of things.

Wait, who are you? I’m glad you asked!

To date, I’ve Produced over 50 TV shows, 3 movies, and over 1,000 hours of content. I’ve managed budgets ranging from $20,000 to $20 million working on shows for HBO, Netflix, NBC Universal, Paramount, and other less impressive outlets. More recently, I’ve served as a ProdCo and Producer on multiple feature films, including the theatrically released Brothers on Three and the upcoming The Highest Road.

I’m also actively working on scripted projects! I Produced the award-winning horror short Stan, which is a Proof of Concept we’re actively shopping, pitching, and looking for partners and investors in. It’s rad.

Stan Trailer: Award-Winning Proof of Concept Short. Directed by Lauren Dunitz, produced with Suzann Toni Petrongolo and Andrew Vogel of VP Independent (Herman, The Dirty South, Dead Giveaway) with yours truly at Rowdy House.

If you’d like to see Stan in person, it premieres this weekend in Los Angeles. You can get tickets here.

ADDITIONAL WORK

Brothers on Three Trailer:

The Highest Road Trailer

Hoping to see you at the webinar next week!

It was because of this guy.

For 11 years, ABC ran a block of programming called TGIF, featuring family friendly sitcoms like Boy Meets World, Full House, Perfect Strangers, and of course, Family Matters. (I can’t believe I’m explaining what TGIF is, but here we are.)

As a 10-ish to 14-ish old kid, this was my wheelhouse. I just turned on the TV and there was good stuff on. Consistent, quality (YMMV) laughs. No scrolling, no searching, no discovery. Turn the TV on, grab a Coke, and have some LOLs before we were even abbreviating them.

And if you were lucky, somewhere during a Family Matters episode, Steve Urkel would pop on the TV and crush the audience with one of these:

One simple sentence that in many ways, helped the show become a runaway hit.

For a multi-year stretch in the 1990’s if you made a mistake, you might say “Did I do that?” Or if you didn’t, you knew someone who said it and it annoyed you. You most certainly were around it and you most certainly knew what it meant. It was on t-shirts, puzzles, backpacks, and of course, the talking Steve Urkel doll.

Or if you didn’t say that, you may have said “Cut it out!” or “No problem!” or “Have Mercy!” or “Not the Mama!” or “Don’t Be Ridiculous!”

There’s at least 20 or 30 sitcom phrases you can drop on someone in their 40s-ish in a certain tone and inflection and they’ll be transported to a time or a place immediately.

The power of a single phrase.

This isn’t an article about the death of monoculture or why things were better then. (I don’t actually think that’s true, but that’s for another column.)

This is an article about how you need to start thinking about MARKETING MORE and less about your BIG CREATIVE VISION.

I’ve written extensively about how your Outreach hinges on your Materials (Email Wording, Pitch Deck, Proof of Concept, 1-Sheet).

I can tell you that 99% of you aren’t approaching it the right way. I say this with love. I also say this with accuracy.

So I’ll keep writing about it because everyone needs to hear it, most people need to hear it again, and honestly, I like reminding myself of it if I lose focus on my own work.

“Did I dooooo that?”

One single sentence drove the marketing engine for Family Matters.

What single sentence drives your vision?

What single sentence hooks your potential audience?

What value are you offering nearly instantaneously?

How quickly can you convey everything you need to say about your idea and make it memorable?

I spoke with a Producer a few weeks back who told me, "We average hundreds of pitches a week and at least 10 of them are AI generated loglines.”

Yes, your competition in some cases, is literally bots. If you feel like you’re shouting into a void, it’s because you are.

But your human competition is largely, not other people.

It’s your marketing approach. It might be your logline, it might be your pitch deck, it might be how wordy your emails are (guilty, and a work in progress).

Last year Jaleel White went on Pod Meets World and shared the history of “Did I do that?” and funny enough, it wasn’t the first catch phrase they tried. The first?

“Excuse me.”

Yep, that’s what they tried.

“Excuse me.”

Since Steve Urkel was supposed to be a one-off character, it would’ve been easy to just stick with a throwaway line for a throwaway character and just move on with their day. There’s always a million reasons to keep going in TV and not look back. It wasn’t his show, the cast was great, or maybe there was a a sweet lunch waiting for them!

But they decided to do better.

White goes on to say, “They tried a million darn catchphrases.”

That’s what it takes to get it right. And they did. A throwaway character helped launch a 215 episode run. Because they took the time to get it right.

It might take a million shots to develop a meaningful hook for your project. The one that breaks through. Lands with a Producer, gets a positive piece of feedback, intrigues an investor, or drives conversation. Progress.

But when you start getting that feedback, you’ll know you’re on the right track and you can follows those leads, learn, and advance your ideas in a meaningful way. And you can be proud of that progress.

You can send your next reach out with an “Excuse me” or you can take a step back and try and get it right and come back stronger.

Did I dooooo that?

Well yes, yes, you did.

I have been overweight for as long as I can remember.

The last day I remember being a healthy weight (probably around 175 pounds) was the week before I went to college. I was 18, coming off a summer working at Riverside Park in Agawam, MA (now Six Flags New England) where I was on my feet for up to 13 hours a day 6 days a week, so there was no amount of lunch break cheese fries that I could eat that was going to break me. There’s a picture of me smiling, looking happy. Looking healthy.

The worst picture of me came four years later. On my graduation day.

I look something adjacent to happy having made it through college, but I weighed somewhere around 275 pounds. Generously, you could say that I look jolly in the photo. Like I had just graduated a future mall Santa-in-training program.

Ungenerously? (A word, apparently.)

I was dangerously obese.

Turns out that eating at an all-you-can eat buffet for four years didn’t work for me. As proud as I was of leaving college as the reigning French Toast Champion (17.5 slices in one sitting, thank you very much) my body was not happy with me.

When I moved to Los Angeles in June of 2000, I decided to start losing weight.

I quit drinking soda, and immediately lost 20 pounds.

I met a vegetarian co-worker. I tried giving up meat and became an original “guy who shows up with his own veggie hot dogs” at BBQs.

I joined a gym and played basketball every Saturday morning. David Arquette tried to throw me an alley-oop. It went about as well as you could make up in your head.

For the next decade, I battled with my weight. In the good years, I got myself down to 215 pounds. There was literally one single day in 2003 where I got down to 199 before giving it all back. I probably averaged around 230 pounds.

In 2010, my son was born and there’s a few pictures of me holding him that remind me of that picture from my graduation day.

I look something adjacent to happy (mixed with a hefty dose of fear and exhaustion), holding this little football-sized person, but I weighed somewhere around 275 pounds.

Again.

This same year, I ended up working on a show named Ruby (This was going to be related to TV at some point!). The series was about a woman named Ruby and her battle to lose weight after weighing as much as 750 pounds. The show addressed not just the physical challenges of losing weight, but also the mental and emotional challenges of losing weight.

Mental and emotional challenges? I thought you just needed to change your diet habits to lose weight.

The single best thing about working in Unscripted TV is getting the opportunity to live in other people’s shoes.

And while Ruby was on camera, getting professional help for her battle with her weight, I was behind the scenes, off-camera, getting professional help for my battle with my weight.

I learned a lot of things working on Ruby, but here’s the lesson that has stuck with me for the 10 years since. It’s hard to lose weight because, well, it’s hard to lose weight. It’s hard to put in the exercise, change your diet, eat new foods, and every other reason why everyone knows that it’s a challenge. But it’s also hard to lose weight because even if you’re unhappy with how you look, it becomes your identity.

Who are you?

You are fat.

How can you be something other than what you’ve always been? It gets written into your code. This is what I look like. This is what I feel like. I don’t deserve better. I’m going to fail, because I always have. Of course I can have Pad See Ew today, it’s not that bad for me, it has broccoli in it!

The weight, I learned, acts like a shield of armor. But the only thing it’s “protecting” you from is yourself. Your own happiness, your own health, and taking control back of your own life.

At least this is what the nice therapist I was watching on my iMac at work was telling me. But was it true?

It took me another 5 years to find out.

On January 2nd, 2015 I weighed 234 pounds, and I decided it was going to be the last year I weighed over 200 pounds.

As I worked my way towards my goal, I found that I faced exactly what that nice therapist on my iMac at work had told me. I found that I identified so strongly with being overweight, I would always take a step back whenever I made progress along with a voice in my head reminding me who I really was. Not only would I physically stop making progress, my brain kept fighting me along the way.

230? Big deal, you probably just had that in water weight.

220? Of course the first 15 is just going to fall off, it’s not like you don’t have the weight to lose.

210? Don’t you dare forget about Pad See Ew!

200? This isn’t you. You don’t deserve this.

I made it to 199 for exactly one day in 2015 (with completely unsustainable under-eating), making it two days in my adult life under 200 pounds. Toldja!

I didn’t do it in 2016 either. Or 2017. Or 2018.

I’m writing this today not because I broke 200 pounds. As if. That goal was so 2019.

I’m writing this because I broke 160 pounds.

I’ve been wanting to write about my battle to lose weight for a long time, but I wasn’t going to do it until I was so far clear of 200 pounds that the number finally felt foreign to me. That it was no longer a number that identified me or felt like my identity. Before I felt like I could confidently tell someone else that they could do it (you can), I felt like I needed to be able to tell myself I did (I did!).

I spent most of 2019 in the 190’s, so it always felt like I was one burrito away from falling apart (One Burrito Away will absolutely be the name of my self-published autobiography).

Over the course of 2020, I’ve dropped another 30 or so pounds, and for the first time in my life, I finally feel like I’m in control. Along the way I (finally) learned that I can rewrite my identity. Health was a choice, just as was being unhealthy. I could pretend that I liked being the fat funny guy or the self-deprecating guy and that it’s just who I was or whatever excuses I gave myself along the way to not put in the work and make the change and commit to the change.

I didn’t lose weight because I worked on a Reality TV show. I lost weight because I put in the work to eat well, exercise, and track my calories. To treat my health as if it was a priority, not a chore. To listen to my body when it started failing me. That every day you face choices that will help you succeed.

But I did lose weight because when I hit those mental and emotional road blocks along the way, I remembered that nice therapist on my iMac, reminding me that whatever your identity is now, does not have to be the same one going forward.

My idea would make a great movie, wouldn’t it?

And my answer increasingly is… no, probably not. Well, at least not yet.

As the entertainment industry currently does …uh… whatever it’s currently doing and buyers push towards IP, sequels, the creator economy, etc…your job isn’t to blindly forge ahead with your movie idea, it’s to identify what container your idea should live.

I’m not discouraging anyone from wanting to make a movie. I’ve made several and I’m looking forward to making several more (inquire within!).

But there’s also chance that your movie idea is not only best served NOT as a movie and that you can also create more opportunity for yourself by figuring out which container you actually belong in and which container you can successfully scale up from.

There’s a reason everyone is running to Substack at the moment. It’s self-distribution for stories. It’s self-publishing. Original ideas. It’s building an audience. It’s proof of concept. It’s a space to carve out a niche and find your voice, and if you really figure it out, generate revenue. It can become your IP.

It can, ultimately, become a movie.

There’s a reason that short stories are being optioned and even Reddit posts. Good story is being identified as having future value. That value isn’t coming from a script, that’s coming from just going ahead and creating. Like, right now.

So here’s a quick one for today:

Build something creative that you can finish with zero dollars. Build something that you can publish, upload, print. Build something that requires little of other people. Build something that showcases your voice. Build something that is yours.

One of the challenges of making a movie, ultimately, is it requires so many things to align, whether that’s funding, an amazing script, bankable talent, interested sales partners, and the list goes on and on. (And on!)

Your idea might be a great movie, but ask yourself if there’s someplace else you could be building that story, that voice, that world so that in an increasingly risk-averse industry you’ve already carved proven that there’s an appetite for what you want to say.

Today I’ll let you in on a little secret. This is not my only Substack. While this one is just a lightly read collection of musings designed to help aspiring creators, I’m here to share that I’ve also taken all of my own advice listed out above and taken a Substack from 0 to 2,000 Subscribers in the last 90 days simply by telling stories that I like sharing.

They’re personal. They’re original. They’re funny.

I’m also pretty much the only person writing in this specific niche on Substack.

I took something that I liked writing about. I saw that the space was (shockingly) empty on this platform and I proved that the audience exists.

I don’t market it. I don’t share it. I just do it and it continues to grow. Completely organically.

So suddenly I have an audience of 2,000 growing…and a companion script that goes with that subject to back up my work.

Subject, Audience, Market Fit, Proof of Concept, Script.

Your journey may be different. Maybe you need to make a short film, maybe you need to start telling stories on YouTube, maybe your stories in a vertical concept, or maybe it’s a podcast. Maybe it’s a movie now, maybe it’s a movie later, I don’t actually have all the answers other than a belief that you can take control of your story now and structure your creative path forward immediately.

There’s enough gatekeepers in this industry already. You don’t need to be your own.

Now what?

Oh, you hadn’t thought about that?

Right, I know you met that Producer on the smoking vaping patio at Barney’s Beanery who said to give him a call, but there has to be more to your plan, right?

Right?

Oh.

Finishing a screenplay is hard work, but it’s not the end of the hard work. In many ways, it’s the easiest of the hard work, which is saying something because getting past the dreaded 10-page wall was already really hard work.

I have some bad news though.

No one wants to read your script.

No, no, I get it. It’s great. Like, really great. Really loud concept and insert other buzz words here.

But your job now is to sell that vision to anyone and everyone who will listen, create a groundswell of support, and become absolutely ruthless and relentless in marketing your vision until you build the right pieces and/or team to get your project financed, cast, represented, pre-sold, and the list goes on…

Practically, what does this mean?

Logline: Rock solid messaging that conveys the story in a sentence. Workshop this into oblivion until you’re able to convey the WHY of your story. You’ve got 10 seconds to make an impression. Make. It. Count.

Pitch Deck: Visual deck that conveys the look, feel, style, tone, energy, of the film. Does your movie pass the poster test? Does it look like a movie that needs to be made?

1-Sheet Summary: Single page Synopsis including Logline + Summary of Movie. Last chance to make an impression because the next thing you want your reach out to say is:

Sounds like it could be a match…why don’t you send over the script…

Your job is to have a good script, yes. For when you get there.

Your immediate job is to have materials that are so undeniable that they can’t help but ask for the script.

You structured your script, so why aren’t you structuring your reach out with that same thought and care?

Your job, ultimately, is to show up ready, demonstrate value, and show potential partners the urgency in what you’re doing.

As someone who both pitches and is pitched endlessly, I’m not sharing some big secret. But I am sharing something that so many people continue to ignore. Being ready.

Everyone wants to believe their project is the one and in some cases, they truly might be. But even if you want to operate with that mindset (again, do not advise) why not do the work so you ultimately demonstrate the amount of value you have to your project so that you can earn more say in your career?

I’m a lifelong creative here to tell you that the path forward is marketing. Yourself, your project, your why. Your job is to learn how to dodge every single no that will be thrown your way (there will be many) and develop your materials with this goal in mind:

Make someone else’s life easier.

Give them a logline that makes them say yes.

Give them a pitch deck that makes them say more.

Give them a summary that makes them want to read those first 10 pages that you fought so hard to get past.

The script is not the finish line.

It’s only just the beginning.

…

…

…

Oh, you’re still here? OK fine, a bit more if you’re looking for an extra edge.

I’ll note here, and I’m so sorry to have to say this, but everything I’ve suggested is coming up on the minimum effort you need to put forth to engage. Yep, the minimum.

I highly recommend shooting a Proof of Concept for your project (only if it can be high quality) and having an approximately budget number ready. We’re at the point where it’s just too easy to make something and physical proof is already fading into “not enough” status.

But here’s what I’ll share: The quality of communication you’ll have as a result of this work will skyrocket. If you feel like you’ve been shouting into a void, this is the path to getting meaningful feedback. You’re still going to get SO. MANY. NOs. But you’ll be in the game in a meaningful way and have conversations that will open doors and hopefully, push your vision forward.

What to watch? (Yep, we still haven’t solved this problem either.)

How about Mission Impossible 1912: Totally The Actual Final Reckoning?

In the future, we’re averaging about 239 MI movies per year with an AI Tom Cruise, and your TV tracks your attention span to create the movie in real time based on your interest. Bored looking? AI generates more action in real time!

But hey, he’s still doing his own stunts? (Shrug emoji.)

In the optimized creative future, content at scale is the name of the game! Your favorite franchises, A/B tested (maybe even C tested!) into creative perfection so that you, the humble viewer, who is already at like infinity thousand dollars in streaming services, keeps handing over your hard-earned cash and/or whatever digital currency has taken hold.

Or maybe this isn’t where we’re headed at all.

I saw a Substack post this morning about building and scaling content. And it wasn’t that different than the definitely being tested future I’ve laid out above. They wrote about optimizing their marketing by warp speed testing variations of their creative to generate the most optimized version for audiences, even though in this case, there was no audience. So their goal was to take a creative idea from zero, scale it with optimization, and build a TV Series.

Counterpoint: No.

This is the part in the article about AI where I remind people that I kind of dig AI. It helps me edit faster, it helps me brainstorm word choices, it helps me refine sentences I get lost in. It’s great with a spreadsheet, it’s great at teaching me the foundations of new things that I want to learn about. Like it’s great. Lots of greats. All of the greats. (I’m also at the point where I’ve embraced human error. There’s probably multiple grammar mistakes in this post. I’m OK with that, I’m feeling highly both very human and highly caffeinated this morning.)

But at the point where we’re all pushing towards the same creative result at scale, then what is the output? OR: If you’re trying to say everything creatively, what are you actually saying? And who are you reaching?

The answer, at some point, is simply nothing and nobody.

The biggest obstacle say, a Netflix faces in 2026 is that you’re trying to create content for the masses.

The biggest obstacle say, a LinkedIn faces in 2026 is that creating content (short form, written) has become so easy thanks to AI that everyone under the sun has developed a Personal Brand® where it’s not uncommon to see the same post from different people on the same day. Whoops.

This flooding of the marketplace has resulted in what I consider one of the biggest media crisis that not many folks actively discuss:

Consumer trust is in the toilet. (What, not great headline for The Atlantic?)

The problem isn’t if there’s good enough content.

The problem isn’t if there’s enough original content.

The problem ultimately is the same as it’s always been.

Discovery.

Our interests in 2026 are so niched that appealing to the masses has gotten progressively more difficult, if not impossible.

On the same timeline, the masses have reached decision fatigue critical mass - so much so that so that it’s easier to Turn Off, Tune Out (a deep cut, in reverse) than it is to keep fighting the algo.

And on the business side, we’ve also simultaneously reached Peak Marketing. Every social platform now offers an easier-than-ever option to BOOST YOUR POST with the click of a button.

And IMO, we’re not scaling reach, we’re scaling and accelerating fatigue.

But hey! This lightly read Substack is called The Optimist’s Guide to Hollywood, right? Where are the answers, where is the hope?

Oh, you want solutions? You want me to end the eshittification era just like that? Tall task for a Sunday morning, but sure, let’s do it!

The now and future of content is community and niches. If you want to create in 2026, stop thinking about mass appeal and mass reach.

Think about organically and authentically finding and connecting with your audience and creating passionately something that you love.

Understand what the size and potential reach of that niche is. Not all categories are created equal and don’t have the same upside in audience, and therefore potential revenue, if that’s what you’re in this for.

(And if you’re in it for revenue, take the time to figure out where the money actually is within your category, if any. It might be a product, it might be a subscription, it might be a service.)

Learn where organic growth is happening (here, on Substack, probably Reddit) and where it isn’t (like everywhere else, maybe?).

Be consistent. It’s a long game. Creative success compounds and good process does not always equal a winning outcome. Showing up is as important as letting some of the answers reveal themselves is.

Don’t try to do too much. In the optimization, it’s easy to run to the Everything Everywhere All At Once Approach. Choose small outputs over failing to produce anything.

And here’s the big one(s):

Become an expert in telling the stories that you want to tell. Or saying what you want to say.

Become an expert in understanding how to structure those stories for an audience.

Understanding where an audience consumes the type of story you want to tell and how to build those stories (written word, podcast, video) is a make or break decision.

There are tried and true formats for telling your stories that work. Emulate them and then add your personality to them.

These are the decisions you can’t actually A/B test. You can’t. Your heart, soul, and originality are the secret sauce that build the foundation of whatever it is you want to build, whether that’s a becoming a founder or making a movie.

The answers and outcomes you want are in you, not in the machine.

Once upon a time, there were 15,000 movie theaters in the United States. Nearly 40% of our nation’s population went to the movies every single week. But then something happened, and less than 20 years later, the movies lost nearly half their audience, from a high of 90 million moviegoers all the way down to 47 million moviegoers in just a nine-year span.

New content that was cheaper to produce started dominating the marketplace, despite it being considered B-level content (or worse!) by creative elites. Studios fell into a steep decline, talent could no longer command the same rates, and during one three-year stretch, over 30% of the workforce was out of a job.

And worst of all, this new lowbrow content was free.

This story, of course, is not about how AI, Covid, YouTube, or Netflix completely changed the course of Hollywood history.

It’s about the rise of the TV.

The above story, which is told in Joel Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz’s 1982 book California, Inc. illustrates how quickly we forget, a mere 74 years (or one Bill Murray ago) that TV was the big bad. An existential crisis for Entertainment. How would Hollywood survive if content was cheap to produce, available en masse, void of artistic quality, and worst of all, delivered to consumers without cost?

Spoiler alert: Still here, even though we took the idols, smashed them, and got left with some nobodies.

If we’ve learned anything from Rashomon or Real Housewives (take your pick) it’s that there’s three sides to every story.

Is Hollywood struggling right now? Yes!

Has Hollywood struggled before? Also yes!

Does that mean it’s dead? Is the killer ever actually dead?

You may have noticed that as a society, we’ve shifted a teeny bit away from nuanced takes, but this take is about as mild as a watered down salsa pack from the Del Taco drive-thru after another night of tequila soda-ing your Hollywood Sorrows away at Barney’s Beanery (LA’s 3rd-favorite sport behind Pickleball and insert whatever LA sports team is car flag-worthy here).

The Entertainment Industry will be, uh, fine? (*Ducks*)

Before you go Del Scorcho on me, allow me to explain. I do, in fact, believe that this is the worst time we’ve seen in entertainment in the last 25 years. 2008 was bad. 2010 was bad. This is both of those combined injected with a healthy dose of The Substance.

Never have I ever seen more people out of work, wondering how to pay their bills, or even crazier, turning to LinkedIn (guilty) in search of answers as to what went wrong.

But the answer is same as it ever was, all that’s missing is an AI-generated Buggles to belt out “Instagram killed the HBO star” to lament the rewriting of material on new technology. Wait, they already lamented that?

The answer we know to be true is that our industry will evolve, just like it always has, it’s just that you might not like what the evolution looks like, or perhaps more likely, you already hate what the evolution looks like because it looks like nothing like the version that you love. (It’s true, in the end, the maniacs blew it up. Damn them all to hell and/or New Mexico, where their next studio gig awaits.)

We’re all allowed that feeling that change is bad, and that things are now worse than they used to be. We’re all a sucker for nostalgia, right?

In an era where it feels like content is loaded into a digital confetti canon and fired at our synapses with reckless abandon (may the best algorithm win!), I lament that nothing will ever feel the same as it did when I crammed myself into a sold out theater in New Hampshire, saw American Pie for the first time, laughed hysterically with 300 other moviegoers, mustered up the stupid youthful courage to email one of the lead actresses, Shannon Elizabeth to see if she needed help with her website, get a reply, and found myself living in L.A. a year later working a charity event for Shannon and watching a pre-pre-pre “I’m Just Ken” Ryan Gosling playing acoustic guitar singing “Genie in a Bottle.”

That’s the Hollywood that sparks my soul and reminds me why I parked all of my earthly belongings into a 1992 Plymouth Voyage and drove 3,000 miles only listening to Elliott Smith’s Figure 8 on repeat.

Shoot. Maybe Hollywood is dead, and the version I romanticized is merely just somebody that I used to know.

(Or maybe that was just my Dark Night of the Soul beat.)

If we’re plotting out the downfall of the Hollywood as we knew it, I am one of the guilty parties.

For the past 20 years, I’ve produced reality television. If you’re scoring at home, reality TV comes shortly after Blockbuster Video was about to kill the movie theater but before DVDs were actually going to kill the movie theater on the entertainment industry apocalypse timeline.

When I got started in reality, it was a job that nobody wanted. You worked in reality TV because scripted hadn’t worked out for you (YET!). I worked a graveyard shift on The Real World, where thanks to my hard work and dedication, they made me the designated sex tape logger, which meant I’d watch cast members have sex on grainy spy camera footage and make notes on what happened (they were having sex) so that the producing team could decide what went into the episodes (not that much sex).

Growing up, The Real World was the first show that I considered my TV show. It wasn’t for my parents or grandparents, it was for me.

Not only was it a look into the lives of people whose age I was about to be, it was a mirror into people with backgrounds, experiences, and lives that I had never seen before.

The Real World was important because on my life’s timeline, it was one of the first pieces of mainstream content to give a real (not scripted) voice to those who did not have a voice. It taught me about race relations, consent, women’s reproductive rights, and gave me an understanding of HIV/AIDS. True story.

The funny thing about Reality TV, is that like everything that came before and everything that has come since, there was significant fear at the time that scripted would be harmed by nonfiction television.

In reality, for the next 20 years, both exploded and there were more than enough jobs to go around, and reality TV evolved from job that your scripted buddies mocked you for while they toiled away on their screenplay while mainlining Tikur Anbessa’s at Intelligentsia to job their wives would corner you for hours over in hopes that you’d tell them why, in fact, Vanderpump did Rule.

I’m an optimist at heart but a realist by nature, so when folks ask me what I think is next, they don’t always like the answer.

The future of Hollywood is not physically located in Hollywood.

In the past 130 years (or one Jack Benny ago) we’ve gone from the silver screen to the TV screen to the pocket sized screen and from long form to half-hours to quick bites (LOL) and from channel flipping to content swiping.

It’s easy to forget (well because most of us weren’t alive at the time) that while Los Angeles was the hub of the movie industry, it largely took the TV industry from New York, as Kotkin and Grabowicz remind the readers of California, Inc.

In modern terms, we’d say that Los Angeles was playing TikTok to New York’s Game of Thrones-era HBO, dishing out an endless stream of subpar disposable content while the true artists fought the good fight. So while the industry currently gives off serious Red Wedding vibes, the truth is that Hollywood is the original mass appeal content machine, 74 Years B.H.T. (Before Hawk Tuah).

History repeats itself on an infinite loop.

At a certain point “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” becomes relevant data point and I don’t need to cite the numerous sources that have Los Angeles production down by (*checks notes*) infinity thousand percent to tell you that we already know what comes next. Because we can look to the past.

The future of the industry is no longer in just California. Great jobs and markets will appear (or continue to appear) in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas. And on the plus side, some of those commutes are still closer than driving from Burbank to Playa Del Marina Vista.

The future of the industry is no longer in just the United States. Spin a globe (or just swipe your Google Maps app really fast if you don’t have a globe) and point.

The metaphorical Hollywood wave is coming, and it’s everywhere.

About a year ago, I was contacted by a production company based out of Thailand. They’d been commissioned by HBO (RIP-ish) to produce a Housewives-style reality show about a fantastic famous group of Thai celebrities. They wanted to bring on an American producer, for lack of a better way of putting it, to teach them how to make a docuseries.

At that time, there had been virtually zero Reality TV produced in Thailand. Remotely, from a corner of my home in Burbank, I taught the team how to build a TV show from the ground up. And like Real Housewives before them, they employed the talented producers and editors of a struggling genre - soap operas - to help tell Reality TV stories.

That show, Deane’s Dynasty was one of the most satisfying endeavors of my personal career. The opportunity to teach people the skills that will lay the foundation for the next 20 years of documentary television in Thailand was a joy that no amount of ratings will ever replace.

I know it doesn’t feel like this now, but when the dust settles, I believe there will be more entertainment jobs than ever. We live in an incredible era where there’s opportunity for storytellers from all over the world to share important stories, and there’s less barriers for us, the titans randos of the industry to share our own stories or teach the next generation of storytellers how to make their mark and/or receive a borderline inappropriate amount of applause when their movie premieres at a film festival.

Dare I say it? I’m excited for what comes next.

I have received over 100 projects in that time. Probably closer to 200. Legit lost count somewhere along the way.

And I have something to tell you.

Your pitch kinda sucks.

(I’m sorry, but someone had to say it.)

Of the 100+ projects I’ve seen in this time, I identified one project that was ready for my involvement.

1 out of over 100.

Yep, less than 1% of projects have been Producer-ready.

And that 1 project, after months of shopping and further development is finally out to Networks and getting serious consideration for Production from a Real Life Streamer! (Yay!)

And that 1 project did not come from someone who was an industry veteran, had connections, or years of crafting pitch-ready materials.

They had a story. They had a vision. A camera. And they got to work building an Industry-Ready pitch.

Pitch Deck with a well-executed treatment.

Sizzle Reel cut with Netflix-quality editorial style.

Your job as a creative is to generate quality creative.

The real job though? Sales.

Yep, I said it. Sales.

I spoke to a Producer in Development at NBC last year and she said her biggest challenge wasn’t identifying good projects, it was finding projects that Marketing & Sales (sigh, the Ad People) feel like they can move in front of an audience with a single sentence or image.

That’s right, in the attention economy you’ve got seconds to convey your message to an audience. So if NBC has XX millions riding on a series, what does that mean for you?

Your idea has to be easy to convey, urgent, ripped from the headlines, offer unique access or perspective, be loud, shocking, weird, or represent a popular genre that is currently performing well.

You do NOT have to be all of those things, but you have to take an honest look at your project and say “Am I any of these things?”

And if you are: “Do my materials represent a marketable project?”

If your idea is truly marketable, your job is to scratch, claw, and fight to create the best possible representation of your project for the marketplace, and then try to sell it.

Sales. Creative sales, but still sales.

Again:

Pitch Deck with a well-executed treatment.

Sizzle Reel cut with Netflix-quality editorial style.

You can pass 99% of your competition if you can do this. I know, I’ve been sent your competition. There is no secret, there is no mystery box, this is what you need to do.

I don’t need to see a loose outline in Google Docs, I don’t need the script, I don’t need to see 10 minutes of assembled clips, I don’t want to be sent a DropBox of unlabeled videos, and I don’t need to see your AI generated pitch deck. And people far more impressive than me definitely don’t want to see these things.

I need to see that you understand the work it takes to get something made because even with all this executed perfectly the odds are tremendously long.

But here’s what I can assure you. If you do this work, you will get meetings. You will get people to talk to you. And you’ll build trust. And even if you get passes, your next email will be opened.

Why? Because you showed up ready.

Your pitch might suck but it doesn’t have to.

You can be the 1 in 100.

It just takes time and hard work, but identifying the right work to do is critical to setting yourself up for success.

OK, so the post is over but a little epilogue for the “Yeah, but…” crowd. Yes. I know. There are exceptions to every rule. Your idea might be so genius that you bump into a WME agent at the Gelson’s bar, slide him a cocktail napkin with your idea on it, and you’ve got a Deadline hit in a week. I get it, things happen, and I think that’s so cool when said things happen. I’m rooting for you! Even IF you have the 1 in 1,000,000 idea, doing some version of what I’ve laid out will create a better foundation for everything that comes next, including the financial structures you’ll be offered.

The smoking gun?

TOO. MANY. HORSESHOES.

(Obviously.)

“Formerly, horseshoes were made one at a time by hand…Now we have machines which will take bar after bar of metal as fast as it can be supplied, cut it into suitable lengths, compress it to any diameter in cross section, turn, shape, feed, point, cut, polish, and finally deliver into any receptacle, without human intervention at any stage of the process. The bars go in at one end, and the nails come out at the other, in a continuous stream.”

Babcock’s article worried that manufacturing would become too easy (guess he never saw the Labubu shortage coming) and that the unemployment crisis of the time would only get worse.

He even had concerns about the rise of media production, 9 years before the first video had even been captured in the riveting Roundhay Garden Scene.

“Newspapers and periodicals are numerous enough to make the world stare; but publishers have already discovered that it is possible to overload the reading public.”

Big words coming from a guy who just dumped over 5,000 words on whether or not there would be too many hats in the future. (“If hats become very cheap, a man may get a new one every month, instead of two or three a year; but no man can possibly need, or will buy, many more than the former number.”)

If I ever get my hands on a time machine, I’m taking W.H. to LIDS.

When I first started working in TV, it was hard. Not making horseshoes before the bar-bender-thingy (probably the real name) came along hard, but difficult relative to what technology that was available allowed one to accomplish, in speed, technical quality, and style.

In the early 2000’s, when I was working on The Real World, the editorial process was roughly: you get hundreds of tapes from the field production team, an Assistant Editor would transfer them to different tapes (to avoid use of the master footage), those tapes would go to a logger who would transcribe what happened on that tape, those transcriptions would go to producers who would read them and make paper scripts of what story they should tell on TV. Then, those paper scripts would go to an editor, who would then get a new set of tapes where they would have to ingest the footage into their editing equipment before they could edit the TV show.

Oh, did I mention that sometimes the editors would LITERALLY HAVE TO WANDER THE OFFICE BUILDING LOOKING FOR THEIR OWN TAPES SO THEY COULD EDIT.

That’s right, editors would go on actual media treasure hunts looking for interview tapes of a pre-WWE “The Miz” defending his use of the term “panty-dropper.”

My office crush turned wife Alicia recalled a single workday where all she did was look for a tape. That was her whole day, searching for media. (Maybe she took a MySpace break to update her Top 8, but otherwise, it was all tape hunting.)

Ah, the golden age of Reality TV.

Over the next five years, nearly half those processes disappeared, or evolved, largely thanks to the rapid rise in both digital editing systems (Avid) and mass media storage (giant networked hard drives, which were at one point hilariously named ISIS, yet the only terror they actually stored was a dinner party from hell).

Assistant Editors still got the footage, but rather than copying the footage to VHS tapes, they ingested the footage into the editing software so that a team of producers and editors could both instantaneously and simultaneously access the footage and begin making the show. The footage loggers were no longer needed (they became story editors), and paper scripts (largely) became a relic of the past, in favor of pre-editing, which allowed editors to focus their skills on telling richer stories, editing more scenes, or becoming more technical with their edits.

Overnight, my job - and hundreds of others, simply changed. We had no say in it, we all just had to adapt. One week I used Microsoft Word, the next I was using editing software I had never touched before.

At the time, it was frustrating - I went from being a creative writer to a creative editor. The first was a career I had planned for, the second was one I actively avoided.

And there were mistakes - one day, the entirety of Keeping up with Kardashians simply disappeared because someone dragged the media folder somewhere else on the server. Sooner than later, everybody was doing things the new way, with teams of Story Producers making TV. (Apologies to those of you who wish that footage had remained lost for all of time.)

I don’t know anyone who would choose the old way of doing things. The idea of handing a paper script off to an editor with time codes written into it so they could spend their work day fast forward and rewinding tapes searching for a moment is literally crazy to me at this point knowing that a process that previously took hundreds of hours has been reduced to mere minutes.

And the result of this technological shift?

In 2001, approximately 100 Reality TV shows were being made globally.

In 2024? Somewhere over 1,200.

And documentary film?

From 2000 to 2024, documentary film production has multiplied up to 30x, from 500 productions to as many as 15,000. (I lost count around 13,952, so I had to estimate the rest).

Any way you slice it, nonfiction content has exploded over the last 20+ years, and with that, came a corresponding wave of jobs that simply never existed before that. New jobs were just…created from nowhere, both in role and in incredible volume, thanks in part to the technology that made it possible.

The actual number is incalculable, but conservatively? Hundreds of thousands of jobs across the industry.

Babcock considered this exact scenario I laid out, with his interpretation of how it would unfold:

“Every simplification (and most real improvements are simplifications) of a process does away not only with some of the men formerly employed upon it, but also with the tools or ingredients which those men used in working, and which other men prepared elsewhere. This deduction must be made in every department. One may almost say that every labor-saving device is also a material-saving device. Its effect in stimulating demand for the articles which it produces and for those which are used in it is largely off-set by its effect in destroying demand for other articles.”

Babcock’s worry, really, was that end-product would become so easy to produce that everything below it in both material and labor, would ultimately collapse. In some ways, that’s true. The rise of digital storage, was in fact, the death knell to video cassette, but it was not the end of the need to store media. The materials have ultimately not been “saved” but what materials are needed to create have changed.

And these changing of materials does have an impact on labor, especially when companies are slow to adapt, refuse to adapt, or aren’t forward-thinking enough, like when Kodak invented but didn’t further develop the digital camera, because hey, who was ever going to want to look at photos on a screen. (Whoops.)

In September of 1879, nearly two full months after W.H. Babcock’s story appeared in The Atlantic, a rebuttal of his viewpoints appeared in Pennsylvania’s Valley Sentinel. Long before the “hot take” era and instant reaction world ushered in around the rise of Twitter, an article, penned by an unnamed author, appeared on the second page of the paper.

(Page 1? Reserved for a poem, two short stories, some tips on how to use your imagination, and thoughts on how to compliment a lady without embarrassing her. “More than one maiden has been made happy—say for half an hour—by a man’s taking the trouble to say a pleasant thing about a toilet that he liked…”)

The Valley Sentinel rebuttal is based largely on believing the inverse of Babcock, that the rise of new technologies only expanded industries, not the other way around, or as I’ve suggested in modern terms, that the rise of new tech in media has only created more opportunity, not less.

In a final blow to Babcock’s thesis, the Valley Sentinel winds up for one more knockout punch:

“There will always be crises at intervals, of a similar kind; but if we may judge the present by the past, machinery, if it dislodge workingmen from some kind of employment, will open the way to work of other kinds.”

During my time on The Real World, it can’t be overstated how much scripted folks looked down on unscripted folks. Not only were we second class creative citizens, we were going to take their jobs. We were (literally and metaphorically) cheaper, and the idea of there being something called a “Premium Doc” felt ten thousand years away. We were a THREAT. We were coming for THEIR JOBS. There was NOT enough CONTENT HOURS for the both of us. (LOL x infinity.)

The entertainment industry oft-operates with a scarcity mindset that one person’s success means another’s failure. Obviously, I don’t believe this to be true, and I think that this causes far more harm than good for anyone who wants pursue a creative life.

The way I see it, there’s two ways of looking at the Entertainment Industry in 2025.

You’re either a Babcock or a Sentinel.

You can look at the chaos of the moment, as we live in the long wake of the actor’s strike, the writer’s strike, the shrinking content buys from traditional platforms, and perhaps the biggest bad of them all - the looming “threat” of Artificial Intelligence and expect that what follows from here on out is certain doom. What have we wrought upon ourselves?

You can get lost in the sea of LinkedIn and TikTok industry experts that have cropped up since 2020 who proclaim some version of “Hollywood is Dead” on a loop because it feeds the algo just what it needs to cook and drives engagement far more efficiently than “Creative things will probably sorta kinda be OK once the dust settles.”

Or you can look at moments in time, wherever they may have happened, and acknowledge that change is uncomfortable, hard, and weird, but somewhere within the chaos, there is a wealth of wild opportunity.

The last biggest breakthroughs in media technology created hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Because honestly?

You can never actually have too many horseshoes.