Tyler Perry's Straw has a deceptive title. It seems like it refers to a single mom named Janiyah (Taraji P. Henson) driven to extremes by a metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back. But in fact, as the film reveals very late in the game, she's actually pushed over the edge by a cataclysmic trauma that shatters her whole existence.

In the latest Low Key podcast, your hosts Keith, Aaron, and Tim consider the possibilty that the whole movie takes place in Hell — just like the Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 existentialist play No Exit. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, or right here:

The grim message of Last Exit is "L'enfer, c'est les autres" — or "Hell is other people," meaning the worst fate is to be trapped with fellow humans, the ultimate tormentors.

No Exit takes place mostly in a single room where three characters are stuck together for eternity. The Tyler Perry film takes place mostly at a bank called Benevolent Bank and Trust, where Janiyah accidentally takes hostages, including benevolent bank manager Nicole (Sherri Shepherd).

The movie doesn't seem, on the surface, to have supernatural inclinations — but then its very twisty final act makes us question everything we've seen before.

Also Read: The Top 5 Movie Twist Endings of All Time

Understandably, the film has drawn intense attention: In its second week, it doubled its audience to nearly 50 million viewers, securing its place as Netflix's biggest hit movie of the year.

Straw Ending Explained?

With that success has come the usual slew of "Tyler Perry's Straw Ending Explained" types of articles that the Internet does for every movie, no matter how unambiguous its ending.

But for Straw, all the ending-explanation stories are actually justifiable — because the ending is truly so hard to hard to comprehend. It almost demands that you rewind and watch the movie — or at least some key opening scenes — again.

As we say in the podcast, whatever you think of Perry, you have to give him credit for recognizing that his main audience of Black women was tremendously underserved until he found his very successful niche with films that aim to entertain, inspire, and commiserate with them. The new film is the latest in his more than two decades of projects centered mostly around Black women.

It's also a laudable salute to single mothers, and a well-deserved middle finger to people who go out of their way to make their lives harder.

And within Perry's film is a fascinating condemnation of people in all sorts of jobs — from police officer to grocery store manager — who are willing to put their humanity aside to advance in their careers. Hell is indeed other people, when they sell their souls.

But the film also conveys the message that people are also the way out of Hell — especially people who put humanity above their jobs to bend rules and listen to people in need. It's a fascinating watch, And we hope our conversation about Straw is interesting, too.

This episode also veers off into many other topics, including movie twists and why they work or don't work. We talk a bit about Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, and The Usual Suspects.

We also get into the joys of the Den of Thieves movies, and there's also a kind of long digression about how to pronounce "San Pedro," the name of the section of Los Angeles where Gerard Butler's family lives in the film.

We wrap up with some appreciation for Tubi's new film Flew'd Out, and for the works of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, tell or friend, or do whatever you want.

Main image: Taraji P. Henson in Tyler Perry's Straw.

Friendship — DeYoung's feature debut as a writer-director — stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a lonely suburban dad who is married to the mysterious Tami (Kate Mara), but lonely. He becomes platonically smitten with his cool new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd), a weatherman who embraces adventure. But Craig's efforts to impress and imitate Austin lead to a series of crises.

Friendship is one of the funniest movies we've seen, which is especially striking because DeYoung eschews a comic tone — he looked to Paul Thomas Anderson's grim The Master for aesthetic inspiration.

The film locks into greatness with the casting of the endlessly likable Rudd — who just seems like your cool neighbor — and Robinson, whose uncomfortably perceptive eye for social catastrophes fuels his brilliant Netflix series, I Think You Should Leave.

But Friendship also nails a moment when many men aren't sure how to be men, which is summarized in its provocative, preposterous tagline, "Men shouldn't have friends." At a loss for how to connect, some turn to the caustic theatrics of Andrew Tate-style influencers, while others turn introspective, looking for real ways to grow and improve.

DeYoung, 42, is good at making friends — he met Robinson at the wedding of Robinson's fellow Saturday Night Live alum, Aidy Bryant. But he says the real struggle for many men is to maintain friendships beyond the surface level.

"I think male relationships are hard to continue," he says. "And I really feel like, at least in my generation, we were really under-socialized. I know we're seeing in a big way now almost like a resurgence, an overcorrection in culture, of this type of masculinity that I think is ultimately destructive."

He continues: "I feel like, in general — and I see this in in a lot of my male relationships, even to this day — there's a certain inability to navigate depth and hard moments that are inevitable in a relationship. I see a lot of my friends struggling with it, failing, and trying to get better at it.

"The current kind of masculine wave speaks to an unmet need men are desiring, but they're confused about getting that need met."

You can listen to our full talk with Andrew DeYoung on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts or right here:

Andrew DeYoung on Friendship and Confronting Our Inner Craig

DeYoung is upfront about the fact that he doesn't know what men should do. He just recognizes the dark comedy in the struggle to be a modern man.

"I'm not here to diagnose. I'm simply here to to point out," he says. "And hopefully people get some joy out of acknowledging how kind of difficult and how hard it is, trying to connect with someone in any way, and kind of falling short, and not knowing how to really process one's feelings.

"There's plenty of other resources out there that can invite you into a deeper relationship with yourself that then hopefully opens you up to a greater relationship with others. But what I'm trying to do is simply make a movie that's cathartic, because we're all, I think, deeply kind of feeling separate right now."

DeYoung knows the suburban setting of Friendship well, even though the suburb in the film is snowier than Fresno, California, where he grew up. He studied screenwriting at Cal State State Northridge, and, after graduating in 2005, made short films and became a top TV comedy director on shows including Pen15, AP Bio, I Love That for You, Our Flag Means Death, and Shrill, which starred Bryant.

He thinks masculine bonding is improving with younger generations, "to a certain degree." (See also: the recent TikTok trend of young men calling their friends to say goodnight.) In the meantime, Friendship offers a pretty good primer for aspiring friends on how not to conduct themselves.

"Recognizing ourselves in Craig, the laughs come from watching a guy who doesn't know how to stop himself in ways that we do — most of us, at least. He's getting to do the things that we really deep down, in a primal way, would like to do. But we stop ourselves, because we know the consequences."

DeYoung likes to follow the primal intincts — the ones that feel like they'll resonate forever. When asked what kind of validation he seeks for a script before he decides to invest the years it takes to turn it into a film, he replies: "None. If I feel it, I feel it. That's it."

Also Read: From Mountainhead to The White Lotus to the Diddy Trial, Cuckolds Are Having a Moment

He wrote Friendship in 2020, and made some tweaks along the way with the casting of Robinson and Rudd, especially to give Rudd's Austin more vulnerability. Throughout the process, he always believed in the basic ideas of the film.

"I mean, it's primal stuff, what's in the movie. Any jokes that I wrote in 2020 that that didn't feel like they had staying power, we just cut," he says. "But deep down, the premise of it is primal stuff — connection is like food, shelter, that kind of stuff."

Friendship is now in theaters, from A24.

Main image: Tim Robinson in Friendship. A24.

In the latest episode of the Low Key podcast, we don't go that far. But we like Murderbot well enough. You can listen to our thoughts wherever you get your podcasts, or here:

One of the strengths of the series, starring Alexander Skarsgård as a security droid that gains sentience, is that it's a dark comedy that looks, on the surface, like a sci-fi action series. (Apple categorizes it as "sci-fi." hence NPR's cute headline calling it a comedy.)

And yes, there are sneaky laughs to be had, the darker things get.

The coolest and most original part of Murderbot — besides the great title — is that Murderbot, like us, just wants to enjoy watching its little stories. We're very much enjoying the show-within-a-show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and especially love when, in Episode 2, Murderbot uses the lessons he learns from the soapy space series to perform his job better in real life.

But if we have a preliminary complaint about Murderbot, it would be that it doesn't swing too far, in the first two episodes, into either comedy or sci-fi. The show's feelings about AI feel kind of old-hat, in a world where AI is already so prominent that many of us feel like our jobs are under threat from it. And perhaps someday our lives will be, too.

The Murderbot Dilemma

Murderbot reminds us a little of Mike Judge's 2006 Idiocracy, in that it's satirical power is diminished if your world view is so jaded that it doesn't feel that satirical.

Some of the show's observations were a bit more incisive back in 2017, when author Martha Wells published the first of her stories in The Murderbot Diaries series, of which there are seven books and counting. The takes were also a little fresher in 2023, when it was first announced that Skarsgård was developing the series with Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz.

Like all stories with elements of satire, Murderbot can be quickly overtaken by the absurdity of a reality that makes its most outrageous ideas feel, in retrospect, quaint. The AI girlfriend of Spike Jonze's lovely 2013 film Her, for example, is now very much a fact of life.

So as much as we enjoy Murderbot, nothing we've seen so far really expands our minds.

Are we shocked that a corporation forces a band of idealists to hire a potentially violent robot as protection? Not in a world where home-sharing apps insist on cleaning and service fees that can climb higher than the cost of the rental.

Are we shocked that a robot hired to make our life better could actually make it worse? We've been on the internet too long to say no.

But still: The cast is good, the writers keep things moving, the landscapes look cool. It isn't Murderbot's that every day brings news of some AI advancement that sounds more terrifying than a SecUnit gone rogue.

And Apple TV+, as we mention on the podcast, is on a tear. Starting with the intense attention around Succession Season 2 this year, the streaming service has really found its footing with The Studio (which is, with respect to NPR, the actual best new comedy of 2025), and Your Friends and Neighbors, a desperately addictive drama about family and status.

Also Read: Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos Makes Screen Acting Debut — on an Apple TV+ Show

We also talk on the pod about an important email we received from a publicist informing us that Murderbot is an "it," not a "he," which the show's shots of its Ken Doll lower body should make very clear.

If you like Low Key, be sure to subscribe, tell a friend, or do whatever you want, it's fine.

Main image: "Murderbot" in Murderbot. Apple TV+.

"My dad used to run an animation studio, and he taught me stop-motion when I was nine years old," says MacDonald. "When I wanted to animate little balls bouncing and stuff, he was like, 'No, no, no — you don't do that. Do something with a beginning, a middle and an end — and an ending that subverts expectations, like a joke.'

"And I was like, 'Oh my God, I can't just start doing stuff. I have to think about it before I do it."

A commitment to thoughtfulness and craft are evident in the endlessly inventive Sew Torn, a Switzerland-set crime thriller involving lots of thread that is now in theaters after debuting at SXSW last year to widespread acclaim.

We talk with Freddy MacDonald in the latest episode of the MovieMaker podcast, which you can check out on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, or here:

MacDonald's dad, Fred MacDonald, was the CEO of the animation company Olive Jar Studios, and worked with Disney and Dreamworks, among others. He co-wrote the 2019 short film "Sew Torn" with his son, who submitted it as part of his application package for the American Film Institute.

Freddy MacDonald was accepted, but maybe overshot the mark — the film was such a sensation that he also ended up getting a meeting with Joel Coen, representation from Coen's agent at UTA, and a deal with Searchlight Pictures to show the film in theaters ahead of the horror hit Ready or Not.

Sew Torn Director Freddy MacDonald on Meeting Joel Coen

Meeting Joel Coen was especially gratifying because "Sew Torn" was inspired, in part, by Joel and Ethan Coen's Oscar winning No Country for Old Men — especially the setup in which Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) stumbles onto a drug deal gone awry.

MacDonald remembers the meeting with Coen in great detail.

"He was just sitting in a coffee shop with a notepad, planning his next movie, and no one was around him. And I was like, he's a legend, just sitting there, and he's just the most humble person.

"And the first thing he told my dad and I was, 'You guys have to keep working together. If it works, to work with family, do it. It's the most special thing. Sometimes you're going to want to murder each other, but that's part of the process. Just keep, keep working with family.'

"And then the second thing was, 'Turn this into a feature.'"

The MacDonalds took the advice. But turning the short into a feature was a years-long process, full of stops and starts.

Also Read: Watch a Seamstress Pull of the Perfect Crime in a Sew Torn Exclusive Scene

The short version of "Sew Torn" is about a seamstress using her sewing skills to pull off the perfect crime at the scene of a botched drug deal along a beautiful, isolated road in Switzerland.

The feature Sew Torn (our house style is quotes for the titles of shorts and italics for features) starts with a reproduction of that jaw-dropping sequence, but follows three different scenarios in which the seamstress (Eve Connolly) takes the money, calls the police, or just keeps moving.

Freddy MacDonald and his father worked out the feature idea on one of the long walks they regularly take to brainstorm. They ultimately realized that the feature needed to be about choice.

"She's there at this road, and she has to make a decision, and she's torn. I mean, as corny as it is, it's in the title," he says.

The seamstress in the film, Barbara, has inherited her mother's mobile seamstress business, and doesn't necessarily like it. Freddy MacDonald is also following his father's career — but has never felt pressured into it, he says. He recalls hours spent in the family's dark garage at their home in Santa Monica, and his dad making sure that's what he really wanted.

"I don't feel trapped at all," he explains. "I think the reason it's such a big theme in the movie is because it's something my dad and I talk about a lot. And growing up, he was very self-aware about it. He would say, 'You really don't have to do this film stuff... you can do whatever you want.'"

While his father was instrumental to the film, his mother and sister were, too. His mother is a Swiss sculptor and photographer, and her country of origin explains the film's setting. And his sister loves sewing — so much so that her sewing box is the one Barbara uses in the film.

"She's still so pissed that I used it for the short film and then the feature and dirtied it up," he says. "She's like, 'I don't even want it back anymore, because it looks doesn't look the same.'"

Sew Torn is now in theaters, from Sunrise Films.

Main image: Eve Connolly as Barbara in Sew Torn. Sunrise Films.

List followed through on the dream. He got sober, scored a slew of TV appearances and standup specials, and started a thriving podcast, Tuesdays With Stories, with his friend and fellow comedian Mark Normand. He's also just directed his first film — a documentary — about his old friend.

Tom Dustin: Portrait of a Comedian tracks Dustin's decision to keep drinking and to relocate to Key West, Florida. He runs a comedy club where he does what he loves and regularly kills with audiences. But he's not well known outside of Key West, sometimes struggles financially, and wonders if quitting booze would be good for his mental health.

The film starts off by making clear that Dustin is very, very funny. He kills onstage, and feels loose and vulnerable and spontaneous. Offstage he's even more likable — fun, open, philosophical. As you watch, you find yourself wondering: Could Tom Dustin be a star?

The documentary makes you root hard for Dustin, and feel happy for his many sources of happiness. But it also makes you wonder if he could be happier.

"I did have this fantasy of ending the movie with a little title that would say, 'At the time of release, Tom's been sober for, you know, 248 days,' or something like that," says List. "I still hope that he does get sober, obviously."

As he made the film, he hoped that watching it might make Dustin decide to quit drinking. But mostly, List says, "I just wanted it be sort of a love letter to him, which to me, is what an intervention should be."

We talked with Joe List for the MovieMaker podcast about Tom Dustin, YouTube vs. theaters, and how you can be an offensive comedian and good liberal at the same time. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, or — why not? — right here:

Joe List on the Martin Scorsese Film That Inspired Tom Dustin: Portrait of a Comedian

The documentary was shot over three-and-a-half-days in Key West, a freespirited town that feels like a Jimmy Buffett song. One mystery of the film is whether a guy who passed by on a bike actually is Jimmy Buffett.

But for all the sun-kissed tropical fantasies in Buffett's signature song, "Margaritaville," the chorus is about wasting away.

"If I was gonna relapse, I would go directly to Key West and meet up with Tom," says List, who, seconds later, promises that he won't do that.

Dustin is beloved by fellow comedians, in part for being so honest about exploring darkness. One section of the film deals with his rough childhood, which included his father's bouts with mental illness. At one point, his father was beaten with a tire iron in a violent misunderstanding.

There's sometimes a sense that sensitive subjects should be sidestepped, to protect the victims. But the victims don't always agree. Sometimes, they want to laugh.

When List showed the film to comedians, they laughed at the tire-iron story. No one in Dustin's family did — except his dad.

"His dad just thought that was really funny thing to re-live," says List.

List opened for Louis CK at the latter's peak, before his career was stunted by revelations of sexual misconduct you've probably heard about. List has stuck by his friend, and starred in his 2022 film The Fourth of July.

But when it came time to direct his own film, List turned to one of his favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, for inspiration. Specifically Scorsese's American Boy, about his friend Steven Prince, who played the small part ofthe gun salesman Easy Andy in Taxi Driver. The director's approach was just to roll the cameras as friends and family told their stories.

Also Read: Anxiety Club Explores the Surprising Dynamics Between Anxiety and Standup Comedy

List took the same approach, and thinks Dustin's openness — especially when drinking — made the film more honest. Alcohol, List notes, "sort of accelerates emotion." But Dustin has some of his best moments while sober.

Dustin seems very moved in the film that someone cares enough to tell his story.

"He says at one point, he's like, crying, and he's like, 'It's the booze, you know?' And I don't know," says List. "If he wasn't drinking, he may not have been as open and as raw."

Tom Dustin Reacts to Joe List's Film About Him

Though List made clear that he was the focus of the film, sometimes Dustin couldn't believe it.

"We actually cut a lot of the times that he couldn't wrap his head around it. And I think he was just so touched by the fact that somebody was going to make a movie about him, and so that gave us a lot of emotion and feeling too," adds List.

"You're talking to him as a friend, but also, as a filmmaker, you're like, 'This is awesome. We're getting great stuff.'"

Dustin's emotionality and charm are among the reasons List thinks he would thrive in sobriety: 12-step programs, he notes, are built around storytelling and sharing.

"I think that he would really, really do great in sobriety, because he's such a social guy," says List.

One connection that improved because of the film is the one between Dustin and List. After years living far apart — List still lives in New York — they're talking more than ever, thanks to the film.

"So it kind of got us back together. It worked out," List says.

Tom Dustin: Portrait of a Comedian is now in theaters.

Main image: Tom Dustin, left, and Joe List. Photo by Matthew Salacuse

The episode is available at this link or below or wherever you get your podcasts.

Among the other subjects discussed are why trailers are so similar and spoilery now, the special power of a timely movie, and how Anora manages the complicated talk of feeling light and important at the same time.

And we talk about the trailer for The Brutalist, of which Michael is a big fan, and the trailer for Halloween, which Tim totally misremembers. As well as the Righteous Gemstones Season 4 trailer, featuring the hot new young-adult show "Teenjus."

Also, if you've ever wondered how MovieMaker chooses what to write about, we get into that a bit, too. The short version: Do something new and exciting, with a different spin that we've seen before.

Finally, we get very scoldy and tell people what to do if they desperately need to keep in touch with a babysitter or medical professional while watching movies in a theater, as they're meant to be shown.

We also talk about our most popular story last week — even more popular than any of our coverage of the Oscars and Oscar-nominated films.

We're grateful to Michael and the Making Media Now team, including sound engineer A.J. Kierstead, for the chance to sort out our thoughts on the state of movies. And we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. And, if you want, MovieMaker Magazine.

Making Media Now is sponsored by Filmmakers Collaborative, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting media makers from across the creative spectrum. From providing fiscal sponsorship to presenting an array of programs, the group supports creatives at every step in their journey.

Main image: The Righteous Gemstones Season 4. HBO.

Editor's Note: Corrects byline and category.

The film goes deep into explaining how the modern-day English translations of the Bible came to be. It says that the first time the word "homosexual" appeared in any Bible was in 1946, when the team working on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible erroneously combined two independent words into English. The film says this error has been used to justify much of the hatred directed at LGBTQ people.

1946 director Sharon "Rocky" Roggio thinks the film could change some Christian minds — if they just watch it. She has already seen some Christian churches try to prevent that from happening. You can listen to our full interview with her on the MovieMaker podcast, available on Apple or Spotify or below.

Roggio has a very real understanding of how Biblical debates over homosexuality can strain families: She is the lesbian daughter of a Christian preacher, who is prominently featured in the film, and hopes she will one day settle down with a nice Christian man.

But she and her father love each other, and are committed to trying to change each other's hearts and minds.

How to Watch 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture

The film is now out on Amazon, or available here. But before the film became available, Roggio told us that some were already trying to discredit it — without hearing out its evidence.

"We've already had major pushback, even before the movie has been released, so that people who don't want to listen to us already are calling us all sorts of names, and debunking our movie. I mean, we've had hundreds of radio shows, podcasts, YouTube videos, sermons, news articles — we had someone write a book about our movie debunking our movie. So we'd love for them to watch the film and actually then maybe do a critique on it instead of prior to watching the film. And then whatever they think of the film, that's their opinion," Roggio says.

She knows people with the most extreme anti-gay positions won't like 1946. But she hopes open-minded and open-hearted people who fill the pews every Sunday might give it a chance.

"We know that there are people sitting in those church buildings, listening to those radio shows, who we call the movable middle, who in their heart might feel that there's something off about this, or maybe they're torn one way or the other. And we hope that they move with us," she says. "They lean more toward being loving, inclusive, and looking at how Bible translations are made, how we interpret the Bible, and how we use the Bible, and how that use becomes put out into society. How dangerous it can be, but also how wonderful it can be. So yeah, we're working on that movable middle."

Roggio, who also appears in the film alongside her father, wants to be very clear that she isn't anti-Christian, and doesn't hate anti-gay Christians.

"The answer is not less religion," she says. "The answer is more affirming religion, more people who see that Christianity is a social justice movement, not a movement to start eliminating everyone's rights who don't look or think like you."

She believes the film is a natural watch around the Christmas season.

Also Read: 10 Great Documentaries About Filmmaking

"We all want peace on earth," Roggio says. "We'd love safety for all of our citizens and all people around the world. We just want to live and let live but also do what's morally right. You know, we're not out to be causing harm in society. We need to have a serious conversation together. And we already know we have a seat at the table. And so hopefully, we can all sit down together and discuss this."

1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, arrives in theaters in December and will be available on video on demand soon. You can follow here for updates.

Main image: 1946, courtesy of the film.

Even if you've never seen Damien Leone's Terrifier movies, you've probably heard about them — news of walkouts and freakouts regularly accompany his screenings, including for the new Terrifer 3, the latest to feature slasher villain Art the Clown. Making truly horrifying movies may have been inevitable for a Staten Island kid whose mom named him after the Antichrist in 1976's The Omen.

"I was introduced to movies in general at a very young age, because my mother just loved movies. And she's curious now, seeing what's happened and why everybody loves Art the Clown. She's like, 'What the hell is the matter with you? Like, what are you doing?' And I'm like, 'What do you mean? First of all, you named me after The Omen.' She named me after the character Damien in The Omen."

The writer-director's mom is very proud of his DIY success — 2022's Terrifier 2, made for $250,000 and heavily reliant on Leone's commitment to extraordinarily detailed gore — made $15 million at the box office. And box office analysts believe the new Terrifier 3, now in theaters, could knock Joker: Folie à Deux from the top of the box office this weekend.

If the Terrifier 3, made for $2 million, unseats the Joker 2, made for $200 million — it won't just be a brutal battle of clown vs. clown: It will also be one of the biggest upsets in the history of the box office.

You can listen to our full interview with Terrifier 3 director Damien Leone on Apple, Spotify, anywhere else you get your podcasts, or here:

Damien Leone on Crossing Lines in Terrifier 3

As his films gain a wider and wider audience, Leone struggles with how to deliver on the shocks his audiences have come to expect without succumbing to pressure to sanitize things.

"That's my big fear with this franchise, because we're in a very unique situation where we're known for pushing boundaries, and we're expected to push boundaries, especially with the graphic violence, with the kill scenes. It's why we became famous in the first place.

"So to suddenly stop doing that again is disingenuous to what we are. So I'm always trying to walk the line, step right over it, just push the boundary a little bit. But on the other end, I'm trying to retain some sort of mass appeal that I believe Art the Clown has."

He's right: The films are known for gore, but their secret weapon is character.

Also Read: How Alien: Romulus Makes a Xenomorph Drool

Art the Clown's mugging and idiosyncrasies make him the most fascinating horror villain since Freddy Krueger. But the film's heart is Sienna, played by Lauren LaVera, a stuntwoman and actor whose mastery of martial arts imbues her character with resilience and ferocity. She's a new kind of final girl.

Leone is also good at small,. real moments unusual for the sometimes cartoonish dialogue of slasher movie characters. For all the insane, '80s tinged atmospherics, Terrifier 3 finds time for a grounded, character-building story about a little girl who finds all her Christmas presents early.

The Terrifier 3 Scene Inspired by American Psycho

In the podcast, we talk with Leone about what if anything is over the line, little moments with Art the Clown, and the Terrifier 3 scene inspired by the novel — but not the movie — American Psycho.

The 1991 novel, by Bret Easton Ellis, contains a scene that is far too graphic and horrifying to have made it into Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation. Leone offers his own spin on it near the end of Terrifier 3. (We aren't saying what it is, but he drops a hint in the video above.)

"I actually never read American Psycho. I'm obsessed with the movie American Psycho, one of my favorite movies ever," Leone says. "Me and my buddy, my childhood friend, were obsessed with that movie when it came out, and obsessed with Christian Bale in it. And he went off and read the book, and he told me all the crazy scenes in the book. ... It left such an impression on me that I never forgot about it. And I said, One day, I'm going to try and circle back to that somehow. And this was, this was an opportunity to sort of toy with it a little bit."

Terrifer 3 is now in theaters, from Cineverse.

One of those ideas is turning from the old-school financing methods of his father to a favorite practice of scrappy DIY filmmakers, crowdfunding. But why is a business known for making classics the old-fashioned way turning to online investors?

“To me it feels like a moment of great opportunity for independent film -- with fewer films being produced by the studios and streamers it’s incumbent upon independent producers to help fill that void,” Pressman says.

It’s no secret that Hollywood, emerging from Covid and strikes, is unusually skittish lately about greenlighting new projects. Pressman sees crowdfunding as a way to break through the delays, and as an expansion of traditional approaches with which his father succeeded. He notes that Ed Pressman “was always looking for new and innovative ways to finance independent films.”

“We’ve raised money in a variety of different ways over the years, but this is the first time through a public offering,” Pressman tells us. “Our raise is motivated less by a need to raise the money, and more by a desire to pioneer new ways to capitalize independent film. We have a lot of traditional investors, but this is an opportunity for us to connect with a wider fan community with an interest in participating in financial upside from movie making.”

You can listen to our full interview with Sam Pressman on Simplecast, Apple or Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

How the Pressman Film Fundraising Works

Using the Republic platform, Pressman Films seeks to raise $1.5 million to help develop six films — three based on existing intellectual property, and three based on new ideas. The minimum investment is $200.

While a few very smart and/or lucky investors get rich backing movies, Hollywood productions are infamous for a lack of transparency, and for losing investors’ money. As author Sam Wasson recently noted in the New York Times, “In terms of making fortunes, Wall Street laughs at Hollywood.” 

Sam Pressman can’t guarantee investors will see a profit — because no one can — but his company is attempting to increase transparency. In its fundraising pitch, Pressman Films pledges that investors will receive payouts at three crucial points:

The company says when a film goes into production, investors will recoup the portion of their investment tied to the film, plus a 20% premium. And when the film completes filming, they will receive 15% of Pressman Film’s producer fee and 15% of any rights fee, the company says.

Investors will also get 100% of Pressman's net profit share in all films from the slate until investors have made their money back, plus 8% compounded interest, according to the company. In other words, Pressman only takes money back after investors are paid back their investment and return. 

“Once you get that money back, you will start getting 25% of Pressman's net profits for these films in perpetuity,” the company’s fundraising site says.

Investor-Advocates

But Pressman hopes participants will not just be passive investors, but active advocates for their films, helping raise attention and excitement for them online. So that Redditor or TikToker you see hyping a Pressman film may also have a financial stake in its success. 

“To me it feels like a moment of great opportunity for independent film -- with fewer films being produced by the studios and streamers it’s incumbent upon independent producers to help fill that void,” Pressman says.

Pressman Films isn’t the first film business to invite fans to invest in films — LegionM, the company behind the Nicholas Cage film Mandy, is based on a participatory model. Pressman Films has a longer track record of making movies, while LegionM has been in the crowdfunding game longer. It was founded in 2016.

In our podcast talk with Sam Pressman, we cover a wide range of topics, including what it was like to grow up on films sets. He has especially strong memories of 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, which filmed in Australia when he was about 10.

“I think it was the most stressful, worst experience that my father had in producing,” Pressman recalls. “It was the only time he fired his director. It's the only time he was banned from the set — by Marlon Brando.” 

He also shares memories of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Danny DeVito’s City Hall, and tells us his parents wouldn’t let him near the set of American Psycho: “My mom wouldn't even let me see the film when it came out,” he says.

Ed Pressman had hits and misses, but Sam Pressman said his father never let box-office failures stop him.

“Somehow, he just kind of persisted,” Sam Pressman says on the podcast. “He didn't get too high, he didn't get too low. … He was shy and reserved. There was a sweetness to his spirit that wouldn't get beaten down even when things didn't go his way. 

“And maybe that was because there were always so many projects percolating and being juggled in his head — when something wasn't working exactly how he wanted, there was the next thing to keep pushing forward.”

Lessons From The Crow 

We also talked about a more recent box-office disappointment, this past summer’s new version of The Crow. The film was in development for years, and Ed Pressman, one of the producers, died the year before its release. 

Sam Pressman says he’s a better producer because of the painful experience.

“I learned so much from the process of The Crow and my father was really, really, genuinely happy to see the movie finally finding its form. He was first sick and in the hospital right as we started principal production in Prague. 

“I think losing my father during the journey was was the most intense experience, and fills the film with this emotion of loss that is kind of built into the story and the soul of the film, which has so much to do with with loss, going back to the graphic novel from James O’Barr.”

The Crow made him more determined to be hands-on in the future, he said — and a new fundraising model will help.

“I think in ways, you know, we were not driving the creative process because of the nature of the development deal, and I want to be able to have our team kind of more firmly in the trenches with the filmmaker throughout the development process. And that's part of why this raise is so important. Because I really look at the films my father made as the treasure and as the great gift he leaves us as a company, and also culturally, I think the films have had great significance. 

“So how do we preserve those? How do we nurture the next iterations of those films so that they really honor what came before and and have a meaning and a reason for existing in a new form?”

Main image: Sam Pressman, courtesy of Pressman Film.

Micah Khan directed more than 30 short films as he looked to break into making a feature, but it was his musical short "Meetcute on Danceworld" that caught the attention of The Weekly World News. When the beloved supermarket tabloid looked to make its own feature film debut with The Zombie Wedding, it turned to Khan because of his visual flair and talent for combining music, crowd scenes and narrative.

He had honed it over a lifetime of watching everything from blockbusters like Terminator 2 to nuanced stories like The Last Samurai to Bollywood song and-dance spectacles — as well as the films of M. Night Shyamalan and Sam Raimi, which fueled his fondness for genre.

When The Weekly World News presented him a story that combined romance, comedy, dance floor drama and zombies, he was more than ready.

You can listen to our full interview with Micah Khan on Apple or Spotify or here:

"Meetcute on Danceworld," in which subtitles explain the meaning of every musical movement, had earned attention and praise from filmmakers as esteemed as Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, who said it was "fresh, original and it kicks ass."

The Zombie Wedding, based on one of the most popular of all the exclusives to inform checkout-aisle Weekly World News readers, is the story of a human bride (Deepti Menon) who decides to go forward with her wedding even after the groom (Donald Chang) becomes a zombie.

Also Read: Ondi Timoner Filmed as Her Father Ended His Life. It Helped

The zombie and non-zombie sides of the aisle must come together as witnesses to a new kind of love. The stacked cast includes Cheri Oteri, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Vincent Pastore, Heather Matarazzo, Seth Gilliam, Ajay Naidu and the Monkees' Micky Dolenz.

"We lovingly call it a zom-com because it's a zombie romantic comedy," Khan explains. "It's very silly. It's very campy. It's it's got big performances and a heart that is, for some reason, still beating, because everyone's dead."

Micah Khan on Mixing Camp and Visual Narrative in The Zombie Wedding

But for all the camp elements, Khan takes the filmmaking seriously. Shooting in 18 days across 35 locations, with 21 speaking roles in the last act of the movie, he juggled an ambitious schedule but still found time for his first love: visual storytelling.

As he details in the video above, Khan is closely attuned to how blocking, camera movement and framing can add subtext to a scene, cueing viewers to how the characters are relating to one another and the story.

It's a fascination he has explored in a series of interviews for MovieMaker with directors including Spike Lee, Denis Villeneuve and Joe Wright.

"I think the thing I learned most on this movie is to adapt and listen to your crew, your cast," Khan says. "Be prepared to pivot. You can come in with the best ideas on the planet. But then maybe you only have two hours to shoot all your coverage. ... You don't have the time to do the dolly move to a zoom to this shot to this shot.

"Something I learned from Joe Wright, actually, from doing interviews with Moviemaker Magazine, is how do you distill the visual theme down to one word? So for me, the word was connection. How was any person connecting with another person on screen?

"The bride and groom — how are they connecting? Not great. So they're far away. Simple. The Weekly World News reporters, how are they connecting? There's something in between them. OK, great. One's in the foreground. One's over here.

"That's what motivates the framing and the blocking. It's a super simple thing you can do to just improve your visual storytelling. Just distill it down to one word and figure out: How is any one person connecting on frame, right now? How are they connecting with characters? And then how are they connecting with the audience?"

In our full interview with Micah Khan, in the podcast above, we also talk about what he's doing next — which may include a very large duck, or a forest creature who is very familiar to the readers of The Weekly World News.

The Zombie Wedding is now available on video on demand from Freestyle Digital Media.

Main image: The Zombie Wedding, courtesy of Freestyle Digital Media and The Weekly World News.

"I think it was probably the easiest film I've ever made, in a lot of ways, because it was so personally satisfying to make," she says on the latest Actual Facts podcast. "It was something that was almost involuntary. I was grieving my father, and loving spending time with him, editing the film. and so sure I would cry. But he was so funny, so I would laugh and laugh and laugh."

You can listen to the episode on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, or here:

Recording her father, Eli Timoner, came naturally, because she's always filmed loved ones. He had no objection to the recordings, and editing them gave her a way to relive intimate talks with him, again and again.

"It was really a very interesting perspective on an event, a period of time that was so intense, where being his primary caregiver was my focus, and I set up cameras, really, as a way to survive," Ondi Timoner says. "I didn't have any intention of making a film. I was just wanting to bottle him up and not forget how he sounded and his personality, his inimitable personality."

Ondi Timoner, Eli Timoner and Last Flight Home

Last Flight Home captures the final weeks of Eli Timoner’s life after he decides to end it under California’s End of Life Option Act. The film offers a profoundly intimate portrayal of love, loss, and the courage it takes to say goodbye.

Ondi Timoner has twice won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, first for her 2004 documentary Dig, and again for 2009's We Live in Public. Both films are now part of the permanent collection of New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

Eli Timoner was a visionary entrepreneur who founded Air Florida in the 1970s, and became known for his generous philanthropy. But he was forced from the job by his own board of director after a stroke in the early '80s that left him paralyzed on his left side.

He lamented that he could no longer provide for his family as he once had. But what he lost in money, he made up in time. Ondi Timoner recalls the gift of having her father be more present for his family. And with Last Flight Home, she tried to make every moment last.

She captures both beautiful and difficult moments, including the bitter taste of one of the liquids he took to stop his heart.

"It was like walking on the moon, like we were just going through something that we had no idea how to do," she says on the podcast. "We'd never been there before — losing our favorite person in the world, who had been the rock of our family."

Last Flight Home, which premiered at Sundance and Telluride in 2022, was Oscar Shortlisted and received The Humanitas Award for Best Documentary. It was also nominated for the WGA Award for Best Documentary and for the Emmy for Exceptional Merit. You can read more about Ondi Timoner and Last Flight Home here.

Actual Facts, hosted by Eric Steuer, is a podcast dedicated to the creation of documentaries and what nonfiction storytelling tells us about ourselves. You can find details of this and other interviews on the MovieMaker site, or subscribe to Actual Facts at any podcasting platform you prefer.

Main image: The Timoner family in Last Flight Home. Courtesy of Ondi Timoner.

It's a great instigating incident for a film, but it's also a dramatization of a very real practice called civil asset forfeiture, which has become a popular and much criticized tool of law enforcement.

Saulnier, who wrote and directed Rebel Ridge, presently No. 1 on Netflix, tells MovieMaker he wanted to touch on issues like the militarization of small-town police forces without getting "sidetracked with injecting any overt politics." But he found that civil asset forfeiture was something that people of all political stripes tend to dislike.

"The story itself was just compelling to me because of a very unjust practice that is, in fact, legal and promoted throughout local law enforcement as a way to sort of use a cartel-fighting loophole in the law on everyday citizens," he says on our latest podcast, which you can enjoy below.

"I was very attracted to it because it was a unifying principle — everyone loathed it. You'd have victims that were sort of marginalized people in the rural South. You had people of color. You had white Texas ranchers who had their entire property and every vehicle on it seized because they had couple marijuana plants."

The Associated Press explains that while civil forfeiture was designed to let police take assets from criminal enterprises, the practice "allows authorities to take someone’s property, without having to prove that it has been used for illicit purposes" and that critics consider it "legalized theft."

A 2024 poll by the libertarian Cato Institute found that 84% of Americans oppose civil asset forfeiture. The liberal-leaning American Civil Liberties Union is among critics of the practice — and even recently cited Cato's poll in a rare example of liberals and conservatives finding common ground.

While Saulnier was writing Rebel Ridge in 2019, the Supreme Court issued a rare unanimous ruling placing limits on the practice — though the ruling, as Saulnier notes, "certainly did not get rid of it."

So yes: The No. 1 movie on Netflix is about civil asset forfeiture. But the joy of Rebel Ridge is that it also works as a taut drama about man standing up to a corrupt-small town police department (led by Don Johnson's Chief Sandy Burnne) with the help of an aspiring lawyer named Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb.) There's lots of car crashes and martial arts and pointedly non-lethal shootings.

Jeremy Saulnier on the Politics of Rebel Ridge

Saulnier loves to include references to societal injustices in his films without spelling out his politics or speechifying. His 2015 punks vs. neo-Nazis film Green Room, for example, didn't feel the need to explain that Nazis are bad — it trusted the audience to understand that.

Rebel Ridge is a relief from the onslaught of message movies that sometimes emphasize the message over telling a good story. The film is a crackerjack, mid-budget thriller that's fun to watch, whether or not you care about the issues it raises.

"I certainly have my own politics, and I really can't help but infuse some of them on sort of a subconscious level. But I try hard to find compelling stories and compelling characters and let that guide me. I think it'd be really boring if we got into a political back and forth.

He notes that the film includes "people advocating for their side — but it's about institutions. It's about pressure. It's about point of view. It's not about politics."

Also Read: Jeremy Saulnier on the Making of Blue Ruin

During the filmmaking, Rebel Ridge played for test audience, and scored "very high with many demographics — but one of them was conservatives. So it was really gratifying to see how this movie hit all kinds of demographics you wouldn't expect, and I think part of that is because of the research and the realism.

"Yeah, it's a corrupt police force, but it's also a cross-section of humanity. You have people who are sociopaths, for sure. You have people who are caught in the middle. You have pragmatists that just don't have the capacity to to curb their own ambitions. It's like any workplace or occupation or institution that you come across."

Main image: (L-R) Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond and director Jeremy Saulnier on the set of Rebel Ridge. Photo by Patti Perret/Netflix © 2024.

Editor's Note: Corrects title of Green Room.

James will share his insights next week at the Austin Film Festival's Ghost Ranch Writer's Retreat, open to rising writers who want to seek inspiration in the same land that was the longtime home of Georgia O'Keeffe and provided crucial locations for Oppenheimer.

His advice: Don't try to create what you think people want. Find your own specific way of telling a story, and hone it so well that outsiders will find it irresistible.

"Don't try to go to the world," he says on the latest MovieMaker podcast, available on Apple or Spotify. "Everyone's trying to chase this other thing. Let the world come to you. Figure out your voice. stick to that.

"What is voice? It's cadence. It's rhythm. We all have a certain rhythm in our bodies."

Growing up, James was raised by civil-rights activists on a rural New England farm, but drug and alcohol abuse made for a chaotic home life, and soon he became a fixture in the Boston area’s straight-edge hardcore punk scene and part of a multiracial gang that took on neo-Nazi skinheads.

Writing always provided an escape.

"Even when I was with my friends and we were living on the streets and squats, when I was living as my most violent self with my brothers in my gang, nothing felt real until I came home to write about it at night. And there's one way I could process the world and feel like I was part of it," he recalls.

He left the gang life for Los Angeles, where he took part in the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. His 2011 film debut Little Birds, which he wrote, directed and scored, was up for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and he became one of Hollywood’s hottest prospects.

But around the same time Little Birds was released, James was arrested on past charges relating to his gang life and sentenced to prison for a year. James knows his time with gangs and prison informed his work, but they also distracted him from it: He didn't get his first TV job until his mid-40s.

James says he can't separate his life from his writing, but that writing has to stand on its own. He notes that if he'd broken in earlier, "I would have made so many great movies at this point."

"I was 45 years old and that was way past my expiration point. I'd basically been cast into concrete, as we all are. And I had to break out of that."

Elgin James on Building a Creative Family Through Writing

Still, his time in prison wasn't completely lost: He spent part of it co-writing the script Lowriders, which was released in 2017. (His work also includes co-creating, with Stephen Merchant, the hit Amazon Studios/BBC One series The Outlaws starring Christopher Walken.) 

One of his favorite parts of being a writer — and showrunner — is creating stories that eventually bring together a family of creatives. People who, months after he finishes his scripts, get to go out and shoot them some cold, dark place in the middle of the night.

"I think as artists and as writers, we take what's inside of us that's fucked up and broken — and maybe hopefully, there's some joy, right? — and try to put it on the page," he says.

"You finally do squeeze out some blood from the stone. And what's beautiful about it is then you get to bring it to your cinematographer, you get to bring it to your production designer, you bring it to the actors, and then they all put their own love and damage and trauma and all that in it too, and hopefully, you achieve something watchable. And if the movie gods are smiling upon you, maybe you achieve something good."

At Ghost Ranch, he hopes to share some of his tools for getting past the fear of the blank page.

"I have certain tricks, like, 'I'm gonna write 10 pages today. Doesn't matter if it's terrible. I'm gonna write 10 pages.' Or because I start to feel claustrophobia sometimes when I start to write, I'll set a timer, and no matter where I am on this page, in 20 minutes, I have to go on to the next page.

"It becomes like a release: 'OK, let me just start fresh here.' And as any writer knows, as soon as you have anything on the page, man, it can be garbage — but when you wake up the next day morning to start again, there's some words there. It's not garbage anymore. It's gold. It's something to climb, a foothold, a handle."

You urge you to listen to our full interview with Elgin James on the podcast, where we also talk about when to (occasionally) flex and when to not flex, his love of Allison Anders and Walter Hill, and how to deal with studio notes. He also talks about his love of the Austin Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.

Main image: Elgin James, courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Emmy-winning Montreal-based studio takes audiences to places they might otherwise never go — to the International Space Station, inside the Oval Office, even back in time. Rather than distracting people from real life, they want to instill a sense of presence that can help us expand our consciousness. 

“How do we evolve our consciousness as humans in the real world? We go out and we have experiences,” says Lajeunesse. “We read books, we meet people, we travel, we question ourselves. We engage our minds in the real world. That is how we progress — because we’re curious, we explore, right? That is how we progress as individuals and as a civilization.

“Virtual reality wants to help with that. Virtual reality wants to be able to engage your mind into not just passive storytelling, where you receive something, but to actually live an experience, empathizing with the characters… activating your mind in a deeper way, being affected in a deeper way, in order to move your consciousness forward.” 

In a new eight-episode series, “Inside Felix & Paul Studios,” they and their team show you the astonishing lengths they go to in order to bring audiences a sense of presence in once-unreachable destinations. One episode, for example, details the process of recording and replicating the sounds of the International Space Station.

The series, which you can stream on Meta Quest or YouTube, uses 180-degree stereoscopic video to provide a sense of depth and three-dimensional space. It is presented by Canon and shot using Canon’s RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye lens and the EOS R5 C camera.

The Felix & Paul Social Experience

As much as Lajeunesse and Raphaël love cinema, Lajeunesse notes that it is “an abstraction of reality — just like painting is an abstraction of reality.”

“But virtual reality is different,” he explains. “Virtual reality has the pretension, or the goal, to try to emulate reality, in a sense.” 

He adds: “It’s not about escaping, it’s about enriching your experience of the real world. We’re just not interested in escapism, in general. … The focus is better engaging with the world you know, not getting away from it.”

Raphaël notes that many people already escape reality by “staring at a tiny little rectangle for the larger part of their day. Sometimes it’s a larger rectangle in their living room, or on their desk.” He likens these to “inferior simulations of reality.”

Listen to our full interview with Felix & Paul Studios founders Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël on Apple or Spotify or here:

Lajeunesse and Raphaël first crossed paths when they were a year apart at Montreal’s Concordia University, where both studied film production, had friends in common, and admired each other’s work. After graduation, they sometimes found themselves competing at film festivals. When they each received the opportunity to pitch on a music video — a 2003 production for the electronic musician Akido — they decided to join forces.

“It was the first gig for both of us — we were just coming out of school and we both needed the gig. So instead of fighting for bread crumbs, we decided to try to do it together,” Lajeunesse recalls. “And it turns out that it was a lot of fun. We immediately connected on a human level and on a creative level, but also in terms of like, what he was good at and what I was good at, which was not the same. And we just started working together and became friends.”

They became interested in more and more immersive cinematic experiences, and in 2014 Felix & Paul debuted their VR experience, Strangers With Patrick Watson, at South by Southwest. 

“It was a one-on-one with a musician writing music in his studio, at the piano, just writing music with cameras there. It’s one shot, it’s one moment with him and his dog,” says Lajeunesse. “It’s so simple and down to earth. But the point was to try to create a full sense of presence, to try to make people feel like they’re just present with this person, and that they can start to feel the humanity and the presence of the person and they can start to feel their own presence in that space.”

Also Read: Making a Movie? Moviemaker Production Services Can Cut Your Costs

Soon Felix & Paul moved on to ever-more ambitious projects, including 2016’s Nomads, about the lives of nomadic people in Mongolia, Kenya, and Borneo; 2017’s The People’s House: Inside the White House With Barack and Michelle Obama; 2019’s Traveling While Black, which was directed by Roger Ross Williams and helps audiences better understand what it was like for Black motorists to navigate the segregated South; and 2020’s Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, which follows eight astronauts on the International Space Station. They have also collaborated with LeBron James, former President Bill Clinton, Cirque du Soleil, and the Jurassic Park franchise, among others.

The company’s creations are available for experiencing in several immersive formats, including on 5G-enabled smartphones and tablets, through fulldome projection in domes and planetariums, and through Oculus headsets. It also offers a truly immersive touring exhibit, The Infinite, which is as close as you can get to the International Space Station without going to space.

Currently in Vancouver and Montreal, it is coming this year to Denver and Houston. Felix & Paul Studios is well aware that some people aren’t comfortable yet entering the realm of VR, so they’re bringing VR to the people. 

“We have access to a universal audience, literally people of all ages… school buses, people in their 90s, everything in between. Single, family, all of them. And we kind of fell in love with that format. And not only is it a universal audience, but it’s kind of the ultimate manifestation of VR, because you’re in a large open space, you’re not just sitting there,” says Raphaël. “It’s also a social experience. You’re in there with a hundred people at once.” 

Main image: Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, courtesy of Felix & Paul Studios.

It's an incredible turnaround story, and one that didn't come easy. The six-part series documents the many obstacles that ex-inmates face when they try to contribute to society — but also proves that they can.

Marte hires ex-inmates to teach bootcamp-style workouts, and the recidivism rate of his employees is zero — meaning not a single one of his employees has ended up back behind bars. For comparison, the New York Times notes that by many measures, over 60% of once-incarcerated people end up back behind bars.

Conbody, based in New York City, provides not only an intense bodyweight-based workout for its clients, but a second chance and a family-like support system for its employees.

Marte tells his employees: "If you feel like you have to do anything stupid, or you feel like going across that line where you're going to bring that recidivism rate up and commit another crime, please — call us. If it's a money issue, if it's a housing issue, call us."

He adds: "We're here to figure it out. Even if I don't have the money, you're gonna sleep on my couch."

You can listen to our full talk with Coss Marte and Debra Granik in the latest Moviemaker podcast, available on Apple or Spotify.

Many people end up back in prison because employers are unwilling to give them a chance — an estimated 60% of people who leave prison remain unemployed a year later, The Times reports. But the criminal justice system can also feel rigged against them.

Granik says the system "grew up and calcified to make rule infractions and breaking laws an industry — a profit-making industry." For-profit prisons have grown thanks to "industrializing and profiteering from systems of punishment," she says.

Granik met Marte through a mutual friend at Defy Ventures, a group that helps people who've been released in prison to adapt their experiences and skills to the business world. At the time, she was researching a narrative feature about an ex-con.

Marte wasn't familiar with the Oscar-nominated director of Best Picture nominee Winter's Bone and the recent Leave No Trace, the breakthrough film for Thomasin McKenzie. But he agreed to let her and her crew follow him with a camera as he tried to drum up business for Conbody on New York's Lower East Side.

The cameras helped him draw more interest. They also captured the day-to-day setbacks and triumphs Marte experienced as he went from trying to just keep himself above water to helping many other people rebuild their lives and succeed.

"One of the biggest things that they really captured in the film is that when I came home, it was embarrassing. I went from making multi-millions of dollars selling drugs, wearing the nicest clothes and all this stuff, and then coming out to the same neighborhood, talking to the same people."

But things were different: "You're not selling drugs anymore. You're selling fitness."

He adds: "I humbled myself, but I was motivated to just keep moving and make it happen."

Coss Marte on Creating Conbody in Solitary

Marte grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1980s, when drugs and used needles were everywhere. Despite living in poverty, he did well in school, and looked constantly for ways to make money, including buying and reselling baseball cards. His entrepreneurial mindset eventually led to marijuana sales, then cocaine. Soon he ran a booming business.

And then he was arrested.

At the low point of his life, he was locked up, so overweight he was at risk of a heart attack, and sent to solitary confinement. Where he turned everything around.

Living in a six-by-nine cell, he started doing supersets — back to back exercises — using only his bodyweight, since no fitness equipment was available.

"That helped me feel like I was I was free. For that moment, I was moving my body and really taking care of myself."

He lost 71 pounds in solitary. He also started thinking about how he could share his workout plan with others — and start a business doing it.

"I wrote out basically a short mini-plan, a business plan, about Conbody."

Why Do Prisoners Get in Such Good Shape?

There's a cliche about prisoners getting ripped — you see endless scenes in prison movies of inmates benching in the yard. There's truth to it, Marte says, and not just because inmates have time on their hands.

"In male prisons, I feel like there's that masculinity, that macho [attitude]— people want to work out. They don't want to be taken advantage of. So it's like, I'm going to work out, I'm gonna get big, a nobody's-gonna- mess-with-me type of deal.

"And then there's also this camaraderie," he adds. "A whole bunch of groups of friends that I've met throughout the time that I was incarcerated, we just felt like, 'This is our time to meditate and to work out together and not feel like we're incarcerated.' We push each other to new heights, new levels."

"Also endorphins, or course," adds Granik, sharing what people interviewed in her docuseries have pointed out. "Endorphins feel really really good. If you do one thousand cherry pickers, you have some endorphins. You were keeping your brains feeling the best they could feel in confinement, at times."

Conbody Welcomes Everybody

Conbody tries to recreate the camaraderie, teamwork and determination of people on the inside, doing their best, for people on the outside.

In the process, it brings together people who might not otherwise meet. At one point in the docuseries, several of Marte's employees note that the clients are often white, female and upscale, the main clientele for group fitness classes.

Sometimes, the classes are a way for people to cross lines and learn about people different from themselves.

"It's a way to get individuals who've never met anybody who's been incarcerated to feel some type of empathy towards people in the criminal justice space," Marte says.

Other times, people turn out not to be so different.

"I've had individuals, young white females, that had dark pasts — their parents have been incarcerated, or their brothers have been incarcerated, and they've never spoken about this," he says. "And they felt comfortable coming to us and saying, 'You know, I've never said this to anyone, except probably my therapist, but I've had a family member that's been incarcerated — and I believe in second chances.'"

Conbody VS Everybody, which premieres two of its six episodes at Sundance, is seeking a distribution deal.

Main image: A still from Conbody VS Everybody by Debra Granik, an official selection of the Episodic Program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Editor's Note: Corrects headline.

"I went to a bookstore at the mall near my house, just to find a book to read on the boat. And I was walking through the Waldenbooks, and was going by the reference section, and happened to look down and on a bottom shelf, there was a book that just said A Guide to Film School. And I stopped short. It was like the heavens opened up," he says on the latest MovieMaker podcast.

"I had so little sense of how movies were made, or that you could learn any of that stuff. And I had always loved movies since I was a little kid. And I picked up that book and I flipped through it for 20 minutes, and then bought it, and it was like a revelation: You can learn how to make movies, and go to California to do it. I got home and before I left on my next fishing trip, I sent off a bunch of applications to different film schools."

One of them, Los Angeles' Loyola Marymount, accepted him. And before long he had co-written his first produced script, 1997's 976-EVIL. A decade later, he would win an Oscar for co-writing L.A. Confidential, based on the James Ellroy novel, with director Curtis Hanson. He would go on to earn another Oscar nomination for writing Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, and to write and direct films including Payback, with Mel Gibson, A Knight's Tale, with Heath Ledger, and 42, with Chadwick Boseman.

But the film he always wanted to make was Finestkind, based on a script he had written at 28, inspired by his time, between college and film school, working on a fishing boat. Fishing had been in his family for decades, and he used the script to detail life on a New England scallop ship, adding in a crime story because, well, that's what movies do.

You can hear him tell the whole story on the podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen.

Brian Helgeland on Making Finestkind

"Finestkind" is the name of the main boat in the film, and is a fishing term that can mean a lot of things.

"It's the fishing version of the gangster thing, fugetaboutit," Helgeland explains.

Growing up in New Bedford in the '80s means he hung around not just a lot of fishermen, but also a lot of guys who may not have been criminals, but definitely gave off an aggressive attitude — at least at first.

They inspire his brand of movie criminals — guys who treat crime like any other job. In Finestkind, it takes a while before his characters get caught up in a drug plot, and by the time they do, we're on their side.

The drug plotline isn't inspired by Helgeland's real life, but other parts of Finestkind are. Lead character Charlie (Toby Wallace), a recent college grad who goes to work on a boat, is based in part on Helgeland. Other characters like Charlie's stubborn older half-brother Tom (Ben Foster), potential girlfriend Mabel (Jenna Ortega) and Tom's father Ray (Tommy Lee Jones) are also influenced by people he's known.

And of course, Helgeland knows his way around a boat. He confirmed that when he went out to sea to prepare for the film.

"I hadn't been on a boat in I don't even know how long — since 1987?" he recalls. "And the first thing I wanted to do when we caught some scallops was to see if I still remembered how to shuck. All the gear, the way you handle the gear and dump things and pick things up and send them back down to the bottom of the ocean, all was still the same. It was so engrained in my head, that stuff. I had not forgotten it."

He sent some of his actors out on a boat boot camp so they could learn to shuck, too — along with countless other jobs. They did it on board a ship now captained by one of his friends from his fishing days.

"They all went out to sea for about a week, and worked with fishermen on a boat that a friend of mine from those days was now the captain of, which ended up being the Finestkind in the movie. That's my friend's boat," says Helgeland.

As he recounts in the podcast, Helgeland is thinking a lot lately about the similarities and differences between fishing and storytelling because he's just released a movie about fishermen. But he says his experience working on a boat always helped him in Hollywood, giving him confidence in his work ethic.

"Many times when I would be in meetings, especially early on, I would try to scan the room and decide who could could survive on a fishing boat who couldn't," he laughs.

He also felt more confident that he could make it as a filmmaker, because he remembered back to when he never thought he'd be able to do handle fishing.

"I didn't think I could do that job at all," he says. "I was terrified for the first month or two that I was doing it, and very proud of myself that I pulled it off. And I really enjoyed it too, and met a lot of great people and fun people."

Finestkind is now streaming on Paramount+.

Main image: (L-R) Finestkind stars Tommy Lee Jones, Toby Wallace, Jenna Ortega and Ben Foster. Courtesy of Paramount.

In the latest episode of The Industry podcast, host Dan Delgado lays out the weird, dubious and lawsuit-inspiring ways Edwards tried to keep the series going without its beloved star. It is presented by SoCreate, and you can listen on Apple or Spotify or here:

Even if you've never seen a Pink Panther movie, you surely know Henry Mancini's swanky theme song for the series, or may have seen the Saturday morning cartoon series The Pink Panther, featuring the lanky, unflappable cat often featured in credit sequences for the live action films.

Some Pink Panther Background

After Sellers' death, Edwards mounted an ambitious plan to continue the series — which had started with 1963's The Pink Panther. Non-fans may be surprised to learn that Sellers was not the lead character in the first film, which focused on the Phantom/Sir Charles Lytton, played by David Niven. But Sellers, a year away from his performance in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, stole the movie out from under Niven the way a thief might steal the Pink Panther diamond that gives the series its name. (It contains a barely perceptible flaw that resembles a panther.)

Sellers was front and center starting with the 1964 follow-up A Shot in the Dark, and in 1968's Inspector Closeau, in which Bud Yorkin took over directing duties from Edwards.

Also Read: With The Holdovers, Alexander Payne Makes His 1970s Movie

But Edwards and Sellers reunited in 1975 for The Return of the Pink Panther, as both found their careers in a spot of trouble, and sought the comfort of a familiar franchise. The film was a hit, as was 1976's The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Edwards initially wanted the film to be three hours long, but distributor UA demanded it be cut; the final version was just 103 minutes.

By now, Edwards and Sellers, who had always clashed, were often at odds.

Edwards wanted to make 1978's Revenge of the Pink Panther entirely from the cut footage from The Pink Panther Strikes Again, an idea Sellers rejected. So they went to work again, for what would be the last time (except for a scene in Edwards' 1979 film 10 that was ultimately cut.)

You might think Sellers' death in 1980 would mean the end of the franchise, but no — it was only two-thirds of the way through. And that's not including the Steve Martin reboot, or a planned upcoming reboot for which Eddie Murphy is in talks.

As Delgado recounts in The Industry, Edwards finally got to use his lost The Pink Panther Strikes Again footage in 1982's Trail of the Pink Panther, intended as an homage and goodbye to Sellers.

But Sellers' widow, Lynne Frederick, saw it instead as an insulting cash in, built from footage her husband hadn't wanted used in Revenge of the Pink Panther. She sued, and was awarded $1 million in damages.

But she wasn't granted an injunction to prevent further showings of the film. Forunately for her, it has been forgotten largely on its own merits — it was a critical and box office failure, as were two further attempts, under Edwards' watch, to continue the original franchise.

Dan Delgado lays out the whole story in riveting, amusing detail, and also recounts promising but ultimately failed attempts to revive the Pink Panther in a CBS sitcom. If you like the episode, we highly recommend subscribing to The Industry, visiting its website, and leaving it a good review on the podcasting platform of your choice.

Main image: A promotional image of Peter Sellers and the Pink Panther for 1975's Return of the Pink Panther.

Hemsworth stars in the Extraction films as mercenary Tyler Rake, who extracts innocent people being held against their will, and tends to do it via extremely long, jaw-dropping action sequences. In the first Extraction, he did it in a long shootout that appeared to be a single-twelve-minute shot. In Extraction 2, he doubles it, and then some.

How Long Is the Prison Break Scene in Extraction 2?

"It's twenty-four minutes and seven seconds. But who's counting, right?" says Hargrave.

The scene, in which Rake breaks his sister-in-law and her children out of prison, includes shootouts, lots of martial arts, a real train, a real helicopter landing on that real train, and, for an uncomfortably long time, Chris Hemsworth covered in real flames. It all appears to happen in one shot, though Hargrave says there are some invisible edits here and there.

For the flame, you can thank Akira Kurosawa, the genius behind Seven Samurai, Rashoman, The Hidden Fortress and other classics of Japanese cinema.

Also Read: How Extraction Shot That 12-Minute Continuous Fight Scene

"I like elements in films, kind of a nod to Kurosawa, and how he would mess with rain or fire or water in the form of rain — and wind," says Hargrave, whose full interview on the latest MovieMaker podcast is available on Apple, Spotify or here:

The prison break was shot on location, during a period of intense cold.

"Knowing in the forecast that snow was coming up, I thought, what would be an interesting contrast, visually? It was like, fire's really cool. But what's more interesting than just having fires? Moving fires! It should be on a person. What if we light Chris Hemsworth on fire? And he's punching his way through a bunch of prisoners on fire? I think that would be get people's attention, if nothing else."

This is where he warned us and you to not try this at home. OK? No matter what. But also told us how he did it.

No, But Seriously, Don't Try This at Home, Says Sam Hargrave

"Fire burns are all about preparation. It's all about prep. There's special layers of clothing, special fireproof gels that we use, and you have to take everything into account, even the wind, the weather. The fire burns differently in different temperatures. And if the wind's blowing, obviously you don't want it blowing back towards you," explains Hargrave.

"And so with with Chris — and we lit his arm on fire, we didn't put him in a full burn, because we couldn't cover up that beautiful face — we lit his arm on fire and had him, you know, strategically move, fighting forward so that the wind is in his face and blowing the fire back away from him.

"Because if you have a gust of wind that comes up and it wraps around the body, it could come up and burn his face. So there is inherent danger in working with fire and you don't want to mess with it unless you're surrounded by and supervised by stunt professionals.

"It goes from hot to your third-degree burns in a blink of an eye, and you don't want to mess up that stuff. So it's all in the prep. You've got the proper clothing, proper gear, proper safety measures and people you know."

He noted that everyone set on fire for Extraction 2 had two people watching them closely just off-camera.

"It was Chris plus four other stunt performers. Each person had two safety people who their sole job was just watching them. For Chris, I think we had three."

Our full interview with Hargrave — in our podcast — covers how Louis L'Amour novels led him to directing, how he balanced stunt performing with film school, and his ultimate Hollywood aspirations. We also discuss the writers strike and why writers are so essential to film sets.

Main image: Sam Hargrave, director of Extraction 2.

It may not be a perfect movie, but it's exactly the movie Rodgers needed. His complicated relationship with the complicated film is the focus of Chasing Chasing Amy, his feature documentary debut — which premieres today at the Tribeca Festival.

Chasing Amy was viewed as relatively groundbreaking upon its release because it was the rare mainstream film at the time that presented gay and lesbian characters as smart, fun, cool, and very comfortable with their sexuality.

But it has drawn criticism in retrospect — spoilers follow — from people who take issue with Lauren's character, Alyssa Jones, falling for a man, however briefly, and for what some see as an implication that her lesbianism and supposed promiscuity are perhaps connected. Others take issue with the Jason Lee character, Banky, who spews homophobia but eventually turns out to be gay.

Chasing Chasing Amy Director Sav Rodgers on the Fruitless Search for a Perfect Messenger

In Chasing Chasing Amy, Rodgers holds space for all viewpoints – while stressing how much the 1996 film meant to him. He shares them with Smith, Adams, and Guinevere Turner, the actress and screenwriter (her credits include American Psycho) who provided the real-life inspiration for Alyssa.

"I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect messenger. Everybody's relationship with specific movies is subjective, right?" Rodgers says in the latest MovieMaker podcast, which you can check out on Apple, Spotify or below.

For me, what worked about Chasing Amy was that I got to see the rich inner lives of those characters. I found it to be really honest with my sense of romanticism. And it presented a possible model in a way in a way in Alyssa Jones, because she was so confident, and she was so herself. It was everything that I wasn't as a 12 year old kid who was really questioning who I was and where my place was in the world.

"And so regardless of how Chasing Amy continues to age, regardless of how culture continues to evolve and progress, it still had a very meaningful place in my heart, and still does.

Rodgers notes that culture evolves, and that since Chasing Amy, other films have come into existence "that are probably closer to the perspective that I'm interested in as a storyteller... that represent my journey in terms of my gender and my sexual orientation."

"But it doesn't change that Chasing Amy was the movie that I had access to. And you don't really pick the thing that saves your life, right?"

Just as Chasing Amy was a milestone for the 12-year-old Rodgers, Chasing Chasing Amy chronicles many adult milestones: We see the filmmaker deliver a TED Talk, get engaged to the love of his life, and come out as a trans man.

But amid Rodgers' triumphs, he saves the most surprising moments in the film for how Chasing Amy affected both the woman who inspired Alyssa Jones and the woman who played her: Both Guinevere Turner and Joey Lauren Adams sit down for surprising interviews detailing the complicated emotions the film brings up for them.

Chasing I Love You Margot Robbie

Chasing Chasing Amy also led to a creative partnership between Sav Rodgers and producer Alex Schmider, whose credits include Netflix's Disclosure and Hulu's Changing the Game. In addition to filmmaking, Schmider is the  director of Transgender Representation at GLAAD.

Rodgers and Schider don't want to say too much about their next project, but in the podcast, Schmider lays out one of the better loglines we've heard lately: The script, by Rodgers and co-writer Taylor Gates, is called I Love You, Margo Robbie.

"It's about a trans teenage boy who is trying to figure out who he is, and going through all the woes of high school, and accidentally comes upon a Jiminy Cricket in the form of Margot Robbie, who falls off a billboard," Schmider explains. "So it is fantastical. It is larger than life. ... it showcases Sav's wildly imaginative, surreal, daffy point of view, that we're really excited to explore. "

Chasing Chasing Amy is now at the Tribeca Festival.

Main image: Kevin Smith and Sav Rodgers in Chasing Chasing Amy

What Is Follow Her About?

Sylvia Caminer on Knowing and Breaking the Rules

The show, from Janine Nabers and Donald Glover, is subtle about its fascination with the self-styled King of Pop, but the fascination is there if you look. Swarm cast Jackson's daughter, Paris Jackson, in its second episode, "Honey," and Episode 6 features footage from Jackson's actual 2005 criminal trial, in which he was found not guilty of molesting two boys.

Swarm and the Michael Jackson Trial

Didn't catch that? Watch Episode 6 again. The Episode is called "Fallin' Through the Cracks," and takes its name from a fake docuseries called Falling Through the Cracks that is focused on the supposedly true story of Andrea Green, the real-life inspiration for Dre. (The show within a show within a show playfully distorts our perception of Swarm and reality itself.)

You can listen to us talk about Swarm, Beyonce, Michael Jackson and more in the latest Low Key podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts, and right here on Spotify:

At the 20-second mark, we see an image of Diane Dimond, a former Hard Copy reporter who, in 1993, reported accusations of an inappropriate relationship between Jackson and a young boy that led Jackson to pay millions to the boy's family.

In 2005, Dimond was working for Court TV, and covered the molestation trial, which involved two different boys than the one involved in the 1993 allegations. Dimond was very open about her belief that Jackson was guilty, which made her a despised figure among the Jackson fans who showed up outside the courthouse to support him through the months-long trial.

Also Read: Owen Wilson's Road Goes on Forever (Cover Story)

As we briefly see Diane Dimond on Swarm, a voiceover intones, "One fan has been so abusive to this reporter that she's obtained a court restraining order."

It's a weird moment in Swarm, since no court case is taking place during the show, involving Ny'jah or Dre. It becomes more clear that the footage is from the real Jackson trial when we see a shot of fans outside the court, one of whom holds a sign that says "Poland Loves You Michael."

Another fan holds a sign that says "Peter Pan Rules," a reference to Jackson's fixation with Peter Pan. (A statue of Peter Pan graced the gates of Jackson's home, Neverland, the name of which was itself a Peter Pan reference. And Jackson once told an interviewer, British journalist Martin Bashir, "I am Peter Pan.")

Second later on Swarm, we see another sign from a fan that says "Bashir is the root of all evil." This will make no sense in the context of Dre and Ny'jah, but will be very familiar to people who followed the 2005 Michael Jackson trial: The case was sparked by Jackson telling Bashir that he had a habit of letting boys sleep in his bed with him.

Donald Glover has made no secret of his Jackson fascination, telling The Village Voice in 2011, “If one day, I can be a neo–Michael Jackson, I want that. I don’t know if it is possible for someone to be that big anymore. But I want that.”

He also famously played a Michael Jackson-like figure in the mesmerizing "Teddy Perkins" episode of his FX series Atlanta.

So did the Prime Video cast Paris Jackson because Donald Glover is fascinated by her dad? Not necessarily.

Nabers told Variety that casting director Carmen Cuba pitched Paris Jackson for the role of a stripped named Halsey and "we all like fell out. We were like, 'Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re talking about.'"

Nabers added: Paris was great. She’s a professional. She came in and asked all the right questions. I’m a Jewish woman, she’s identifies as Jewish, so we bonded about that. And she trusted us."

She added that Paris Jackson "really just owned it this character of a light-passing biracial woman who is really intent on letting everyone know about her Blackness." (On the show, Halsey presents as white but says she has a Black grandparent.)

Here's the trailer for Swarm:

Swarm is now streaming on Prime Video.

Her latest film, Gumbo Coalition, continues to tell stories of the forgotten and ignored — from prisoners to undocumented families, through the eyes of National Urban League leader Marc Morial and UnidosUS leader Janet Murguía. But the landscape has changed.

Documentaries are more popular than ever before, and the fight for equality and workers rights is, at least on the surface, less lonely. Almost every major corporation professes to be on board.

With two Oscars — her second was in 1991 for American Dream, about a strike against Hormel Foods — Kopple has establishment respect and recognition. She is such a documentary filmmaking legend that she even earned a namecheck from The Simpsons (proudly posted on her production company's website.)

"It's totally changed since the very beginning, when I started, when people would say, 'Why does a little girl like you want to make films like this?'" she says. "And documentaries were thought of to be very boring."

Which doesn't mean things are easy.

"Still, I hardly ever have much money to do films," Barbara Kopple says in the latest MovieMaker podcast, which you can hear on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, or right here on Spotify:

Has it gotten at all easier?

"A little bit easier," she says. "I mean, if I apply for grants, I don't get them. Because they think, 'Oh, well, she doesn't need it. And that started right after Harlan County. So it's tough. ... The biggest challenge for me in making a film is is raising money and being able to keep going and figuring out how to keep going."

She notes that one of the biggest problems for all documentary filmmakers is distribution. Technology has made filmmaking easier in many regards, but even in the recent documentary boom, it was hard to stand out and find a releasing company that would share your film with the world. And the documentary boom of recent years has retracted.

But Kopple has stayed true to a filmmaking approach that has always served her well, since she started off helping the Maysles brothers with their groundbreaking documentaries Salesman (1960) and Gimme Shelter (1970): She embraces the cinema vérité style of blending in and letting her subjects talk, with everything on the record.

Not that she disagrees with other approaches.

"People need to express themselves as they see it," she says. "Michael Moore's in his films, and I try to not be in my films. Sometimes you'll hear my little voice. But I think all of it's important, and all of it is part of our culture and our history. And I don't put that down at all."

Barbara Kopple and Cinema Vérité

Her always-on-the-record, fly-on-the-wall approach is the same, she says, whether she's covering coal miners or celebrities. She refuses to be moderated or managed by publicists, even when working with the likes of Mike Tyson (the focus of her 1993 film Fallen Champ), Woody Allen (featured in her 1997 film Wild Man Blues), and the Dixie Chicks (2006's Shut Up and Sing).

"I don't do it unless I get total access, and I don't have all these people telling me what to do. The person who I'm filming has to want to be able to tell their story," she says. "And, you know, Woody Allen, for example, was in very uncomfortable situations."

Wild Man Blues follows Allen and his jazz band around Europe, and provides a fascinating, contemporaneous look at Allen's life in the years immediately after the custody dispute with Mia Farrow in which she accused him of molesting their daughter, Dylan. Kopple had him mic'd at almost all times — even during his private dinners with his partner, Soon-Yi Previn.

"He knew all the really good restaurants in Europe. And I always put a wireless mic on the characters. And so I was listening. They were at one table, we were at another table: 'Okay, he's having the flounder,' I would tell everybody at the table."

Also Read: Humanity Stoked Is About Saving the World Through Skateboarding

Gumbo Coalition captures more intimate moments, like an exchange between prisoners taking part in a program called Save Our Sons to help them rebuild their lives after serving their sentences, and a UnidosUS gathering where a woman named Rose Escobar recounts immigration officials handcuffing her husband under a Trump administration directive.

She and her small crew were able to blend in because her subjects want her there, and trust her not to present them out of context, she says.

"This is what matters," Kopple says. "They care about getting their story out, and that's all that matters."

Of course, another thing that's changed since her beginnings is that more people have seen more documentaries.

"It's harder because to blend in, because people are more media savvy than they were when I started," she says. "But we try to make ourselves as invisible as we possibly can."

Gumbo Coalition is at the Sarasota Film Festival, and plays again this Sunday.

Main image: Janet Murguía of UnidosUS and Marc Morial of the National Urban League go door-to-door in the Gumbo Coalition by Barbara Kopple.

"I think the door is always open from my perspective," Sherak says in our latest MovieMaker podcast. "She's Sidney Prescott. She's amazing in that role, and then the second part of that is she's an amazing person."

Campbell opted not to return to Scream 6 because of a salary dispute. We asked Sherak if brining her back for Scream 7 or a future Scream film is just a matter of money.

"I mean, the answer is a qualified maybe," he says. "That lives In a different in a different world, and everybody has to do what's good for them. And I think that the hope is there's a way to find common ground at some point."

You can listen to our full interview on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, or right here on Spotify:

Neve Campbell on Not Returning for Scream 6

Last August, Campbell told People that she passed on Scream 6 because "I did not feel that what I was being offered equated to the value that I bring to this franchise, and have brought to this franchise, for 25 years."

"And as a woman in this business, I think it's really important for us to be valued and to fight to be valued," she added. "I honestly don't believe that if I were a man and had done five installments of a huge blockbuster franchise over 25 years, that the number that I was offered would be the number that would be offered to a man."

Since his company, Project X, took the lead on reviving the Scream franchise with last year's Scream 5, Sherak has emphasized how much he tries to create a "really fun, familial environment for everybody" on the cast and crew, even flying in bagels from all over the world.

He stressed how much he enjoyed working with and hanging out with Neve Campbell on Scream 5.

"I would love to work with her again, Scream or not Scream. She's just awesome," he adds. "I would like nothing more than to work with her again."

Sherak also noted the closeness of the cast, including the new Screamers who constitute the "Core Four" — Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding — as they filmed the fifth Scream in Wilmington, North Carolina.

"She's awesome. Unbelievable as a cast mate to the to the kids in 5," he says. "We had a ton of fun with her in Wilmington, in a really weird experience, because COVID was still going strong. We spent a lot of time playing board games on the weekend as a group, and she was unbelievably gracious, and somebody who has been playing this character for a long time, and a character that she crushes as a horror icon."

Sherak's praise for Neve Campbell echoes the support of the foundational franchise star by the rest of the Scream team, including Scream 5 and Scream 6 co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (also known as Radio Silence). The Scream 6 script takes care to express nothing but love for Sideny, and, by extension, Neve Campbell.

And Ortega had only positive words about Campbell in a recent interview with ET.

"You know, it's nice because there's still a protectiveness in the script and that's something that the actors had naturally over her because obviously we respect her and we want the best for her," Ortega says. "She's missed and thought of." 

Scream 6 is now in theaters.

Main image: Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott in Scream 5.

That's one of the behind-the-scenes, spoiler-free details Scream 5 and Scream 6 producer William Sherak shares with us in the latest MovieMaker podcast, in which he also shares details about working with James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, helping save the Scream franchise from the wreckage of The Weinstein Company, and the joys of practical effects.

You can listen on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, or right here on Spotify:

"Some of the cast doesn't know they may or may not be the killer," Sherak explains in the episode. "A couple of the non-killers didn't know that they weren't the killer. We keep it [secret] as far as we go. As long as we can. In Scream 5, we actually had multiple endings of the script. So that they really didn't know."

We also talk on the podcast about how Project X Entertainment, Sherak's company with fellow Scream producers James Vanderbilt and Paul Neinstein, encourages friendship on set. Much of the success of Scream 5 and Scream 6 depends on the dynamic between the Core Four, played by Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding.

Also Read: Jenna Ortega’s Journey From Disney Channel Star to Scream Queen

"The thing about our sets — and sort of a company line — is it's really hard to make a movie. Even separate of good movies, it's really hard to make a movie. So it might as well be hard with people you like," says Sherak.

The Scream 6 Core Four Are Friends

"We try and create a really fun, familial environment for everybody, the cast and crew. ... The whole cast, the Core Four. The text chain from Scream 5 hasn't stopped," he adds. "They called it Camp Sherak. Every Sunday, I flew in bagels and lox from somewhere else around the world. And we all had brunch together."

He continues: "You want that sense of family and community to show up on screen. Because they're friends. And then all of a sudden, it's a whodunit movie. That's where it starts. And it's so much more entertaining when they actually are friends.

"You can fake it to a point, but you see on screen on Scream 6... this Core Four, they're really friends in real life," Sherak continues. "They're all unbelievably talented actors. But they're also genuinely friends."

Sherak also tells us how Project X began collaborating with Radio Silence, which includes Scream 5 and Scream 6 directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella, and working with writers Vanderbilt and Guy Busick.

When Will the Scream Franchise End? Maybe Never

Sherak credits much of the endurance of the Scream franchise to Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 4, and has executive produced all of the films. He talks on the podcast about how the team behind the new Scream films reached out to Williamson for his blessing before Scream 5, and how he stayed on board for Scream 6.

"The genius of what Kevin created in Ghostface is that we don't have to deal with, 'Why is our bad guy still alive?' Because every time it's someone new in a mask, whereas other horror franchises have to deal with, 'How does this bad guy keep surviving?' We don't have that problem," Sherak says.

"So as long as we can keep coming up with fun places to put Ghostface, I don't think this specific franchise needs an end. Because there's always somebody new and a whodunit movie is always fun."

The Scream movies also have another advantage, Sherak says.

"New things are constantly happening with kids and the way they communicate and the way they interact with the larger world," he says. "So there's always something to comment on."

Scream 6 is now in theaters.

It play like a classic street crime rise-and-fall story, but one where everything is flipped: the cops are the crooks and the accused are the ones calling for justice.

"It is such a dirty cop story, and there's so many thriller elements to it," Abrams says on the latest MovieMaker podcast, which you can check out on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, or right here:

I Got a Monster aims for journalistic rigor, but enlists the tools of crime dramas to drive recreate real-life drama and atmospherics.

"We strap the camera to the front of cars, we drive down streets at 75 miles per hour — to give it those action elements," Abrams explains. "We use our drones in a more visceral action film way to try to create a little bit of that pacing, so that you could feel like you're getting pulled into that story as well as having your heart hopefully touched by what the victims are going through."

But I Got a Monster isn't one of the many true-crime documentaries that use tricks of the trade to prop up sloppy insinuations. Abrams left out elements of the case that require speculation, focusing on matters that have been resolved in court.

What Happened to Wayne Jenkins

Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the former leader of the Gun Trace Task Force, is now serving a 25-year-sentence after pleading guilty to charges including racketeering, robbery and falsifying records.

More than a dozen officers have been convicted in the scandal since 2017, Baltimore has paid out more than $20 million in settlements, and hundreds of cases have been thrown out because of doubts about officers' testimony. (This all may sound familiar if you saw last year's HBO David Simon series We Run This city, in which Jon Bernthal plays Wayne Jenkins.)

I Got a Monster lays out how the corrupted members of the Gun Trace Task Force would stop Baltimore citizens who seemed to have cash on hand, plant drugs or guns to justify the stop, and then raid their homes in search of loot. In at least one case they filmed a staged bust in which they pretended to discover a safe they had already partially plundered.

What 'I Got a Monster' Means

The film's title refers to a "monster" seizure by the officers, who often targeted people with criminal records because they knew judges and juries would believe cops over convicts.

"Part of the unfortunate dynamic within the story is that a lot of this got ignored because the people that were victims, were sometimes 'bad guys' — they were previously convicted of selling drugs. They were previously convicted of possession of firearms," says Abrams.

"They knew if they targeted people with criminal paths, they would be more likely to get away with the stuff that they were doing, because there was precedent. I wanted to humanize them."

I Got a Monster came to be through a friendship between Abrams and Baynard Woods, who was co-authoring a book also called I Got a Monster with fellow journalist Brandon Soderberg. The authors believed their story could also work as a documentary, so the three men worked together.

Also Read: Hold Your Fire Aims to Revolutionize Policing — With Lessons From 1973 (Podcast)

They received substantial help from Ivan Bates, a defense attorney who quickly realized Jenkins was up to no good, and helped bring him down. In a twist you couldn't write, Bates was recently sworn in as the State's Attorney for Baltimore City, a job in which he has pledged to get illegal guns off the street. Legitimately.

The film quickly pulls you into an undercutting of the typical good guys and bad guys crime narrative: Jenkins was once known as a hero cop who rescued fellow officers during the 2015 Baltimore riots sparked by the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

But an errant snatch of information on a federal wiretap — yes, in the hometown of Simon's The Wire — led investigators to discover the secret machinations of Jenkins and his crew, and that some of the suspects they had arrested seemed to be victims of a setup.

It all could have been discovered much sooner, Abrams says, if anyone had listened to their side of the story from the beginning.

"We wanted to lay out a story talking about the players involved, and then really give the space to the victims to finally be heard," he says on the podcast. "because that is part of the subtext of what happened. "This happened because nobody listened to them."

(Also: We mention in the podcast an interview with an ex-police officer in which he estimates that just 1,000 cops total in the United States are bad. Here is that very interesting interview.)

I Got a Monster is in Baltimore theaters and available on VOD Friday.

Main image: Sgt. Wayne Jenkins in I Got a Monster

In the latest Low Key podcast, Keith Dennie, Tim Molloy and I discuss all that Creed III does right, and why we think the franchise can keep going strong. You can listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, or, you know what? Right here:

Creed, Star Wars and Indy

Movie sequels quite typically feel completely stale by movie three. But Creed III is critically acclaimed and broke multiple box office records over the weekend, including for the biggest box office opening weekend of all-time for a sports movie. Like Rocky, which was still going strong by Rocky IV (the film that opened the door to the Creed franchise), Creed III has beaten the sequel odds.

The closest analogues to the Rocky/Creed franchise are the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. All originated in the same five year period, from 1976 to 1981, and all are still active today. Financially, Star Wars is the most successful — and the second-most successful franchise ever, after the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It has earned more than $5 billion domestically, far more than the Indiana Jones or Rockyverse films.

But its owners seem confused about its direction, with Lucasfilm canceling projects soon after greenlighting them. (Before he left Disney — and then returned — Disney chief Bob Iger promised a "slowdown" of Star Wars films, conceding that a recent run of Star Wars projects was "too much, too fast.")

Indiana Jones hasn't had that problem. It has released only three films since Raiders of the Lost Ark, in 1981, and 80-year-old Harrison Ford will don the fedora for the fifth and last time in this summer's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The Indiana Jones films have earned almost a billion dollars, all on the shoulders of one actor. But there are no apparent plans to keep the franchise going without Harrison Ford.

Creed has youth on its side. Its star, Michael B. Jordan is 36, and Jonathan Majors, who seems ready to assume a bigger role in the franchise, is 33. Jordan has promised a Creed 4, and there are also plans for a Drago spinoff. Together, the Rocky and Creed franchises have made more than a billion — and the Creedverse is only expanding.

Other franchises are taking notes. It's no surprise to learn that Creed was a key inspiration for Cobra Kai, another hit saga that builds on the history of decades-old IP, the Karate Kid films. (Which were, in turn, inspired in large part by the Rocky films. There was once even talk of a crossover.)

Cobra Kai and Creed are both success stories of revitalizing old stories while honoring them — but Creed got there first.

Creed III has also earned universal acclaim from pretty much everyone except, well, Rocky Balboa himself. Sylvester Stallone has distanced himself from Creed III, the first film in the Rockyverse in which he does not appear, because of an ongoing feud with producer Irvin Winkler.

The connection audiences feel with Michael B. Jordan’s portrayal of Adonis Creed is easy to understand, but the Creed franchise doesn't coast on nostalgia. It finds a believable thread to pull Adonis out of his role as boxing promoter by drawing from his unexplored past as a troubled youth.

It also makes great utilization of the talents of Jonathan Majors, arguably the hottest actor in Hollywood, to play Adonis' old friend and intimidating foil, Damian Anderson. Fans get treated to some of the coolest boxing action we’ve ever seen on the big screen, and a story about a hero who learns to face the shame and guilt he’s fought to keep hidden since he was a child.

The formula from the first Rocky film was repeated in the ensuing five films, and an incalculable amount of poor imitations. Movies in the Rocky-verse are typically inspirational, underdog stories where the protagonist overcomes an opponent deemed insurmountable by the general public and, oftentimes, from his own corner.

Creed III contains shades of that familiar framing and adds another layer that isn’t present in the previous films: trauma. Adonis is haunted both by the moments he’s chosen to erase from the past he chooses to share with loved ones, and the methods used to protect him from the same friends who allowed him to survive on the streets as a young boy.

Ironically, Adonis resents being cut off from Damian, while also intentionally trying to forget the events leading up to the night that altered their lives forever. 

The dynamic between Adonis and Damion is grounded and heart-wrenching as we watch it play out in a diner, on a beach, and in the ring. Jordan and Majors make it feel believable wherever they are, even without the boxing gloves.

Most encouragingly for the franchise, Jordan — who by now knows Adonis Creed better than anyone — makes his directorial debut in this film, and shows really great promise.

“I felt like with Creed III, it was knowing that I had the best handle and insight on this character and this world because I lived with it the longest,” Jordan noted in this MovieMaker cover story.

The quiet shots in Creed III convey everything that needs to be said through posture and lighting, but Jordan also expertly meets the action with a chaotic expressiveness that is rare with films lacking superpowers. He’s obviously got more ideas in his bag, possible glimpses of a real champion.

We say this as Ant-Man fans! You can listen to our deep-dive into the disappointing start of Marvel's Phase 5 in the latest episode of the Low Key Podcast, featuring your hosts Keith Dennie, Aaron Lanton, and me:

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania Box Office

Don't get us wrong: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a hit. It has earned more than $167 million domestically, for a total of more than 363 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

But in its second weekend, Quantumania fell 69.7 percent in North America, which is the the worst decline ever for a title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Quantumania held on to No. 1 at the box office with $32.2 million in its second weekend, but seems to have ceded a lot of territory to Cocaine Bear.

We have to chalk that Ant-Man and the Wasp's slide to the underwhelmed word-of-mouth on the film. It has the lowest CinemaScore of the 31 films in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And while that score, a B, may not sound so bad, THR notes that nearly 70 percent of Marvel movies have earned an A+, A, or A- CinemaScore, and of the five that have earned a B+ or B, four are among the six latest Marvel movies.

Ant-Man and the Wasp VFX Problems

One of the most consistent complaints about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania are the VFX. While the VFX artists did the best they could with the timeline and budget they were provided to create the lava lamp look of the Quantum Realm, this Vulture piece suggests they should have been given more resources.

It includes interviews with VFX artists who worked on the film and said many resources were focused on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever instead of on Quantumania — perhaps and understandable decision, given that the first Black Panther was one of Marvel's most successful films, and the pressure to make its sequel an honorable tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman.

Nevertheless, one of the Quantumania VFX artists attributed the rushed pace of Quatumania visual effects to simple "human greed."

Is Kang a Good Villain?

Almost all reviews of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania praised Jonathan Majors, who plays the time-twisting villain Kang, for rising above his material. We wrote here about what an excellent year Majors is having — next week he'll star in Creed III opposite Black Panther veteran Michael B. Jordan.)

As we discuss in the podcast, the problem with Kang as a villain is that we really don't understand how powerful he is, or what he's capable. There are countless tell-don't-show moments where people tell each other (and the audience) how dangerous he is. But they don't play well with scenes where he needs Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) to help him with things that should be, in the Marvel Universe, relatively simple tasks for a villain of his supposed powers.

The final battle of the film, the outcome of which we won't reveal here, is also baffling, given all we've heard about Kang. Tne stakes of the film feel as confusing and elastic as the messy, fake-feeling boundaries of the Quantum Realm.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is now in theaters.

Main image: Evangeline Lilly as Hope Van Dyne, aka The Wasp, and Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.