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Foreign.
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Welcome back to the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. My name is Sonny Bunch. I am culture editor at the Bulwark, and I'm very pleased to be rejoined today by Chris Fenton, who I've had on the show before to talk about. He, he wrote a great book about working, trying to, trying to bring Hollywood and China together and, and some success there and some failures there and some, you know, some, maybe some regrets. Now, I don't know. We can, we can discuss that in, in a minute. But I, I'm, I'm glad to have you back on today, Chris. We're going to be talking about your new movie, the movie you have produced, Bad Counselors, and making that movie in America and the effort to get more movies made in America and kind of what that means. Uh, but thanks for being on today.
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It's always an honor. And I love listening to the show. Your guests are fantastic. So I'm very humbled by being on yet again. So thank you for all the great work you're doing out there.
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B
Appreciate, I appreciate it. You know, sucking up will get you everywhere on the show. I just want to let folks know that that's. If you. But no, I appreciate that. And, and this is an interesting story to me, what we're about to talk about today, because there's a lot of chatter in the ether about film production in America. This is a, it's, it's, you know, there are efforts on Capitol Hill to get a federal tax credit going. You know, you've got Donald Trump who has his, like, Hollywood guys who are telling him that we need to, we need to make things in America. We need. Subsidies and tariffs are being kicked around and, you know, all sorts of, all sorts of different things. So I'm, I'm excited to have you on today to talk because you are kind of at ground zero here of making movies in America. This, this new movie, Bad Counselors, is as you, as you, as we were discussing a little bit before, entirely made here in the States. Let's, let's talk about what that actually means. What does it mean to, you know, make a movie? What, what are some of the pressures that, that push against making a movie in the United States? What, you know, if you, if you had this movie and you wanted to make it in Romania, how much cheaper would it be?
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Yeah, well, it's a, it's a great question. A lot of times it does come down to just simply dollars and cents and your P. Ls and how you're going to project making revenues against whatever Your budget is. So that is a big issue. And, you know, for me, if we backtrack to some of the reasons why I've been on the show before, a lot of it was about the US China exchange. And what Hollywood was doing is to essentially get our product into that market. And sort of the way we were not only catering to Beijing in terms of soft power initiatives that they had, which meant we were implementing or forcing into plots various things that projected a certain Beijing narrative that they wanted to tell their own people, but also project around the world. So that was one of the things we were doing. The other thing we were doing was really teaching them. You know, it's sort of the saying, like, in order to sell them fish, we had to teach, teach them how to fish. And one of the things Beijing was really smart about was they said, hey, not only do we want you projecting narratives that Beijing is, is trying to push out there globally, but we also want you to teach us how to do the best in, best in the world film filmmaking that you do in Hollywood. We want to do it ourselves and we want to do it for our own, our own people, which is something that we help them accomplish. Not only did we help them, you know, understand the development of scripts, for instance, like in the early 2000s, when I looked at, say, a Mandarin language translated script, a lot of times a full movie script from them was literally like three pages. And, you know, there was just a lot of improv or whatever they would do to make these movies work. Then we taught them essentially, you know, the 110 page, you know, sort of three act narrative structure, etc. How you develop it, how you create the low points and the setups and all that kind of stuff. And then of course, we taught them the skill set of actually making the movie. You know, you know, what a gaffer and a grip does and you know, the kinds of VFX work that you need to put into it and what the right type of direction and all, all the little ingredients that go into making these big productions. And then additionally, we taught them how to build the facilities. In fact, when we shot Iron Man 3, we were forced to use these new sound stages on the outskirts of Beijing that were literally. The floors were made of this red brick. So by the time the dollies and the tracks and the cameras and all the people working on a, on a particular scene were done at the end of the day, shooting a particular part of the script, you know, you couldn't even see from one end of the soundstage to the other because it was filled with this thick clay smog inside the soundstage. So you literally had to tell them, hey, that's not the kind of flooring you put into these things. So if you look at China, a lot of the stuff that we have problems with, that we're talking about today is very easy to extrapolate. Around the world, we taught a lot of markets how to craft their own storytelling. We taught them how to actually shoot and produce that. And then we also help them build the facilities that they make their own productions in. And during that process, they realized there was a huge business and a huge economic benefit to try to draw our own Hollywood productions into those other markets. So in the mid-90s, for instance, we started to see Canada come on board with all these different financial incentives, tax rebates, other incentives, subsidies, soft money that would lure people north of the border to shoot movies or television productions. We saw it on a federal level, which we do not have here in the United States of America. We never have had it here in the United States of America. Then that complemented what provincial benefits and subsidies and incentives there were, and even regional ones around, say, cities, say Toronto, or just on the outskirts of Toronto, like Hamilton. When you add all that up, you're looking at, like, say, in 50 cents of every dollar has a potential rebate capacity on top of a very weak currency, say, in Canada. 80 other countries around the world presently have federal film incentives. We don't have any. So if you look at the dollars and cents that go into making film and television, you have to realize that something that you're making here in America, with the best in the world at its craft at our fingertips, and the best in the world, facilities in the world are here. It sometimes doesn't make economic sense. In fact, more often than not, it doesn't, because 60% of our film and television now is done outside of the U.S.
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B
it's. I, we almost glossed over the, the Chinese script process with this three, this three page. I just. I like to imagine, you know, a screenwriter in China somewhere being gifted a Mandarin cop of Save the Cat and being like, here. This is how you. This is how you write a script. But that's, that's kind of funny. The, the, the, the federal subsidies are the question here, because there are subsidies in the United States, right? There are states that California just recently increased their subsidies. Noah Wiley's been out talking about that on, you know, various PR tours. New York has some subsidies, L.A. texas has some. They're not very good. Atlanta was going to be, you know, Hollywood east coast for a while. And you know, a lot of that production has gone overseas because of the, the competing federal subsidies, which I guess, I guess, you know, gets to the, gets to the big question here, which is how do you convince the federal government to do anything like you would want them to do? Because I look at it, I look at the dysfunction on Capitol Hill and think, well, they're not going to get anything done anyway. But on a secondary level, it really is one of these things where you, you know, you, you look at, you look at the topic and I just can't imagine a, a like conservative Republican elected official saying, yeah, we're going to send money to those pinko commies out in California. I, it just, I don't, I don't see the path for this.
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So it's a fantastic question. Okay, so there's a handful of responses I'll give. Number one is for me, I hate just shouting into the wind and I have no problem calling out issues that we have, but I want to have constructive solutions to them. And if I can act on those solutions, I want to act on them. So number one is can you make an American made film? We had an opportunity to do that here with bad counselors. Go to bad counselors.com to find out the theater that's coming to next week. Hopefully you guys go see it, rebuy tickets, etc. Number one is I feel like something that's fully American made around something that's very authentically American, like the American story of summer camp and you know, fraternity brothers get, get in trouble and have to be counselors there and annex ensue and there's sort of a call for something greater and there's that great summer romance that happens at these summer camps that's going to have a nostalgia feel for Americans. It's going to have, you know, hey, I'm doing it right now for kids and it's PG13 family comedy fun. So number one is if you make that with the craftspeople of the American of America, I think there's this quality aspect that will draw people. Hopefully the same way they might go buy a Harley Davidson, number one. Number two is this is not a, this is not a California Los Angeles issue. In fact, 80% of the production in film and television that's actually done in the United States is done outside of California. A lot of people just are under this misguided assumption that most of it's in California and Los Angeles. And I can tell you not Much is done here in California at all nowadays. Because even in Manhattan beach, where I live, our sound stages, which got me to Manhattan beach because we were doing both Avengers and Iron Man 3 there. Now that soundstage is bankrupt and it's selling to some other industry. It won't even be sound stages anymore. Same thing with cbs, Television City, cbs, Radford, you name it. It's happening across the board in California. So let's talk about the other 80%. Well, you brought up Georgia. Georgia has by far and away the greatest soundstage backlot in the world. It's not the biggest. Bollywood actually has one that's bigger, but it's close. It's called Trilith studios. Thousand acres, 31 sound stages, state of the art facilities. When you look at the fact that we have swing states that a lot of people inside the beltway are caring about come midterms, a lot of the states that are production hubs in this industry happen to be red states or swing states. You got Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, etc. Those are all big production hubs. It's not just California, it's not just New York. So it does affect Americans across the board. Number two is when we're healthy. 2.7 million Americans work on film and television productions. The wages alone just for a healthy ecosystem are a quarter of a trillion dollars. So if you're just looking at, hey, I'm an elected official, I need to please my constituents, I'm in a red state. Oh, am I actually in a red state or a swing state that actually has film and production hub? There's a real incentive there and a very low hanging fruit to try to push forward an incentive like this. And what's beautiful about it, this is the best part, as somebody that hates wasted taxpayer money, is that the money is not needed to build world class facilities or resources. We have those. It's not used to train people to work in this industry. We have the best trained individuals across the nation already trained and skilled to do it. All it does is incentivize people in the United States studios, independent film studios like ours, Loam Entertainment, to hire other Americans. And when you hire Americans, you get access to that rebate. And that rebate goes through a full audit process. In fact, we've, we shot bad counselors over a year ago. We're still waiting for North Carolina to go through its auditing process. I'm not complaining about it at all. I love the fact that they go through it with a fine tooth comb. Making sure every one of our expenses is legitimized, fully backed up, and qualifies for the incentive. And once they're done with it, you get that rebate back. But it takes a lot of time. So it's all about guarding taxpayers, and it's all about helping Americans.
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Well, let's. Let's run through the process of what. What it was like for you to shoot bad counselors and. And work this into your budget, because I think that will be instructive for people to kind of understand what the. What the actual, you know, economic stakes are here. And I don't know how specific you're able to get on numbers. I feel like there's a. There's a great account out there who's doing FOIAs of these requests, which is really interesting. You get, like, real good looks at the. The actual. The actual numbers involved, which I have. I've. I've been. I've been kind of fascinated by. But this is. But this is. This is. It's a whole process. So when you. When you're sitting there, you're like, okay, we have this much money, and we're trying to figure out where to shoot this. How do you decide where to shoot it? How do you decide what sort of rebates, incentives you're looking for? And, like, how much does that actually. How much does that either decrease your overall budget or increase the amount of money that you can spend? Right. Because that's the. That's the real way to look at this, isn't it? Like, instead of making a $2 million movie, I can make a $2.5 million movie, and we can spend, you know, that $500,000 on whatever. What go step by step through the budgeting and the development budgeting, rebate process for us.
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Yeah, well, it's actually a really interesting question, and if it doesn't cause audience members to glaze over, you should probably have, like, a really competent line producer, a physical production exec on, to get into the nitty gritty, because it's fascinating, but it does require, like, a real passion to understand the numbers. But, like, let's hit it on the sort of the basics. Number one is we fully financed Bad Counselors, Loam Entertainment did. From capital that we had, so we had no other outside investors. One of the things that we wanted to do was make sure that we could pay for it in full on the gross budget of the movie. So we allotted. And let's just use a $10 million as an example budget. Right? We had the 10 million ready to go to shoot the movie. And then at that point, we were looking to see, okay, if we do it in different areas, what could we save? Now, number one was. And this is gonna. I'm gonna get. Look, I've. I've never been afraid of talking out loud and on the record about things that are sensitive, but I can tell you that I'm part of a coalition pushing for this American federal production incentive. And part of that coalition involves unions like the Teamsters and SAG and AFTER and WGA and dga. So when we were looking at making this movie, we realized if we could work in a right to work state where you don't necessarily have to hire certain unions, you could save a lot of money. So we did shoot in North Carolina, which is a right to work state. Okay, so that saved some money on certain unions. Now, obviously, you're making a movie for theatrical release and all that kind of stuff, you're going to have, you know, DGA or sag, AFTRA and all that kind of stuff, but there's other unions and below the line that you can avoid using for something done at the budget we wanted to do it at. So that's number one. Number two is you can look at different areas of the country and go, okay, how do they satisfy, say, the outdoor shooting of what we need to do now, we were a summer camp movie, so there's a lot of forgiveness where you could actually shoot it. I mean, we could have easily shot it in Bulgaria or in Saskatchewan or Manitoba or down in South Africa. It doesn't matter. Around the world, it would still look like a summer camp in America. But in the United States, we also had that same freedom. We really love North Carolina. I actually went to summer camp myself in North Carolina, so that was near and dear to my heart. But on top of it, North Carolina has a 25% rebate there. We did post in various other states, whether it's Tennessee.
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Sorry, let me stop you there. When you say 25% rebate, what does that mean? Just so we're using 10. You didn't. This movie did not cost $10 million. We're just using $10 million for a round number to explain to people. When you say, so if you spent $10 million on this movie, what does 25 rebate mean?
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Yeah, so that 25 rebate. So the way the states look at it is that you're spending money in their. The. In their essentially region, and that's going to spur economic growth. In fact, there's a lot of studies that say $1 spend equals roughly like $6 of, of economic benefit to that area, depending on how they govern, an oversight, what that actual spend is spent on. So a lot of, a lot of states got smart, say after Michigan and some of these other places where Hollywood sort of used and abused the privilege. Like they would fly everybody in, they would shoot, they would get the rebate and fly everybody back out. So there was no long term benefit. But if you look at say a place like Georgia or say North Carolina, where they have really strong infrastructure, able to do countless film and television productions over and over again, they make it really mandatory that you're hiring people from those states and you get audited to make sure that those people, whether they're above the blind or below the line, are actually living and working in the state where that rebate is involved. Then on top of it, there's various other components which some states do and other states don't. For instance, above the line spend. So say if you spend $25 million on Tom Cruise, you get a 25% rebate on that $25 million. Now North Carolina doesn't do that, but the United Kingdom does, which is part of the reason why you see a lot of these big productions shooting in the United Kingdom, even though England has the pound, which is super strong and actually works against them drawing production out there. Then you even have things like say Georgia will give you an extra rebate if you actually credit the state of Georgia in the actual movie itself. So there's all kinds of different nuance that these states are looking at in terms of how do we keep a production hub, a thriving economy, localized and set in our state by drawing in these productions and spurring economic growth over a long term. How do we do that and also draw these in on a financially prudent basis for the taxpayer? And over time, we're seeing states get really good at it. In fact, some of them are getting so good at it that California or our, our productions are going, yeah, we'd rather not shoot there because it's very difficult to go through their audit process. There's a lot of hard terms that they have that don't really benefit the net budget of what we're trying to do. So it turns them off. And then the legislator will get together and alter it a little bit and realize, oh, we got to change that, change that in order to get that production back in. So you're seeing that constantly happen. The big issue though is that there's no federal incentive to layer on Top of what all these individual states are doing. And that's what's needed to help even the playing field. With a lot of these big hubs outside of the U.S. canada, UK, South Africa, Australia, you know, Eastern Europe, et cetera, there's a lot of wind to their backs over us in terms of keeping the production overseas rather than reshoring it here.
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B
Right. I. I'm sorry, just to, Again, just to kind of loop back here. When, when you say 25%, though, like, again, on a. If, if your budget is $10 million, does that mean the state is writing you a check for $2.5 million? Is that, is that basically what happens?
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Yeah. And I mean, if everything that you spend qualifies, say there's a 25% rebate that's blanketed across everything, and you go through the audit process and everything that's applicable to that 25% is roughly $10 million, then yes, arguably you would get back two and a half million and the state would argue that that 2.5 million given back to you is paid back to the state at 6x or 10x or whatever their calculus is.
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B
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to get it. See, that's a whole different. That's a whole different debate, the economic multiplier argument. And I'm, I'm, I've always been a little skeptical. I, I have enough libertarian in me and have read, you know, enough of the. That I'm, I'm a little, I'm. I tend to be skeptical about those. That said, I am still pretty. Look, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of a federal tax credit for the reasons you mentioned, which is that it is not a level playing field. That. It is. We are. We are. It is a situation like. It is not free trade. Right? It is, it is. It is a, It's a situation where the other countries are subsidizing this to the detriment of the United States. And the, the question then becomes, you know, kind of, what does that process look like? But I do have concerns there as well. Right. Which is, you know, let's just take a very basic one. When you're dealing with any of these, when you're dealing with a state, you know, board or whatever, a state rebate board, are there things that you have to steer away from? Are there topics they don't want, they, they're not going to reimburse you for? Are there genres that they are saying, well, we're not going to make horror movies here in, you know, I don't know, Texas or whatever. We don't want people thinking this state is a scary place. We've already got the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We don't want people, you know, thinking this is a murder. Murder capital. I know this happens sometimes, and I know. I know there are states that have requirements that you not portray the state in a negative light. For instance, that. That strikes me as dangerous on a creative level in the sense, for the same reasons. To bring it back to what we were discussing before, that some of those efforts to woo China were dangerous.
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Right.
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That you had to steer away from certain topics that were offensive to the Chinese government, to the Chinese people. This is my concern. This is my concern as a. As a critic, as a viewer of films. How do you avoid that? And is it. Is there. Is there a way to make sure that that doesn't creep into the process?
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A
Well, I think it's a very. It's a difficult question to answer because you also have the economics of what happens with that content actually after it's made and starts to get monetized. So in terms of the. The real problem that I had with China wasn't necessarily their censorship of our content for their market. Like, I actually thought we could live with them saying, hey, you made this movie, you need to cut out X, Y and Z in order to play it in our market. Because actually we do that in various other markets.
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That happens all over the place.
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Saudi Arabia, etc.
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Sure.
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Where their issue was was you need to cut it out for the whole world to see. We don't want anybody seen in a Bond movie, a Chinese antagonist, you know, we don't want anybody in, you know, certain movies seeing a criminal in. In China or somebody getting away from the police in China, or like, the famous story of, like, we don't want, in the, you know, Tom Cruise movie, seeing Dirty Laundry in the background, know in Shanghai. That that's an issue when you're censoring for the Globe because of the prerogative of a certain country. I think the same thing could be said for what you're talking about in terms of individual states. Now, if you're going to show. You're going to shoot in North Carolina and show something derogatory about North Carolina or shoot somewhere, anywhere and show something that's derogatory about North Carolina, there'll probably be a certain amount of people in the market of North Carolina itself that won't go to see the movie because they hear it's offensive to people that live in North Carolina. So that is a, that's a commercial decision that you have to make knowing that your monetization might get disrupted if, if a certain state is saying, hey, you can shoot here and you can shoot whatever you want, but, you know, you can't do X, Y and Z. Content wise. I think that that is a bit of an issue because it is, it's, it's a bit of a, you know, it opens the door to a lot further censorship. I do know of particular, I mean, for instance, Trillist Studios, which is actually owned by. It was developed by Dan Cathy, who's chairman of Chick Fil? A. A lot of people know the Chick Fil? A story. They know the values of Chick Fil? A. I know for a fact that they haven't prevented certain movies that would totally be seen as maybe offensive to certain people that hold the values of Chick Fil? A. They, they haven't prevented those movies from shooting there. I mean, they're not putting their name on it or whatever it is, but they're providing facilities for storytellers to have the freedom of speech and freedom of expression to tell their stories.
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B
But that's a private right. But that's a private corporation, right? Making decisions one way or the other. I guess the concern I have is again, it's one of these things where once the government gets involved, you kind of, because of the First Amendment, because of whatever, there has to be some sort of content neutral standard. But then you end up with people complaining to, you know, the North Carolina legislature, like, oh, we're making these. And I'm not talking about bad counselors here. This is a very family friendly, you know, this is, there's, there's nothing offensive in this film. The. But you could have people say, like, oh, well, this, you know, I'm, I am offended by this, you know, serial killer movie that shot here. Why are we subs? Why are my tax dollars subsidizing this sort of thing?
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A
And I, well, it's an interesting. I could, I, I know exactly what you're saying because I haven't heard of a story and maybe you have of, of this being an issue, but I could give an example of one that that could happen, which is, say there's a state with very strong anti abortion laws and you want to shoot a movie about, you know, you know, it's a freedom of, you know, freedom of choice, you know, essentially pro, Pro choice movie. You know, could you see the legislator saying that, legislators saying we are not going to provide a rebate to that movie because of the subject matter. I could see a scenario, especially in this divided sort of country we're in right now, occur in that scenario. And the question is whether it would even happen in reality from the practical point of view of would the filmmakers of a movie like that want to actually be shooting that movie in that state to begin with? Because my answer would be no. Why would they? Why? It just seems like unless they want to antagonize everybody, it seems like you would rather go somewhere where you're welcome more about whatever that subject matter is when you say so. Maybe the practicality of it would trump the reality of getting to a certain dilemma that you're talking about.
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B
Sure. Totally on a state by state basis. But once you make it a federal issue, then it's. Everybody.
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A
Yeah. Yes, 100%.
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B
And I mean, you know. You know, I mean, and this is. I, again, I. It's, It's. It's one of these. It's one of these things that's almost, you know, well, let's, let's have that problem. Let's cross that bridge when we, when we get to it, after we have the federal, you know, credits. Let's get those. Let's get those on the, on the books first.
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A
Well, for instance, I can give you. I mean, you know, I've done Steve Bannon's show a bunch over the years. The guy was in the business for a long time, as a lot of us know, and many of us came across him through that. And he's a powerful voice out there. And on top of it, Donald Trump really needs to get behind an American federal production incentive in order to get Congress even motivated on something like that. So part of this is getting President Trump's attention on it away from the. The penalty version, which is the tariffs, and more into the carrot version, which is the rewards. And, you know, Bannon said he'll never support. Say, why would Trump support something that just benefits California and Hollywood? And I said it actually doesn't. 80% of the production is done outside of California, so we need to make sure he's aware of that, number one. But I could see him come, I could see the president say, hey, like with the salt deduction, I want this incentive to benefit the states I care about more than the states I don't care about. And I'd be. It'd be interesting to see, you know, a means to an end is getting this done, but it would be interesting to see if. To get him to do it. There is an accounting practice that could be applied that would benefit the 80% versus, say, the 20% in California. And then, of course, when he's no longer president, you could set it back so it helps the whole state. But if you're thinking about means to an end and getting this passed and getting more of this production onshore, I think it's important to think like him and his constituents and the people inside the Beltway that are going to support whatever initiative he's pushing forward. And that might be one way to do it. And it could involve essentially what you're talking about on censorship.
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B
Yeah, but, Chris, that's, that's, I, like, I find that as an American, I find that kind of offensive, this idea that the president would be like, all right, I'm going to benefit my allies and my cronies with this tax subsidy and punish my enemies. I simply. Well, look, I mean, the people in Congress who are pushing for this are all Californians right now anyway. I can't imagine any of them going for this.
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A
The lead in this is Brian Jack out of Georgia, Republican, and Laura Friedman is the Democrat side of it. But you're, what you're saying is what I think a lot of us sort of wish was the way it worked, but let's face it, the salt deduction was created in a way to penalize blue states and reward red states. Right.
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B
So, and that was bad. That was bad. We should, it was bad. I'm not like that.
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A
Look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying that I agree with, with the, the sausage making that might get us to the point where we can bring back some of the 60% that's done offshore. I'm just saying there might be a means to an end temporarily that doesn't benefit everybody, but at least gets it back here, like, and I'm, I just putting it out there, I mean, that's the reality we have to deal with.
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B
I, I, you know, I appreciate that. At the same time, again, I just, I find that, I find that deeply troubling. I find, I find that, I find that to be, I find that to be bad. And that, and this kind of does get to my, well, again, this gets back to my broader worry about these sorts of subsidies, which is that it will be doled out based on projects that are approved by the government, which feels bad, or to states that are approved by the federal government, which is not ideal either. I just, I don't, I, I, I'm not, I'm not a fan of that. Sorry, I didn't mean to get so this guy. No, you're slightly off the rails.
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A
And by the way, we're not disagreeing whatsoever. Like we're on the same page. I'm just saying the, the muddiness of the reality is we got 60% of our production done offshore. Like how do we fix that? How do we level the playing field? And if there's baby steps that you got to hold your nose to to help get it kickstarted and then eventually start to alter and improve them over time, that's one way to do it. Or we can just shoot for the utopian version of it, which awesome might be possible too, I don't know. But the reality is like if you look at say the Pentagon or the Department of War, right? There's. I spoke at AFRICOM in January in Stuttgart, Germany about how the, the Department of War really wants to get behind and help cooperate as much as possible with pro American content. Right. So just that statement, and I'm not saying that this is the way it would work out, but you can guarantee that if you're trying to get the cooperation of the Department of War for lots of military assets in your films, right? Because that is used a lot in these big tent pole productions, et cetera. You probably want to veer towards pro America content versus anything that's, you know, neutral or warps. Right?
- [35:24]
B
Well, sure, yeah. No, I mean this has long been, this is, there has long been, you know, cooperation between the Department of Defense and the film industry to, you know, use military assets, jets, helicopters, you know, whatever. But this doesn't, this is not without controversy either in the sense that there are films that are rejected for, for that cooperation because of, you know, the, they don't put, they don't portray the military in a, in a good light. Which I again, I think is basically, I don't have a big problem with that, frankly, if you're going to be using government assets, I, but this is a good reason not to kind of institutionalize that at a top line level throughout the country on every production. Right. Like, I just feel like that, you know, you're, you're, you're introducing a lot of potential interference by the government that we should, as I think Americans not be, you know, super excited for.
- [36:29]
A
But how, when you think about it, how does it work with, you know, say, other industries, you know, whether it's, you know, General Motors, the automotive businesses or the aeronautic, you know, Boeings and, and so many other industries that are subsidized heavily by the US Government at a Federal Level you can pretty much guarantee there's a lot of different sort of push and pulls that are a part of that process that might not seem, and by the way, Eileen, libertarian too, that seem very anti, libertarian, in fact very anti the idea of like democracy or the way this country is supposed to operate. But since governments around the world are inferior, interfering in the free market version of what we would love to see take place, we're sort of stuck with this situation where the federal government sometimes does have to step in. And yeah, it probably does get quite muddy in the process. Like, I worry about the thumbnail you're going to put up here, which is like Fenton says, penalize blue states, you know, like censor content. That doesn't work, but I know you're not going to, but I'm just saying, like, we're on the same page. But it's the reality of like, how do we baby step this in the right direction? And if we have to hold our nose to it for a certain period, can we get, is there a belief that maybe we can get to the next baby step that avoids some of the problems in the first step?
- [38:02]
B
I don't see, I'm, I'm, I'm not in favor of holding my nose for that first step because I think that first step is in and of itself bad, is probably worse than there being no subsidies. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna disagree with you on that one. But the, but I like the broader problem is, yes, this is 100% a, a, a, a, a international problem in the sense of other countries around the world are creating an unlevel playing field and trying to figure out how best to combat that is and to keep the jobs here in the United States. Again, we want, you know, to keep the American filmmaking jobs here instead of, you know, there was a, there was a story about like Rob Lowe went to live in Ireland for two weeks to film an entire year of his game show that he, that he does because it was cheaper to fly all of the contestants, all of the American contestants, all of the American crew, of course, Rob Lowe, who I'm sure is staying in a very nice hotel in Dublin or whatever over to Ireland for, you know, a, a month long stretch or three week stretch, whatever it was, than it was to just film the damn thing in California and that's, or Georgia or Michigan or wherever. And that is insane. That's, that, that is not, that is not a situation that works, that should work for anybody in the United States.
- [39:36]
A
Well, you know, what's Incredible too, is that the. One of the reasons the UK has such a stranglehold over our production too is, yeah, they have, they have juicy rebates, but they also have a currency that's pretty unfavorable on their side, but they also have medic, you know, healthcare that is either heavily subsidized or completely free for people that are living and working in the uk. So that alone is a major mover in terms of. Of how the economics work. So you could almost blame some of this production moving offshore to a variety of things that have nothing to do with the entertainment business but have to do with overall the economics of the United States of America. Healthcare being one major problem with that.
- [40:27]
B
Yeah, no, that's the. It's another thing that you hear about, particularly with the UK unions, that they don't have to pay as much for health insurance, which keeps the actual. Despite, despite, you know, everything being union. Unionized over there. It doesn't, it does not cost as much to film with union crews in, in England, which is kind of interesting. Again, another kind of interesting unintended consequence of all this. All right, let's talk. Let's talk bad counselors because this is coming out. This is coming out next week. You're getting it. You've got a release via Fathom Events. Fathom Events, of course, is, you know, in theaters all over the country. What was it, what was it about the script? You know, I assume you start with a script, you get a script, you're like, oh, this is. I want to make this. What was it that drew you to this story and, you know, being able to make it here in, in the United States?
- [41:25]
A
Yeah, well, it's, it's interesting. The company that made it, Loam Entertainment, I've been helping build since January of 2025. And the idea was to make content that didn't necessarily have any sort of political ideology, was good, escapist, entertaining, fun, but then on top of it, by the end of it, called for something greater. You know, whether it was faith based or whether it's just this idea of going out and do your best and, and make the world a better place because you're inspired to do it. That was sort of the idea. And Will Lowry over at Range Media in their Nashville office, because we're located here in Franklin, Tennessee, gave me this script that Chris Dallin was attached to direct. And I read it and I was with my colleagues and we thought, wow, this is a perfect first one because, you know, people don't necessarily think of family comedies is something that calls for something greater. And, you know, we. We felt like there was a great nostalgia idea behind it and two great lead roles and Ramon Reed, who's, to me, like a young Kevin Hart is in the film, and. And Matt Cornett, who's blowing up from his Amazon series called Every Year after, is the. The main lead and the romantic interest in, in the film. They played a great tandem, got in all kinds of different trouble and, and, and go through this redemption led by the camp leader, which is played by Chris Klein from the American Pie franchise. And it just turned out to be a really good movie by the end of it. I mean, I've been involved with a lot of flops over the years, and this one, fortunately, didn't end up that way. It ended up testing extremely well. We've tested it across the country and a lot of different college campuses, including usc, where I'm a professor. So we felt really excited about it. And downstream, it's going to be on Angel, Netflix, Amazon, you name it. But we decided to take a shot theatrically to add a little gravy and to get the word out about it and cut to 15 million trailer views, and we're out there on Cinemark, Regal and AMC theaters come July 22nd. It's been a real success so far, and we're just hoping some people want to go see it in the big screen because it's a really fun movie to feel good about and laugh in in a. In a community of other, you know, 80 to 100 theater dwellers.
- [43:55]
B
When you did you. Did you go through, like, a full audience testing process with notes and cards and all that?
- [44:02]
A
Yeah.
- [44:03]
B
And you, and you. And you told. You said it tested pretty well.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah. So we, we, we tested the movie, I would say, probably eight different times with various audiences. We really wanted to see if we could thread the needle between young and, And. And sort of parents, which, which is, to me, something that was always missing in a lot of the movies that I would take my kids when they were younger, too. It just felt like a bit of a waste of time as a parent, because you're in a dark room, you're not really communicating with your kids, but you're sort of hoping you to have this great, fun, shared experience. But it's either too young for, for you to enjoy or it's too old for them to enjoy. It was always hard to find that balance. I always loved how, you know, say, Kevin Feige figured it out with, with those, you know, that last generation of Marvel movies or even the way the Shrek franchises used to do it or Toy Stories or various other things. So that's something that we were unsure about and we sort of nailed it. And it was one of the highest testing movies I've had, which I'm not sure if that's saying much, but, boy, I've been involved with ones that have come out of the testing. And you're like, oh, no, what do we do?
- [45:14]
B
Well, it certainly shows confidence in. In the film, putting it in. It's going to be in 690 screens around the country. Is that right?
- [45:21]
A
Yeah, 690 screens. And what else is interesting? And there's probably a whole episode about this. But. But when we put it through Fathom, you know, you're. You're actually in control of your own capital spend when you distribute that movie, which means you're in charge of. Of hiring the vendors, the. The creatives that do the art and the one sheets and the trailers and all the social media and all that stuff. And it's a really fascinating process. It's stressful. You gotta have, like, a great village of partners that are working with you to do that. And, you know, it's something that I. I sort of missed out with a lot of the studio movies I did over the years, mainly because you're just part of this big room that's watching the studio machine do their thing. And sometimes you'll lay a little input in, and sometimes they'll listen to it and sometimes they don't. But in this situation, myself and Chris Galuska over here at LOAM and. And our chairman, Tom Evans, like, we were overseeing, like, every part of it, and it was really fun. And, you know, we feel like we really had our. Our hands in, like how we were marketing and getting the word out. And because it's American Made, it's also allowed us to be out there talking about it on a national level, which is very unique for a small comedy like this. You're typically not on an ABC News or a Fox News or something like that talking about a small independent comedy. But in this case, we have been the.
- [46:45]
B
Working with Fathom is interesting. I, you know, I've had the folks from Crunchyroll on a couple times, and it's, it's a, you know, they do a lot of the. You kind of anime releases. They do a lot of anniversary releases, you know, 50th anniversary of JAWS or whatever. You know, they'll put that in theaters. And I do find it. I do find it pretty interesting how successful they are. And how successful they have been at getting these movies out there. Can I ask, in terms of the release strategy, in terms of the release date strategy, how does it work with Fathom? Do they have, like, we have this many screens on these days. We have this many screens on these days. You know, we've got kind of an open. We've got a hole in our schedule here. Like, how did that work in terms of plugging. Plugging your film in?
- [47:32]
A
Yeah, well, it's. It's really interesting because when you look at I. And I don't know the. The full genesis of. Of how Fathom came to be, but my guess is theaters have always been trying to figure out how do you fill their screens across the board on every day of the week. Right. And there's only so many big Hollywood movies coming out there. So Fathom was put together by, you know, Cinemark, Regal and AMC theater chains to essentially figure out, okay, well, how are you going to fill these screens that, you know, maybe aren't filled on a. On a Monday or Tuesday night or during a, you know, Saturday when there's only certain amount of big movies out there? And essentially, if you want to go through Fathom, you submit the movie, and then they have a very tough judging criteria. Like, they want to make sure that if they're going to bat with their three owners, they can say, yeah, we're going to fill screens because we believe this movie is like X, Y and Z in certain case studies or whatever it is. As far as comps are concerned. Once they sign off on that, then they give you an option of what type of release you're willing to do. But those options also come with, you know, this obviously, you know, apparent price tag of what it's going to cost to market and promote it out there to make sure that it works. So they give you an extremely favorable split as far as what you recoup as the equity investor in the film. And that's really advantageous because when I look at some of the studio projects I was involved with and I saw the price tags of what we were spending on marketing and promoting those films, it was. It was flabbergasting because you're just like, wait a minute, where all that money go? And if you're in the waterfall as a producer and, you know, you know, all the recoupments that have to occur before you start to see any sort of taste of the back end, you get upset about where this waste is going. So in this particular case, since we were the equity investors, we could make sure we knew where every dollar was going and govern that. And the way Fathom offered, you know, the opportunity is they said, hey, we got this opening for this amount of guaranteed days, say in July. We have this opening in the fall that guarantees you this. We have this opening next year and you start to look at the cost of the money, right? Like we could have held it until say spring of next year if we wanted to, to catch kids before they go to summer camp. But you have that cost of money. You want to get out there and activate it. And we have a certain mission to get the word out. We want to get the next movie going. And you know, we committed to a certain guarantee and a certain amount of spend that we felt comfortable for. And now we're rolling the dice a bit. We're hoping people go and pre buy the tickets and that will add more theaters to it. And then we hope we have these theaters full so that they extend the, the date range of what this, this movie is going to be in theaters for. Because you know, the longer we're there, the more money we recoup and the, and the more amplification of our downstream revenues occur. So it's a really interesting business model where you sort of take fate in your own hands and if you have good downstream already in place, which we do, you feel like hey, this is a risk worth having because it just gets the word out more. And you know what, perhaps we get really lucky and you know, it catches, catches wind and it does more than we all expect. But even if it's in that low end range, we're going to be really happy.
- [51:00]
B
Yeah, well, I, you didn't say the number, so I'm going to assume you don't want to say the number. But I am curious what sort of PNA spend a six day run at fathom costs. I like that. That's, that's not, that's not an insignificant number of days. I you suggest it's not cheap. I'm just curious like if I, I have a 5 million dollar movie, I want to put it in theaters for 6 days, how much does that cost me on top of what I've already spent?
- [51:31]
A
Well, put it this way, if you look at like say Universal has Blumhouse, right? And Blumhouse is, you know, obviously they make bigger movies but for the most part that initial deal was like, hey, make these $5 million genre movies and we'll release them theatrically through Universal. And as we know, some of those movies never came out theatrically and the Calculus there is that those $5 million movies typically need 15 to 20 million in advertising spend in order to get them out there wide.
- [52:02]
B
Right.
- [52:03]
A
I can pretty much tell you we're nowhere near 15 to 20 million and spend for our six days. So it's, you know, it's, it's something that is done economically. It's not full of bloat. And then on top of it, you're, you, you're cushioned by what you know you already have coming downstream. So put it this way. If the movie ends up making $0, but we had 15,000 trailer hits already, like, we know we're gonna be fine because that's just gonna amplify what we already know is coming downstream. So it was sort of like a sure bet, but it does allow you a seat at the table to essentially roll the dice and see if you can have something that's sort of lightning in a bottle twice.
- [52:50]
B
Yeah.
- [52:51]
A
And you're like, wow, what a political answer. You didn't tell me that.
- [52:56]
B
Didn't, that did not answer my question at all. But as I, as I said, if you had wanted to say the number, you would have said it already. So I'm g, I, I, I, I appreciate, I know how, I know.
- [53:05]
A
You know what?
- [53:05]
B
Give me a number.
- [53:05]
A
I'll get, give me a number and I'll give you higher or lower. Give me one number.
- [53:10]
B
I, I, I'll just go with an even million.
- [53:13]
A
Okay, you're, you're in the ballpark.
- [53:15]
B
Okay, I figured that's about, that's about right. Yeah, but, but, you know, it's, it's interesting. It's a, it's, it's an. Because this is so, I, you know, I asked because this is the thing that, that every studio exec and every distribution exec I talk to stresses out over is, it's not the cost of the movie. The movie costs, you make a movie for a million dollars, it costs a million dollars. It's not the cost of the movie. It's the cost of telling the people about the movie that gets you. And, you know, as you say, spending $15 million on a 3000 screen release means that you then have to GROSS Something like $30 million just to even sniff at break even. And that's, you know, $30 million, not nothing. That's, that's a lot of movies don't make 30. I'll show you that. I mean, you know, but I'll show everybody else the top hundred list of films released this year. Not a ton above $30 million. It's a, it's, it's a, it's a not insignificant margin. So, you know.
- [54:15]
A
Yeah. And on the, on the indie side, like the, the economics, if you're prudent. Economics get a lot better if you, if you, if you look at what's publicly reported out there and we could have, we could have an off the record after this is all said and done and I can sort of walk you through how it all works. But the, you know, we're going to be good, we're going to be good on this film because it happened to be a good movie. Okay. If you make a, a movie that's not very good and you're doing what we're doing and then you got the downstream, you know, you're getting nervous, right. Like, and by the way, having a good movie is very difficult to pull off because there's just so many. We had 1200 people involved with this thing. You never know what's going to happen, even with all the best and intentions. So we got lucky there and then we, I think we're very nicely padded on this. The other thing I will say is marketing today. And you know this from building your own presence and your own brand and your podcast and what you do as a content creator. The, the big, you know, search companies that search engagement. The ability to grow organically has been very throttle. Right. Like the idea of being able to go viral just simply because you did something great and, and it's going to be allowed on a viral basis is very difficult to do. They've really harnessed it. So you almost have to pay for things to actually work on any sort of viral basis. The inorganic growth side of it. And it, and that's a little frustrating because, you know, we've created a lot of behind the scenes content and various other things where you really want it to take off. And we've had some stuff that, that has done that. But this push to pay for everything is something that is a bit, you know, disheartening. But it's also, I guess, part of what the business economics are nowadays and it's something the studios and independent financiers have to battle with now when they get a movie out there and they want to market it.
- [56:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, that's the, the effort to monetize attention is definitely one of the more annoying things of modern social media. I can speak to that from experience. All right. As you know, I always like to close these interviews by asking if there's anything I should have asked. If you think there's anything folks should know about either either the movie or making the movie or the state of, you know, all the subsidies and everything. What should folks. What did, what did we not discuss that folks should know about?
- [56:53]
A
Look, I think for me it's, you know, I, after working between the US And China and, and, you know, having relative success in a career, like, I'm very focused on what I think is actually constructive and beneficial for the United States of America because quite frankly, I was doing a lot of stuff that, yeah, I wasn't really aware of at the time and eventually got banged on the head enough times to realize, wait a minute, you know, we're, we're not doing things that are in the best interest of the United States in terms of what we were doing between the US And China. And now I'm trying to course correct that in my own little way, but I really believe in it. This is not something that, you know, it's, it's, it's not something where you're going to go make a billion dollars doing these kind of movies, but to me, it's really something that I'm passionate about. I think the team that we have is really creative. I think our development slate is really, really impressive and fun and engaging and is something that's going to help the United States of America in a lot of ways. And I'm just, I guess the big thing that I want to stress out there that we haven't brought up is, you know, myself, Loam Entertainment, the handful of others that are involved with this movie can't do it alone. We need others to, like, get behind this effort to make things work in a way that bring this country together in a stronger way that help prevent the divide that seems to get worse every day and really start to care about your brethren. And that doesn't mean something where you have to be anti foreigners or anti international markets, quite frankly. No, not at all. But we just need to remember that in this game of World cup that we're playing in, we do have the United States jersey on. So let's play like we're a team on the United for the United States and then, you know, when we're off the competitive field, be best friends with your friends from the UK and Canada and everywhere else that's totally cool. The same way your kids can do it in, in club sports. But like, let's be proud of the jersey we wear and remember that we're all one team.
- [59:04]
B
Chris Fenton Producer on Bad Counselors, author of Feeding the Dragon and you know, also the producer on Waiting. I mentioned this last time you were on the show, but the. The movie that my wife and I saw on our first date. So I will always be grateful to Chris for. For that as a, you know, important moment in my life. Chris, thanks for being on the show today.
- [59:28]
A
Thanks for having me, Sonny.
- [59:30]
B
And my name is Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bulwark. And I'll be back next week with another episode of the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. We'll see you guys.