Jon Stahl: "YOU ARE THE STUDIO NOW"

MARKET MONDAY #12

TRANSCRIPT:

My name is Jon Stahl. I am a recovering TV comedy writer. I worked on the final two seasons of Veep on HBO and wrote on the Fox animated sitcom HouseBroken. Now I am producing my own digital series and writing the Film Stack newsletter “How Not to be a TV Writer”.

This is my dangerous idea... Now I want to start by acknowledging that this does not apply to everyone. Some people will have a much easier time in the traditional media career path. They will have the connections, they will have the resources, they will have the expertise necessary to navigate that and forge a career for themselves through traditional Hollywood.

This presentation is not for those people. It’s for literally anyone else.

You have a new job description now, whether you like it or not or know it or not.

You know, in the old days of Hollywood, the traditional studio model, a large budget meant that a post team could be six people. A camera crew. Crew could be a dozen or more, and the writers room could consist of 25 or more writers. They all had one job, and they got really good at it. They were specialists. That was the golden age of television in Hollywood. And in case it isn’t immediately evident that the Golden Age is gone now, in this new entertainment reality, you are the writers room and the production office and the camera crew and art department. You have to be literally everything. Now, that will change as you gain leverage in the system.

But if you want to adapt – and I highly suggest you should – you, starting as of now, you have to consider yourself, a bit more of a generalist, which means in addition to being the production company, you’re also the studio, which is terrifying because who knows what the fuck they do. But also, it’s kind of exciting, because as a studio, you get to make the really big, important decisions, about the stories that get told.

You need a development process, a distribution strategy and an IP pipeline. And, I hate to break it to you, but you had to build all three of those things yourself. You also have to be willing to listen and to learn. And where does that learning happen? I’ll get to that in a second.

But first, to put it very, very bluntly, the pilot model is fucked. I’m not going to apologize for any language here. And it was it was fucked way before I way before the streaming bubble pop – way before the explosion of the creator economy. And it was the result of streamers when they replaced pilots with straight to series orders.

They were taking a gamble on a new model, which was, instead of testing the concept by producing a cheaper, less expensive pilot episode, they purchased a script and spent a lot more, to produce a full eight episode season. But this also shifted the risk on to creators, because when every greenlight is an eight episode order, studios are going to make fewer of them, and they’re only going to make that bet on a sure thing. Or as close to a sure thing as you can get, which is why Taylor Sheridan has nine shows on TV, and I have exactly zero.

But a new pilot model is emerging outside the studio system, and it’s happening on social first platforms like TikTok, like YouTube and like Instagram. And you don’t have to be Taylor Sheridan to take advantage of it. I myself am producing ten pilots this year, and that does sound unhinged because it is.

But that’s not even the worst of it, because each of these pilots doesn’t consist of a single episode anymore. A pilot now consists of a run of episodes. It could be like a web series I produced called Case in Point, True Crime Detective. It could be for, like a show I produced in December called Upstage. That’s, this is kind of an update because I literally just shot this yesterday and the day before, in Burbank with comedy actor and UCP founder Matt Walsh. And it was amazing and hilarious, and way, way too much for the budget that we had, which was no dollars, zero, $0.

Why so many episodes? Why am I producing all of these episodes for each of these series? Firstly, data, this is the most important thing. The more episodes you release per series that you’re producing, the more data points you have to determine what resonates, what doesn’t, who your audience is, who they are, not.

And here’s the thing. Even the flops contain incredibly valuable data. By putting my stuff on YouTube, I’ve been able to see exactly where people drop off. Demographic data, watch trends, thumbnail click through rates in really, really painstaking details. After a few weeks, I’ve already gotten incredibly helpful data. For instance, the thumbnail click through rate is 11.5%, which is really, really high. Meaning that I did a good job of capturing the fun of the series in the key art.

There was a high drop off, due to a cold open that was slower than I’d like to have had. But after one minute, retention stabilized, which means that once people realized what they were watching, they stuck around. They actually liked it. Now, this data will be incredibly valuable as I produce other series.

You have a better chance of your episode getting covered and shared if you produce multiple of them. Ideally as many as possible. Now you have to remember that every single minute over five hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. If you want to give yourself the best shot of getting noticed and shared and going viral, you can not rely on merely on episode anymore. Now that logic applies to the number series that you create, which in my case, as I mentioned is ten. Why ten specifically? Not that it’s a round number. I’m a believer in something called the power law, which actually comes from the world of venture capital (boo) but it states that 90% of portfolio returns are generated by 10% of portfolio companies. I think, I believe, that success rate applies to creative projects as well. So in order for one of my products to find its audience, I have to make ten of them.

So where is the money coming from? It’s all out of pocket. It’s all speculative, but the good news is I’m not burning money in the equation because I’m using a model called the MVC. The idea is you take something that would otherwise cost money – you make the smallest possible version of it that still captures the fun of the series and ideally that thing is as repeatable. Brooklyn Coffee Shop is an excellent example because it is one of the most repeatable concepts ever. So you think it is like a proof of concept, but instead of impressing gatekeepers, you are validating the concept on the open market.

So there’s this new development process/ What about your distribution strategy? The old model was to write scripts, gatekeep access and get a greenlight. That doesn’t work anymore. The new model: get an audience, create a big project alongside building that audience, and release it. Which is exactly what happened with Iron Lung, which is an incredible case study, released in three thousand theaters, two million dollar budget, made thirty million dollars in a week.

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