Films Not Made: Welcome to Films Not Made. I'm Avizev Weeder. And I'm Amy Hobby, and today we have two guests, Blair Briard. She's an award-winning executive producer. She got her start in indie film, ⁓ producing for John Sales and also produced films like I Shot Andy Warhol and Margo at the Wedding. ⁓ as an executive producer for television, she's worked on things like Better Things, ⁓ Scenes from a Marriage for HBO with Jessica Chastain. And the other two for Max. Our second guest is Kristen Newman. ⁓ she's a television writer and producer over two decades in Hollywood. she got her start on that 70s show and ⁓ has gone on to write and produce things like How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, Gallivant, and ⁓ Only Murders in the Building. ⁓ but more importantly, or I should say most importantly, ⁓ she also is the author of the best-selling memoir, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, which is what this episode is all about today. So, Kristen Blair, welcome to Films Not Made. It's great to have you guys. ⁓ we're excited that you're here to talk about a project. ⁓ this started as a memoir, I think back in 2014. Kristen, you want to tell us what motivated you to write the book, the spark of the idea, all of that. Yeah, so it's a comedic travel memoir. It ultimately kind of tells the story of my life, but through different trips that I took in my twenties and thirties. And so I had been kind of avoiding marriage and kids in my 30s because I got so addicted to travel and solo travel, especially. ⁓ it was back in the days of network TV, where you had spring off every year, and I was on that 70s show. writing on it for seven years. So I got these springs off every year to travel without having to look for another job. And so that started. And then it started to become such a part of my sense of self and identity ⁓ that I found that if I was ha with somebody in about February or so, I would really need to break up with them by March because I didn't want to bring them with me. You were on a scholarship in the spring. It was kind of what was happening. And you know, and I I I had two boyfriends of my twenties, so I really only was single for the first time in my thirties. And that was when all of my friends started to get married and have babies. And so I kind of found myself doing this thing alone. So that was kind of my life, and everybody had been like, ⁓ write these stories down, but I didn't really have a take on it. It felt like in the middle of it, it just felt sort of like travel brag or something. I mean, you're a you're a writer, so of course you should be writing about it. I should have written it down, but mostly I just wrote that 70 show and then I traveled. I didn't write my own thing. I just was like, if I am writing when I'm not writing, then what am I writing about? I have no life. So I would go live. And ⁓ and so then though I met my now husband. I started to write some essays, just trap like David Sidaresi style at travel essays about some trips I'd taken and it just turned into sixty pages and you know, all of these stories. So it was time to get a T V job. And so I slapped a piece of paper on the front of these three essays and said excerpts from the upcoming memoir, what I was doing while you were reading, and sent it to UTA. And they were like, ⁓ you're writing a book. And I said, No, I just wanted to make it look official. And they're like, This is, I think this is a book. And then sent those chapters to a book agent who was like, Yeah, it's book. And so then I pitched it and got a bidding war and sold the book. And then I had to write the book. And so I met I thought it was gonna be just a bunch of can I have your agent? Yeah. Yeah, it worked out great. So and they wanna they're you have an interesting job, so please write about your job. And so I was writing about my job and my job heartbreaks in ways that I hoped would not keep me from getting more jobs, right? Which is obviously part of today's conversation story as well. And ⁓ so I wrote the thing, I went to therapy, I forgave myself for all the things I did wrong so I could be super honest, I wanted to make sure it was honest. That was good, and it was a great experience. And it released the week I got married crazily. ⁓ and so then we went on what we called my honeymoon junket, where we like did a little bo book tour with my new husband. We're going to We're going to Des Moines on our honeymoon. Yeah. Where I'm gonna read about fucking other people. Yeah. ⁓ And so he went to one event, Rachel Dratch and me and New York. It was all very cool. And he's like, love you, support you, love it. I don't need to hear it acted out. You know? I'll just meet you in the hotel room afterwards. So we did that. ⁓ and the book came out. And I was working at ABC at the time and had a couple overall deals at Disney, and they wanted the book and they wanted me to adapt the book. And I was like, you will ruin the book. Like you make it. I wanted you to adapt it as a TV show. ⁓ as a show. A TV show. Yeah, always, yeah. What I wanted the book to be was a picture of a different way to live your life, your timeline as a woman, your thirties, and not be like a train wreck style story about a woman who was like being wild and b and opening up herself up to the world and not doing what everybody else was doing until she sees the light and at at the end does. You know, I wanted years of that life to happen and and the series was never gonna end with her getting married, you know, and having a baby. It was not gonna be that. ⁓ so that was all really important to me. And so I didn't do it as a movie. I just tried to figure out what to do with it for about eight years. And then the COVID lockdown happened and my overall deal was done and they didn't renew it. And I was like depressed and like what's next. And so then I just specked the book. I just made a pilot, a TV pilot in six days. I just wrote it. Kristen sent me ⁓ the book, which when I read, I laughed out loud. And you know, usually when you're reading something funny in your brain, you're sort of like, That's funny, that's funny. But I was cackling out loud. Yeah. And it was so easy to see, and it was so easy to hear her voice. Yeah. And and part of our idea was that, you know, this is the anti-COVID. This is the a book that gives you everything that we cannot do during COVID, which is travel and have sex with strangers. Exactly. So we were like, let's we have to find the perfect timing where it's not like, ⁓ my God, it's too scary to do something like that, to make something like that, but it is actually wish fulfillment for everybody. ⁓ my God. It was for me. So it was hard to Yeah, and hard to figure out how to shoot it still because it was still, you know, it was slow down before the back vaccine when we shopped it. And so we took it out and everybody was pretty full up on their own things. And so it's obviously sold to Disney. Like in the end, they they got to have it, but just without paying me an overall deal is what it Right. Right. ⁓ I was also simultaneously working on Only Murders in the Building season one, which was also Disney. So they really got all my time and energy just from much less money than they had been paying me before. Do so when you were shopping it, were there any Meet almost meetings besides Disney? Were there any I don't think so. I think it was just like lovely, lovely meetings that they just didn't buy it, you know, which was a surprise. I think that we thought because so many people had tried to get the book for so long, yeah. I thought there would be a lot more options and and there weren't, honestly. I it really was in that time period where it was sort of after it felt like you could sell a lot of different things, especially if you have So a writer like Kristen, who's so experienced and has such an incredible track record. And, you know, I'm always generally have been able to get in the rooms for a pitch. So like the two of us were, it's like we were a pretty good combination, but it was in the time period where everything had shut down and you couldn't really no one was sure what they wanted to spend money on. They had bought a lot of stuff that didn't go during COVID. And, you know, we We we had a hundred thousand conversations about should we stop, should we go, should we not? And ultimately we did. And all the meetings were great. People the book is a huge bestseller. It's in how many languages, Kristen? Seven, five, five languages. Thirty reprints or something. And so many people just out of the blue, go, ⁓ my God, I love that book. I read that book. I saw it in a hostel when I was traveling. Like many So you have a built in audience. Like there was a built in audience. But getting And an audience that's like especially like women like 18 to 40s is really especially your book built an audience, which is what people wanted. That being said, I wrote it as a half hour streaming. So we were pitching to comedy teams. And I think that that also hurt. Like on when we sold it to Freeform, they were like, add 10 pages to make it a 41 minute long quote unquote one hour for Freeform so you can have Double the budget and it's easier to sell internationally, which is what we should have done. It was also, I mean, to their credit, you know, the executive said, I don't know how you s show this story in in a half hour network show, which is really like twenty-two minutes, when we're looking at travel and landscapes. You're getting there. And it was I actually thought that was like one of the smartest things that happened was they said this needs to be longer. And it already felt like, you know, the script, I think Kristen probably you would agree that, you know, even the pilot felt like it's like kind of barely gonna fit. So that was that was quite great. And I think we also felt like with freeform, we were going to get their growing up audience of women. It it did which is what they said they wanted. Which is what they said they wanted. And so even though Freeform, you know, did have a sort of patina on it in a way. ⁓ I think we were like, okay, women, girls growing up, audience, female, everything, let's just lean in and and and Hulu the next day. ⁓ yeah. We just were like, let's lean into that and kind of embrace that, not kind of feel like, wait, free form isn't really the right platform for this because Kristen's voice is pretty spicy. I'll just say. Yeah, but but that being said, ⁓ it was, you know. It's a it's a network that primarily is watched by women. And so we felt like, ⁓ they really will be actually somebody who will back a women's fo a woman's voice and a woman's story that is not about, as I have heard pitched to me over and over again, as what the platforms are looking for, women in peril. Women in peril is a big thing that women like that people like to see women do on television. Women living their lives is not. Really, it's not perilous enough. What are they running from? Everything like isn't perilous enough for women, apparently. Who's going to say women? Yeah. I'm in peril every time I leave my apartment. I'm in peril. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So this is a little different than ⁓ our usual films not made, where we talk about films that get developed, pitched, ad nauseum, script notes, and they don't get made. But this one actually went into production. ⁓ so what happened next? You you guys ⁓ Blair, you're making a budget. You guys are talking about casting. ⁓ Yeah, well first of all we lost our director because what happened was when COVID Before you started we if everyone Before we started if everyone's got their bingo card ⁓ out ⁓ could punch that. That's right. So we everybody made our deals and it took a while and then the deal was made and then Susanna Fogel got two of her movies greenlit. That had been bashed up from the year of shutdown. Everyone's getting work. Yeah. That's right. It just only was gone. Part of the story of not getting films made actually really interfered with us trying to get a TV series made because Susanna, who's an independent filmmaker, independent director, you know, was her baby, her project. And so she left, which left us a little bit out in the cold. And also, you know, all the buyers and Freeform when we sold it had. That was she was part of the equation. So so we lost some time there. We had to find ⁓ another director. So then we went into the casting process, which was kind of the same thing, which was them going, This person, this person, this person. They tried to cast a man in the lead role. Yeah, right. Exactly. Like just, you know, everyone's busy. Yeah. So that was really difficult and and and challenging. They just kind of wanted the same old, same all. Who was their top choice? Can you tell us? Well, we made an offer to an actress. Can we s should we say yeah? Yeah, we were very excited about Meredith Hagner. Everybody was excited. I I was like, would die for her. Amazing. And had a great meeting. But she didn't want to do freeform. She literally had because it was free form. Right. You know, it was a little bit like low small cable to like most people are like, What's free form? Yes. Yeah, like eighty percent of the people I would it's on freeform would say, What is freeform? You know, is it a maxi pad? I don't know what it is. It does sound like that. It's both. It does. It's not a great rebrand. ⁓ As we know, it's now dead. So yeah. So we kept looking and looking, and they just kept saying, These are like the five people that we'll say yes to. And we went back into You know, the pile and we're looking, and I think she was like number sixty or something or forty-five or something on a test. But we looked at her again, and there was something that we all went, well, we all, which was really Kristen and myself and our two casting directors, like, wait, something's here. And we were like, This show is gonna make her star. She is she is Kristen. As an actress, as a younger person. Isn't it incredible when you see that and know that? I produced a film called Secretary, and we had this young actress, Maggie Gyllenhall, come in. and like we're we're like we're like, we think there's something, but she's we can't fund the film on her. Then she would come she auditioned for us like three or four times. And we were like, ⁓ we're just we gotta go for it. We just we just have to. You know, and when you just know, you just know, right? You just know. We knew. And it felt like that with Chelsea, Chelsea Fry, who was tremendous. And and so then they said, go make your pilot. And we went to Latvia to Riga. Were you set? We went to Riga, which is a phenomenal city. But when we were shooting there, there was a full COVID lockdown. We had to be in we had there was a car feud. So we were off done by 8 p.m. You had to stay in your hotel from 8 p.m. till 5 a.m. the next day. And you had to do all the testing like every day, right? Like all that stuff. Yeah. It was a very experimental, like very draconian testing where it went way, way up your nose and also in your mouth and sometimes in that order. And there'd be the person smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee while they did it and then sticking the it was very it was it a government official ⁓ doing it? Plus the Disney official. Plus a Disney official with us who we were constantly. You were you were shooting Latvia Riga for Russia? Or you were shooting Latvia for Latvia? No, it was for Russia. I wrote about ⁓ my the pilot episode was about a trip I took with my best friend and her mother to Russia for their first time since they had immigrated when my friend was three. We went when we were like twenty eight and ⁓ and had this very wild time and ⁓ there might have been a boyfriend at home. And so that i i i in in the pilot, the character like realizes she needs to like live her life and comes home, breaks up with the guy, and determines to like live a bigger, bigger world, you know? You know, we we did ⁓ chemistry reads with ⁓ kind of romantic partners ⁓ from LA between Chelsea and the men that we were auditioning. And there were, you know, actors in Russia. And Disney was like, you obviously cannot have Whatever Sputnik vaccine is not gonna do it for yes. You cannot have Russian actors. No, like absolutely not. It can't happen. It's not gonna happen. There's three vaccines they can have. We have to have CE, all kinds of documentation. Like, no, no, no. We care a lot. And so I'm like, okay, we found this guy, Dima. And he and Chelsea had a chemistry read that we felt Uncomfortable being in. Yeah, with this personality was melting. It was too much. So this kid took got on a train for 30 hours, went to one of the other Baltic nations, stayed with an ex-girlfriend for the night, got a shot, had to have a video of himself getting the shot and a piece of paper signed, and I think a phone call with the Disney lawyer. And then took the train back so he could be in his play the next day in Moscow. And it got done. Everyone's like, Do whatever it takes to get this man. Yes. So we got him. And so we all go to Latvia and here is Dima. And and we and we find this incredible actor to be the best friends, like romantic partner. Yeah. And the four of them are just like it's like a house on fire. Like the two women fall in best friend love. Yeah. Everybody's chemistry is amazing. It's re we're we are all in with bags over our heads all day while we're shooting in this the like schools were shut. The whole thing was shut down. Everything was shut down. Three months earlier, if we had the original director when we were gonna shoot sunshine open, great. But now it's November and it's a complete all country shutdown. But it's joy. Like joy happens, you know. Well once they saw the pilot, because the pilot was so perfect. For for me, I think it's the best pilot I've ever produced. It was mag everything worked. So then what happened is that Putin invaded the Ukraine and then Disney said we can't promote a pilot. We can't promote a show with girls having fun in Russia. And I think Kristen and I, I mean, I was crying on the phone. But we were saying people don't fall in love with politicians. They phone people they fall in love with culture. We argued ourselves silly and they said too bad you have to do another pilot. So Kristen who is But the series was still green lit. The series is green lit. But we had to do to do the pilot. ⁓ my gosh. And they would pay for it, right? So yeah. But it was only at like a third of the pilot because the pilot was LA. They decide to go to Russia. Right. There's the trip. They come back from Russia. They're in LA. And at the end of the pilot, she leaves for her first solo adventure in Argentina. So we just had to lift out Russia and I stuck in Iceland. ⁓ Sure. Not easy. Not easy. So you have a you have a new pilot. You're and then you go to Argentina and you shoot the rest ten episodes total, right? Ten episodes ten one hour episodes total in four countries Latvia, Iceland, LA, its own country. It's a country and Argentina. Yeah, and Argentina and finished shooting in Argentina, I think two weeks before the strike. Two weeks before the strike. Before the writer's strike. The writer strike. Before the writer strike. We had editors in LA, so Post was sort of up and running. Everything had at least a director's cut. ⁓ and I had I had Yeah. All ten episodes had director's cuts. And I had done like I had done network cuts, like many multiple rounds of network cuts for five of them. And then two more I had producers cuts of. We had everything in the can, but Kristen was put in the horrible position that so many creators, directors, writers were at the moment, which is do you continue to edit as a showrunner or do you work in solidarity with your colleagues and shut down posts during the strike? There were people who r I think like Ryan Murphy kept working as a showrunner. He's just I mean can you explain that? Can you unpack that a little bit for our audience? Why would a writer's strike Affect the show. Yeah. So the Writers Guild position, which was not, it was not a law. They couldn't say that it was officially scabbing to edit, but their position was that it was, and that editing is writing. And specifically for my show, it was a voiceover show. And you know, like my original pilot was an hour and 20 minutes that I had to cut down to 44, right? The way one does that is with a lot of voiceover. Yeah. And ⁓ and so you have to write. You have to write. And like a lot of showrunners were were talking about the dilemma of of what to do in this moment. And and Kristen, you you wrote something quite beautiful about it as well. Because everybody was like, what are we all doing? Yeah. Like, you know, what should we do? And ⁓ and so I wanted to publicly post that I wasn't going to edit. So that other showrunners would just know what we were all, you know, like here's what I'm up to, you know. And I was like, I'm gonna I'm I feel uncomfortable while people are not working. And I even was like, Thank you to Freeform for pausing it all and not trying to finish it without me. Like they're, you know, valuing the right stories and I appreciate that. Right. And so I was trying to be really careful. That got, you know, photographed by somebody and was on deadline the next day. That's right. That's what I was referring to. Yeah. Yeah. So it got very public. you know, very fast. Right. ⁓ I don't know. I tried to change your mind. Yeah. What was their yeah? What was the reaction? ⁓ people were like, you know, you're the Queen of Hollywood today, and probably Disney hated me forever, probably. I mean, I tried to be complimentary to them about it all, but obviously like it was April, it was gonna come out in August. Like it was a done deal. So I really was like, it's gonna push this. They're like, you're not gonna come out now till the next year. I'm like, that's heartbreaking, but Okay. But like they'd spent fifty million dollars. Like I just it never occurred to me that it would go away. Never. Yeah, it does. Fifty million. Holy crap. Fifty million. And it but I mean. That's a big write down. Yeah. But then so I think Kristen, just to sort of pick back up where you left off. So then the strike ends on I think a Monday or Tuesday. I had been speaking to the studio saying where I'd been speaking to the studio and the editors trying to like Patch the hole as a non-writer, you know, producer just going like, We're ready, we're ready. Are are the editors ready? Is post ready? Everybody's ready. We had everybody like this ready to drop in so we could hit the ground running, pick back up where we left off, and Kristen could go back to, you know, being the showrunner creator and get it done. So on Friday and then I get this bam. And then I and then I get this crazy phone call. That summer there was the whole deal. ⁓ wit between Disney and Spectrum, which for a minute Spectrum kicked all the Disney platforms, including ESPN, off of Spectrum. And the way that they were able to make that deal was by dropping like seven or nine linear platforms from Disney's portfolio to make the deal, which it didn't do. So it was a ploy to show the loss. It was a tax write-off. They that is, you know, they we're we're we're not airing the show. In order to take the tax write off. Right. I called Kristen. Kristen was apoplectic. I mean, I was it was just horrible, horrible, so heartbreaking and just did not feel real at all. And like, how could that decision be made? We were done. Like we shot it was such a There's no it seems like there's no sense to that. You know, could they still air it? Could that could it still get or like who has the rights now? Because yeah this is a question. Your book ⁓ you know there had to be a purchase of the rights to the book that that went to make the free form or the studio or the LLC or whatever, right? So you don't I have the rights to the book, but they have the rights to all of the scripts and everything we shot. Right. Right. So you did you get the rights back or you never or you crafted the deal in that way? Well, I've always yeah, the the book is mine to do with what I choose. Yeah. But the but the show is not. And so we shopped it. The whoever you shop it to would have to obviously pay back that cost. Yeah. Or what or not, because you know, they can choose to you know make one dollar instead of zero dollars if they want. True. ⁓ but what is confusing is that to confusing to people who are like in charge of things like studio finances and heads of agencies and it's confusing to them too. Is this question of if you make a dollar, do you then have to undo that full $50 million write-off? And also, especially given that the studio that took the write down is Freeform Studios. We just sold it to Freeform and Freeform Studios, which is just it's just freeform. Doesn't exist. Yeah. And it doesn't exist. So it doesn't exist anymore. There's not it's sort of unencumbered. ⁓ if people are ⁓ interested in this. We were like I was like all we need to do is raise enough money to finish it and put it on like let's make a website and just like five books episode. Yeah. Yeah, YouTube. Yeah. Well we ⁓ you know ⁓ when we we started to ⁓ talk to you about about it ⁓ the idea was well what if we took the ⁓ The original material, right? So the so the book. And ⁓ because ⁓ the series has already been produced and and and and waiting for ⁓ someone to to to breathe life back into it, ⁓ why don't we see about ⁓ developing it very quickly as a feature and producing the ⁓ packaging materials ⁓ via our ⁓ our AI pipeline to ⁓ see what we might come up with. ⁓ my gosh. What is behind door number three? Exactly. Welcome to our show. So what we do Javi, let's take us take Yeah. So what we do is we we to we take all the stuff. We take ⁓ all the well well basically we we start with the sc with the sometimes it's a script, but in this case it was it was Kristen's novel. And ⁓ it gets it goes through ⁓ many stages that are ⁓ are now fairly automated. The the entire book gets broken down ⁓ into ⁓ certain story classifications and then we ask it to cast the ⁓ first ⁓ four principal roles and ⁓ help us create ⁓ a pitch deck and a trailer. So we're gonna look at the pitch deck first. and I'm gonna share it. I know like I don't even know if I can look. ⁓ Now we have some disclosures. Films Not Made uses AI to reimagine movies that were never produced. All development materials, pitch decks, trailers, and posters, are AI generated. Any likeness of real people are speculative and synthetic. No real actors participated in their creation. This is cultural commentary not endorsed by any individual or studio referenced. Just so we can ⁓ describe it to people who aren't watching this ⁓ on YouTube. ⁓ the cover ⁓ the the cover image is of ⁓ w a young woman, ⁓ who would be the the character, the main character, Casey, on a it's probably Argentina, maybe No, for sure. It's it's in she's in front of El Al Tineo, which is the famous Bookstore that used to be a big theater. We shot we shot it out. We shot there. ⁓ so it knew somehow. Well, hello. It did. And good work. And we've got the title, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding. We have this great image of a passport that looks like it's from the nineteen forties. I can't lie. Has a lot of pages. A lot of pages. Good work. And and a paper boarding pass. Boarding pass, yeah. and a little espresso. A very small coffee, a non-American sized coffee. ⁓ the log line. We ask it for a log line and and a pitch, and the log line it wrote is a sitcom writer who spent a decade turning heartbreak into passport stamps and foreign love affairs must finally face the question she's been outrunning. Was all that freedom just the longest way home? This is the romantic comedy about what happens after you run out of continence. And the comp it puts there is fleabag meets before sunrise. The the look is ⁓ the genre is sun fade passport romanticism. ⁓ every frame looks like a photograph from the best day of a trip you are all already nostalgic for. Oversaturated highlights, golden haze, Kodak Portra. Hmm. Portra's like a film. Film stock, like from the nineties. ⁓ warmth that feels borrowed rather than owned. The color shifts with geography, but the light stays consistent, warm and slightly blown out, as if seen through the window of a departing plane. Argentina pushes warmest, airports stripped to institutional sodium. The beauty ⁓ has a shelf life built into every frame. Wow. That's basically what we did. We and it was interesting. I Ben and ⁓ Ben Kasulki and Becca had I thought a really beautiful idea to shoot the LA parts of it in regular TV frame and then shot the anything traveling was in like 16 by an hour. Yeah, was in a big movie aspect ratio. ⁓ cool. I love that. And yeah, it was cool. It made like her literally the frame as her world got bigger, the frame got bigger and she would always be smaller in the frame and in T V land in LA, she was kind of more trapped by it all and the a and w we we colorized everything warm whenever we were traveling anywhere and and the c and the production design and wardrobe colors were really vivid. And in LA it was more like the kind of her version of LA, the like blown out gorgeous bright not not fantasy. Not fantasy LA, fancy, gorgeous, you know, dreamy LA. Just kinda like you're working on a T V show LA. That's right. You're driving on the four ⁓ five L. It's Van Eyes. It's too hot. Yeah. It's too bright. Then we have casting, right? We have casting. ⁓ first up, Casey. We have the image of the first choice, which is Maya Hawk. that's the AI picks ⁓ three choices and gives a little kind of one one one word description. Incandescent. Yeah, incandescent. ⁓ Catherine Newton disarming or ⁓ Rachel I don't I don't know Katherine Newton that well. ⁓ I do know she's from my hometown Orlando, Florida, but that's about I don't know. What do you do did you ⁓ how's this? Do any of these ring ⁓ ring true to you or she looks like she's having a good time. Neither of us brush our hair. Yeah. We do ask it to to to to generate the image in in situ of the of the film. Next up is is Juan, quiet Argentine gaucho who devastate whose devastating honesty forces Casey to see her own pattern for the first time. Is that even true to the the plot? ⁓ I don't know about pattern so much. A little bit, a little bit, but certainly the devastating honesty, the sort of sweetness. Like that's this guy and his Sweet vibe, not like smoldering, but more ⁓ more kind of he was almost a priest and he had that kind of like lighter thin vibe. The next actor is Lorenzo Farrow, who is actually Argentinian. He's the only one who is actually an Argentinian. Apparently smoldering. Yeah. ⁓ Sholos in Cobra Kai, apparently. ⁓ okay. Apparently. People love that show. Yeah. He's like big. my husband does 'cause he's from the eighties in the Valley. Okay. Exactly. So he'll know he'll know that this time. He'll know that. Next up we have ⁓ Hope, the best friend. Great. She's great. I love her. She's amazing. Take IO. Yeah. ⁓ she's the best friend who answers every sobbing airport phone call for a decade without once saying, I told you so. ⁓ after casting, we we get some ⁓ just storyboard frames ⁓ from the the supposed film. ⁓ it looks like Casey ⁓ just you know at a at a dance club, hands over hand. I mean, it kind of looks like our show. Truly. That's amazing. It really does. It didn't watch the show. It did not we did not show it the show ⁓ or or any anything like that. It we this is strictly from the novel, and and the style and then of course the the casting. ⁓ so ⁓ So we have Maya Hawk who looks ⁓ forlorn in a airport, an empty airport, ⁓ somewhere. Yeah, it's COVID. There was just a there was just a a bomb scare of some kind. Exactly. Yeah. And we have Maya Hawk looking out the window of an airplane. She's landing maybe back in LA. I don't know. It's city for sure. She doesn't look happy about it. I think she's definitely coming home. She's r returning to her work. ⁓ and then we have like a Big happy cable with art stage. Red wine. right. In Argentina. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the crew dinner. Yeah. If only. Yeah. But we also shot this scene. Like they went to one of her f her her the friends that she makes in Argentina. ⁓ her family has an Astonsium so all of the buddies all go out there. And they have exactly this picnic basically. That's what it is. Under screen lights and yeah. Mm-hmm. Absolutely stunning. Amazing. And then the dance party. Look, we had that both in in Latvia and in Argentina. And in our and in Iceland, too. Yeah. And then we do just some bios. my God, what is going on with me? I look so weird. I was like, who's that? Well, apparently it's you. ⁓ And again, we ask it to do an image of you in My Facelift is amazing. Kind of in situ ⁓ of the film or or You're writing some notes on You're a writer, so apparently you're writing in it looks like a like a day book planner. Forget the laptop on the curb, you know, pounding out new pages. You've got like a leather covered bound notebook. My hair has been blown out. Yeah. It's incredible, my blowout. Amazing blowout. Like the perfect blowout. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to say this is amazing because I'm often like like I don't do all the stuff, you know, in my face. Yeah. And I'm always like, what like and and and to like so and I'm like, ⁓ this is what I would look like if I did all the things and look like look like all the people who do all the things. This is me looking like everyone else. Yeah. I'm definitely like a blair. And then Blair Breed. ⁓ Blair. With a little blazer. Look at your blazer. Yeah. There's like cameras behind you and lights. C stands. Look at that. It says Do you have that outfit, Blair? I have that I've actually one like my IMDB photo, I think maybe has that shit. And then I do have that shirt. Yes. It says Blair Breard is a six-time Emmy nominated producer whose credits include Louie, Better Things. Baskets, one Mississippi, scenes from a marriage, and the other two. They grabbed much better credits for you than for me. Yeah. Through her company Bossy Boots, she has a first look deal with FX Productions. Not anymore. I mean, that's like 10 years ago. I don't have that deal. And it's about 10 years old. I was gonna pitch you something if you did. So I'm glad to know. That's funny. ⁓ my goodness. That was a moment. The closing on this pitch deck is the ⁓ why this story, why now? it says the conversation about women choice and timelines has never been louder or more confused. Every week brings another think piece about freezing eggs or having it all or the loneliness epidemic among single women. This story cuts through the noise with something radical. A woman who chose adventure, chose freedom, chose herself. And does not apologize for the decade it took to get ready for love. It is not a cautionary tale. It is a not a fairy tale. Nope. It is the rare romantic comedy that believes a woman's thirties are not a countdown. They are a curriculum. A curriculum. It's like something to do, something to learn? ⁓ yeah. I'm not sure. Guideline. ⁓ It's sad as And also curriculum doesn't sound fun. Well, yeah, the ending process. Okay, maybe. Maybe it's a learning process, maybe. Yeah. And I like that it's not a cautionary tale, it's not a fairy tale. I think that gets told it correctly. That's really helpful. I like that. All right. Okay, let's watch the trailer. Ready for the trailer. Okay. All right. I don't know if I am. Maybe I'll be inspired. Maybe it's gonna be great. ⁓ yeah. Senior. Here's who I used to be. I love you too. I also write sitcoms. It doesn't sound like a real job. And it sort of isn't. We're not a house of aspiring writers anymore. At home, these words pos impossible choice. Do you want love or freedom? You have the soul of a traveler. And what real travelers know, it is better to be free than loved. Iceland. I love this. But the question that's really been on my mind is, get your shit together. What have I done with my decade? With my 30s? Girl, you really should have froze those eggs in your twenties. If you want to ride to the airport, will you marry me? Ouchou. And then the whole town came running to see the feast. It's not that I'm brave. I'm just comforted by things that scare other people. Look at that stamp. And I'm terrified of things other people find comforting. Whoa! She frames. Now I wish I just didn't have to learn how to be alone. Alone. Four steps. So, where are you off to next? Argentina. We met yesterday. So scary. Coming soon. It's so fascinating because it's like so good at making very realistic looking. humans and scenes and things that look like they've absolutely happened, but the people just don't speak the way or move the way people speak and move. Like the natural like there's d and the and the pace of the the pace of the whole thing is unnatural and weird. It's like clunk a little weird. But it's also like weirdly scary. I mean because I I mean I feel like there are there are things it looks perfect. Yeah, and the trailer that I was like, wait, that's like what we did. That's what we shot. That looks like where we were. It's it's it's a little warm. Yeah. Well, it's you know, it it it it's trained on all those photos that everybody's taken in all those places, you know. ⁓ my god. So it's ⁓ but it's like the thing that is missing is just like how humans actually are. Yeah. Versus this messing. Flaw or messy. Messy. Things are perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Like and the thoughts, the thoughts that it puts together for the trailer don't connect to each other. It's you know, it's like commenting on things that didn't happen and it's not it's not giving you a story, but it looks perfect. Mm-hmm. That's amazing. Thank you for doing that. What a joy it was to get to see all of that. It's maybe it's it's it it doesn't make me feel like, ⁓ now I know what the movie is. I still don't know, wouldn't know how to write the movie necessarily, like what what to pick out from the book to turn into a movie. I know how to cut my ten episodes into a movie. Like that's also my dream, is that if there weren't four directors and Disney would give me the dailies, I would absolutely just cut it. Okay, we have one more ⁓ fun activity. ⁓ what we like to do at the end here is is we since we've shown you the new packaging stuff we came up to was to actually just just try to get a a ten minute meeting with ⁓ with our own ⁓ creative executive that we can ⁓ get in ⁓ get into the the our session here to ⁓ see what they think about rebooting the SES. Yeah, we have an LA executive that that joins us for a minute. How wonderful. 'Cause I know you guys want to fix it again. Yeah. Hey Amy, hey Avi. Hi Kristen. Hi Blair. Give me one second. I'm pulling up the pages and the deck. If we keep it to Argentina and make it a contained trip, the ending can carry more weight as a look, that one lingering moment before parting that suggests possibility but doesn't lock it down. The thing is, it's stronger if that look is earned through shared stakes earlier. Would you want that look to feel like closure or like an open invitation? Yeah, I think it should feel like possibility. Yeah, possibility plays well here. If we've watched them in Buenos Aires go from strangers to co-conspirators, then that final look can carry a charge. You believe they might meet again, but you also buy it if they don't. The win is letting the audience feel both. How much ambiguity are you comfortable with in that beat? Hey Meredith, I'm gonna jump in. I'm a producer. I have some questions about the financing. ⁓ you know, I'm here ⁓ with Blair, my producing partner on the project. And ⁓ you know, we want to know ⁓ like who are your buyers for this? Are you guys financing? What are your budget ranges? talk to us about what you can do for us. Okay, if we're talking buyers, this is a sweet spot for streamers who want female forward travel romance with comedy chops. Think Netflix, Amazon, maybe Hulu. Budget wise with multiple international locations, but no heavy VFX, you're probably in the mid-single digit millions. Are you aiming for streamer licensing or a full negative pickup? We don't know. Not sure, Meredith. I think I think we need to go. Meredith, do you guys ⁓ validate parking? Can we talk to your assistant? I didn't even get a water. No one offered me a glass of water or That was amazing. She's a politician. I wish I could be better at that at just ignoring the question and sticking with what you were gonna say. You say this is like media training one on one. A hundred training. Wow. Yeah, that was amazing. She's amazing. That was so creepy. The way that she had that kind of like Bored vocal fry. Like Avi, did you give it that directive or did it just know that that's what it should be? Well, the I mean there's there there's a there's there's a lot of system instructions in there, but being bored isn't one of them. It just knew. It just knew. That was great. This is a super fun time. You know, I I think this is just this has been so awesome because we've never had something that that got made. And then we're st we are trying to re enter it into ⁓ into the the discourse. and ⁓ I it's just fantastic material. I mean, honestly. ⁓ I mean what I don't know what else we can say. Yeah, thank you. ⁓ thank you guys so much. Thank you, Blair. Thank you, Kristen. Thank you. Okay. Talk to you later. You've been listening to Films Not Made, but if you want an even better experience, check us out on YouTube where you can see all the new materials, including the pitch deck and trailer. And subscribe to our Sub Stack for show notes, more about our guests, and industry insights. And please follow us on Instagram and TikTok as FilmsNotMade. And of course, we have merch. Check that out and all things films not made at filmsnotmade.com. Thanks again for listening and watching. We'll see you next time.