Films Not Made: Hi, I'm Amy Hobbie. And I'm Avi Zev Weider, and this is Films Not Made. Where we invite directors, producers, and writers and talk about their favorite projects that were developed and never went into production. And then we take their original materials, we put it through our own AI pipeline, and we create a new deck and trailer. Then to round it out, we have a quick conversation with our own creative AI executive. Could this project be made now? Should it have been made back then? Or are we just giving our guests a little closure? Welcome to Films Not Made. Today's guest is Natalie Weiss, multifaceted storyteller. She writes music, musicals, she's written an opera, children's television show. She's been commissioned by the Wooster Group, ⁓ Brooklyn Philharmonic. She's collaborated with Mark Ronson, the band Fisher Spooner, remember them? And I'm a huge fan of her off-Broadway musical Camp Wanatachi. which played a run in New York City at La Mama and had incredible reviews and I saw it twice. I love it so much. So yeah, welcome Natalie. Thanks for having me. When we first started ⁓ talking about the show, this was like one of the first projects that Amy immediately wanted to ⁓ circle back around to. Certainly for me, it's totally unique because it's a children's show. ⁓ It's called DJ Natalie's Neighborhood. ⁓ And why don't you just start us off, give us like the short pitch of it. Yeah. DJ Natalie's Neighborhood is a show for families and it's Pee-wee's Playhouse meets Mr. Roger's Neighborhood set to a DJ beat. And trying to take some of my life in Brooklyn, coming up with like these zany roommates and all these troubles we had and make that the setting for Baby DJ School, which is an actual business that I started and Baby DJ School would take place at the apartment. so instead of, you know, my helper being, you know, some actress I hired to help me in my music class, it's like my amazing horse roommate, Hey, hey, Monet. You know, and I just got to use songs that already existed in the Baby DJ School universe. Baby DJ School is a music education program built around pedagogical kids music. So it's like we've got a house music beat and we're building a house or there's a jungle beat and we're acting like animals in the jungle. And it's all about teaching musical concepts through songs. So how old are the kids in baby DJ school? We started two months. Two months? to five years. Two months to five years because that's like when the brain is the most plastic and the most receptive to information. And I feel like anything that can be taught with joy can enrich a child. So if you're teaching a child about mathematics, but you're like giving it to them like, that is two plus two, you know? And I felt like if we were teaching a skill that the parents would be able to brag about knowing, they're like, well, yeah, I use tractor, but digital for a couple of years, you know, like if they're learning something too, they're not on their phone and it models happy learning for the kids. Plus if the parents think it's like cool, they're taking a picture, they're paying attention, they're not zoning out like when they're hearing wheels on the bus for the umpteenth time, you know? Baby DJ school had this like viral success. We were on the cover of the New York Post before we had our first class. We, which is, you know, me and my ⁓ conception of myself. Were you hosting this out of your apartment? No, it was worse. I did it out of vintage store who was not counting on like a multinational media circus. They were like, yeah, come do a kids music class. It'll be like a little something. And it's like, the Associated Press and like Russia and like everybody's taking turns getting five minutes of the class. So it, the kind of success of that made me say like, maybe there's something I can bring to like a larger audience that can be interesting for children and for adults, just like the classes. So you're saying you were, you had the business going for, ⁓ for how long before you had the inspiration for, to transform it. to DJ Natalie's Neighborhood. I would say two years. I'd been like it kind of had my first class in September 2013 and my background is like a, you know, a composer and a playwright and I worked like the characters. So it seemed really natural for me to just put this in a setting with a narrative and the guy who had been making the beats for the baby DJ school songs, I was like, okay, this is the idea. And then the beat, like it sounds like it's a kid's song. And then the beat drops and he gets like the concept and it's like funny. so working with him, Matthew Young, who's so talented and can do any genre, made it fun too. Because I just like, once we wrote this theme song together, it just kind of congealed. I was involved with DJ Natalie's Neighborhood. In 2016, Natalie emailed me ⁓ with a script and an idea. At that point, it was Broad City meets PewDiePie's Playhouse. ⁓ I'm curious, did you meet any... A little more insider and cool actually. Yeah. lot of ways you can go there. Yeah. Did you meet with other people before me? Like, was there like who read the script first? You have the pilot script already at that point. You were the first person. Like I, you're the, I mean, I'm sorry. My world is like music and like barely into like theater and musical theater and opera. Like I've kind of found my way into that. So you were someone who was just like fun and I felt like might have fun producing it. And there was, I was like a huge fan of the work of yours that I'd seen. So I was like, well, if she can imagine You know, whatever my biggest reference at the time was Secretary, which is like one of my favorite movies to this day. Hey, look at that. Hey, there she is. Yeah. And I just thought, you know, like, let's see if I can I can get a meeting with you because I know you a little bit. Plus the the baby DJ school thing had been trending. So I thought, like, let's capitalize on this if I can. At the time, I had a company called Tangerine Entertainment and ⁓ our company only did films directed by women. So we were focused on female identifying content creators. And you know, we had a bit of a team there. I had a development person, my producing partner, Hubble, we had a production person and even an assistant. Those were the days. And we had, we set up a meeting and you came into the office and the team was Honestly, really wowed by you ⁓ personally and your pitch. Everyone thought you were so charismatic. You sang part of the theme song for us. Really, it was a green light from us. ⁓ Not that we had money. Can we hear the song? Yes, you can. ⁓ The beat is kind of what makes it ⁓ I think a little anachronistic, but the melody is DJ Natalie's neighborhood where beats are dope and life is good. DJ Natalie's neighborhood come mix along with me. love it. I love it. It's so good. Did you have storylines already there? Like what was the strategy for developing it? Did you come in and be like, I got this story and that story in this format or? just kind of walk us through how Yeah, it was basically like, imagine you're at Pee Wee's Playhouse, but the whole setting is like a DJ trying to make it in New York instead of like, but it's like the place is alive in the way everything is at Pee Wee's Playhouse. When I came up as a kid, I had like a teacher type figure that I watched. was like Pee Wee's Playhouse or Mr. Rogers. or even, you know, lamb chops. Like there was an adult who I was like, dang, let me learn from you. Did you grow up in New York? No, I grew up in Orlando, Florida. You know, one of the things that ⁓ occurred to me while I was ⁓ going through the materials was this, ⁓ you would have never seen it growing up in Orlando, but there was this local show, it actually was produced in Hartford, because I looked it up, called Marlowe and the Magic Movie Machine, which was this very strange local show about this guy who works in the basement of this big corporation and he has this machine that is like basically like some sort of AI computer. Of course, this is like 1979 and it plays film clips. He like punches in buttons and it plays these film clips and anyway, and it reminded me your show. where they have a problem and then they go and visit some place, there was something reminiscent about that and now you talking about these early shows as a kid watching it and how that influenced you, just popped into my head. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I would have been able to, like there was just a cool thing happening in the 80s when I, was watching TV, was like a very psychedelic time. was like people like, yeah, weird animation history. you know, like Miss Piggy was this just drag goddess, like, she, you know what I mean? Also very psychedelic and genderqueer, like Gonzo, like we don't even know what he is. Why does he like rubber rubber chickens? Like, I don't know if you know, Gonzo from The Muppet. It was also around the time of Avenue Q, right? When around 2016, right? It was a little bit earlier, but it was still in like the zeitgeist. Rick Lyons made the puppets for Avenue Q and we were in conversation with him about- Yeah, I remember. I love puppets. I came to New York to do puppets. That's what I thought I was here to do. And then I realized like at the absolute highest level, puppeteers are still broke. Like maybe... There's very few venues for that. There's one in Park Slope called Puppet Works. That is a really, you know the place? Yeah. Yeah. And then there's Williams. Sixth Avenue. There's Puppetsburg as well. There's a couple of places. Puppetsburg. was also. There's a Williamsburg and Greenpoin or something. There was also ⁓ Story Pirates. They started a whole thing, which I thought was really funny. they did have a, they probably still do maybe have a podcast, which I thought was super fun. We used to take the kids and make the kids listen to it. Yeah, and my whole thing with the kids is ⁓ I babysat for so many years. I had like no skill sets besides like writing musicals and Like the lights. It's a perfect CV for ⁓ babysitting. Exactly. I'm like, you're, yeah, exactly. And that's how the DJ classes started was just like kind of like being kind of bored when I babysat and like, but let me, I had my DJ equipment with me to go to ⁓ a gig afterwards. And then I was like, well, you guys should play with this. And then I realized how much they liked it. And I was suffering through these. mommy and me music classes that I would take this wonderful family I worked with. Oh, I know the pain. Oh, you know the pain. I have triplets, Natalie. He triplets. Two boys and a girl. had DJ baby school. And we did music together and music for Aardvarks. Those two are like. icons, I don't know if you like from a business standpoint, like those are. Oh, I'm sure they rake it in. I mean, music together does, but music for our works is like a lot of inspiration there. Oh, yeah. And then when I thought like, is like if I make this a show, we can make it like I'm pretending to lug my record player and 12 pairs of headphones from, you know, place to place instead of like actually having to lug my stuff around. So that was the inspiration for the class and the class was the inspiration for the show and I could bring together things I liked. But I ended up learning, God, Amy just like, I got stuff I can go on my gravestone because of Amy. I got to pitch to everybody and like I didn't. I didn't, you it wasn't picked up, but I can say like, ⁓ my grave, like I've been at the Disney Junior office, like, you know what mean? Yeah, so, yeah, so let's back up a little bit. So Natalie came in for the meeting ⁓ and the whole team loved ⁓ the pitch so much. I do want to state that my company had ⁓ no experience with children's television whatsoever. So a green light from us was sort of a dubious green light, but we had a lot of enthusiasm and we figured like we could figure it out, right? We'll find a way. Like that's just how Ann Helble and I would roll. ⁓ So our first idea was to attach like a big name DJ as an executive producer. And Natalie had a list of people that she knew or admired. ⁓ You know, we figured that could like help get us in the door at some of the companies. Natalie, do you remember who some of those were? I think Diplo was like pretty big at the time and Mark Ronson, I hadn't done anything with him yet, but he was like a DJ whose name people knew. And I felt like, you know, I knew somebody he was on his, you know, on his like NTS is like a cool internet radio show. He was a guest on his NTS show, so maybe if he feels like it, he can do an intro. Like I threw parties for years. I have more connections in that world than I do on children's television. That's for sure. Yeah, and ⁓ Queen Latifah was on the list at the time. We wanted to be sort of more female creators. We went into a pretty quick development process. ⁓ At the time I had an amazing development person named Elizabeth Caden. She gave Natalie some notes and Natalie went away to a writers retreat, I think, and then came back addressing all the notes super fast. Yeah, the cool thing it was most people on the retreat were puppeteers. It was like an all-purpose like I didn't know that I didn't remember that. So at the completion of it I had like puppeteers read it. So they got to do the accents they would do. And they were so they were like, ⁓ this is gonna this this is no no question this is gonna happen. Just please let me be on it. You know, the just great ⁓ support from people who are also making super fascinating, deep puppetry work. So that was that was ⁓ the greatest place to develop it. It was just really fun. ⁓ You know, like having like pretend people in my mind and having them do things together and sing and dance together. Yeah, it's like about as fun as it gets. It's that. So I was a blast. Yeah. And there was an initial deck that you had sent the very first early deck, which, ⁓ you know, my team thought it should be more slick, I guess. So but I looking back, I kind of really like that first deck. We've got characters here. We've got DJ Natalie and kids. And some kids. Yeah. It says if Mr. Rogers or Barney was a late twenties hipster, that would be her. Sole lease holder of her magical four bedroom apartment. That is magical. Yeah, that's unheard New York, probably at any time. thing a lot of people, I mean, people don't know, who aren't in New York is being the leaseholder of apartment is almost like being a landlord. Like it's like you can split it up and market it how you want to and decorate it how you want to and can be its own business. And the place I was staying at the time had four bedrooms like on each corner. And I always had such characters in there. And then we would all convene in this center space. So it was like a, it worked. okay. Yeah. Did you have a horse staying with you? Like Ms. Hey Hey? Miss Heihei Bonet. No, we didn't. had some, I didn't have any drag artists that ever lived with me, but I certainly had some huge, huge personalities. And at the time, think RuPaul's Drag Race was just coming out and like there was just like, ⁓ like camp lives. it was, ⁓ and I had just learned also about this whole, ⁓ the next character. I'm trying to, Kashi, Yeah. The, idea of this peace, love, unity. And they all had this like candy. They would give each other these bracelets and it was just a real childlike sense of like love and acceptance and color at these raves, which was an MDMA. Yeah, exactly. I kind of came up more in like indie rock world where like dudes with long hair were just like, we're unhappy. So, you know, like that whole culture was, as as I found out about that, I was like, that's a cool kind of world. So it pulled from people I knew who were involved in these scenes. The deck goes on through a couple of other, these are sort of like prototypes for ⁓ what then got developed. You have LD, the problem solver, tech savvy. a glow worm and up and coming lighting designer. Lights are so crucial for a party and like a competent dyke is like central to every endeavor. Like, you know, that's, that's what you want. It's true. didn't read LD as queer in the, we'll see later on. Yeah. I'm not quite sure how it went. Okay. original just like an awesome like no-nonsense tech lady from Buffalo who's just like, listen. From Buffalo, I love it. Then we have a daytime, the cheerful audio file, a bluebird from East London. ⁓ that's funny. Again, didn't catch the London thing. It's like a, looks like a blue big bird there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like at the time I had been like, what kind of bird should it be? And David Bowie had just passed, I believe. And his last record, he had all this imagery about a blue bird, like kind of being this, that kind of symbol of the infinite. So it's like, just do a blue bird. So interesting. Shalina, ⁓ the ⁓ mermaid that gets picked up in Rockaway. Mr. Octopus, I wouldn't even get Mr. Octopus later on. Yeah, he was our bad guy. Octopus is great for puppetry because like you can employ several people too for each arm, know, like high employment. Yeah. More puppeteers work. Yeah. Landlord. Greedy merciless. landlord. kind of landlord. For no confusion. No mystery there. And Super Super was the conceit of one of my dads from Baby DJ School and really great actor, Michael Abbott. We just kind of got together and I was like, if you had a kids show, if you were on it, what would you want to be? And the idea of the superhero superintendent is just great. Like a bumbling superhero is like my favorite genre of person. Super. Super Super. Super Super. It's such a New York character too, you know, you're super. I think from a development point of view, The goal was to get the materials to a certain place and then to get Natalie in the room, right? Because Natalie is charismatic and Natalie was a huge asset and the center of the show. So the idea was to get her in the room. I think like that fall, the fall of 2016, we were trying to get the materials a little better. think... Maybe Elizabeth had another round of small notes. We were doing a budget and breakdown. My team, my production person, we did an initial email to talk to someone I knew at HBO who I was close to like easy, what I like to call a lob. It's a pitch that's someone you, it's a lob. And Natalie, you had sent an email to us saying, you know, maybe we should bring on and maybe we had suggested this, someone who that's a television, actual television production company. And, or you had mentioned, and this is only interesting in retrospect, like maybe you would do otherwise just do crowdfunding and do it sort of DIY and film it in the spring. You know, so we were doing this budget and breakdown and I think like, you know, puppets, there was a little bit of ambition to it that would make that a little bit hard, but it was an interesting point of view. you know, the New York part of it, I thought should be a sell. There's so much like broad cities, Sex and the City, a million things set in New York, not to mention like the genesis of children's television, which was Sesame Street was all in New York. The original sets had like trash on the ground. So it was like more like New York. ⁓ And it got super sanitized and That was right when Sesame Street started being under the guidance of HBO, which is my hope. know. That's why we wanted to go to HBO. We're like, ⁓ slam dunk. Yeah. you, I mean, you, you come out with all this, all this, new material, you know, with, with Amy and the group. but then, I mean, and from your perspective, was there like something that just clued you into like, this isn't gonna happen or did it just kinda die on the vine for you? Not even anything like that. They were like, no, we have meetings with Cartoon Network, Disney Junior, Amazon Junior, Netflix. ⁓ And I was like, what? And I got to go to LA and pick out my nail color. But it was such a mind fuck because you guys had been like. We just get you in the room. You're good. Get this girl in there. Okay. Like, I hope so. It's all on you. And then we would get there and I was like, nobody is going to see my personality be or anything because it would be like, the person, because the person from Amazon Jr. would be like, here's what we've done and just talk about themself for like, an hour. Welcome to Hollywood. I was like, is so weird. I've been researching you. know all of this stuff. Shocker. Like, witness me on it. And then the first sentiment I got was like, we want someone that the kid can identify with that's at the center of the show. So like Daniel Tiger's neighborhood is a kid. It's Daniel Tiger. It used to be Mr. Rogers' neighborhood because we used to be like, here's an adult who's going to teach us. And now they're like, They want a kid that we can imagine ourselves as doing the learning instead of it coming down from someone on high, which is I'm sure empowering in lots of ways, but you you don't get like weird, pervy, experimental, like peewee as a kid. you got to, you know, like it's all that stuff and the weirdness in the camp that like gives life color that comes, that comes with not being a child anymore. You know, when I heard that I was like, ⁓ and then it was, so I felt like I was living the life. I've got pictures of my Netflix past. I felt like y'all's tack with me was like, this thing is raging. It's like she's in the Wall Street Journal. She's on, wait, wait, don't tell me. We have all this momentum. We're not gonna wait to spend three years developing a thing. It's like. You can see like she's this thing is on fire and if you want to get on the train, good luck. Yeah. Coming back to the point, we didn't have a lot of experience ourselves with children's television and we didn't know those executives or, you know, I always look to myself like what could we have done better? You know, ⁓ we probably could have gone to a production company that had a track record producing these. But, you know, look, we just were like, This is so obviously unbelievably rad. And of course, someone is kind of green lighted. Well, you did do that. And that's what I took into Sesame Street. And that was also like Dear Diary. And so I was talking to them about the characters. And when they were asking me questions afterwards, they were like, so the Muppets, they would be on set with you. I was like, did you think? Like, did you use the word of my life? So that went great. They like clapped for me when I was done. I was like, all right, well, this is good. And then, you know, you guys threw everything you had at it and we got it in front of like every important kids thing that I knew about. And it was like, you know, they weren't ready for our shit. they, they wanted like sanitize boring ass Daniel Tiger's neighborhood. Like there was an old man with a sweater change and like a live jazz pianist and that's what Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was and then they're like let's redo it make it CGI around like a boring child tiger and it's like yeah that's what was happening so if the momentum had stayed on that project it would have been doing it like an off-broadway show that's a little that's how ⁓ yeah Phoebe's Playhouse started they did just a live show and then people came and they ended up getting more connects. But there was never like a death knoll. I was just like, I think I've reached the point where my emails are bothering people and I think there was like a little bit of a whimper at the end. Like I did find an email where you said like, I met these people who can do a podcast. This is before podcasts were video. Like they're creating audio content for kids. Like maybe it could be a podcast. And I think we were just like, ⁓ yeah, I think there's just always a point where you're like, we're. We can only go down so far. It turns out there is room at the bottom and here you are. Right, right, right, right. Which brings us to the next part. ⁓ You get a, we took all the stuff, all your materials that ⁓ you started with, that you developed with Tangerine, with Amy and Anne and the pitch deck, the scripts. We asked AI to help us create a new deck. and a trailer that we're gonna share with you now. ⁓ And, you know, maybe this is inspiration, maybe it's closure, but ⁓ let's walk through it and ⁓ see what you think. Because it's remarkably different from the first one. 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. For people who are listening as a podcast on audio, we have to describe it a little bit. There's a Brooklyn apartment, I guess, and it says... DJ's Natalie neighborhood in sort of the rainbow colors. What I think is very saleable about this right now is it looks like it could be a YouTube show. Like it looks like it could be like we have this is the world. This is something I could do and like essentially produce on my own and pay for myself. And then if it goes viral, then somebody else can put some money in it. Yeah, we got all the all the characters there. You got all the characters. I mean, this looks cute. actually more like my apartment than the second gen deck, which had like, looked kind of like a lobby at a Disney hotel. Here's the log line that AI wrote for us. When DJ Natalie teaches the word of the day, play. Okay, so first of all, let me back up. The deck is for the pilot episode. Not exactly for the series. So when DJ Natalie teaches the word of the day, play in her magical Brooklyn apartment, the landlord crashes in with an $800 rent hike starting tomorrow, forcing Natalie and her puppet roommates to hatch an absurd plan. Sublet their leaky bathtub, open a magic portal to Rockaway Beach and find a water loving new roommate who turns out to be Shalina the mermaid. And the well, you know what? This is before Mom Donnie, because now you wouldn't have that rent hike. No, no, there's no more rent hikes. So, yeah, your landlord would probably be going to jail. You know, also, there's pink smoke coming from two directions. Yeah. I don't know what's happening there. That's the magic, Amy. Yeah. All right. OK. The kind of elevator pitch is that DJ Natalie's Neighborhood is a live action kids series set in a magical Brooklyn apartment where DJ Natalie runs kids DJ school with her puppet roommates. ⁓ they run it with you. And each episode takes one simple idea like play and turns it into music, movement, ASL, and a joyful field trip. Showing kids that creativity and collaboration aren't just fun, they're how you solve real world problems together. Yeah. All right. The style. African masks on the wall? Yes. That's I've got culture in my back pocket. That's right. The style, we have a page that says style and it shows, you know, basically like a brownstone stoop. You got some records. You got a milk crate of records. I think you're next to a record store too, it looks like. Oh yeah. And it says the style is neon storybook Brooklyn. which is a ⁓ bright live action kids TV look that places magical moments inside a real cozy Brooklyn apartment. This is already just what we have with AI now. Like it looks just more like it. We just had less. We could only work with stock images and photos we took. We couldn't generate images like this. That's But the other problem is that it's like no DJ would ever live in this brownstone. Like no broke DJ with like a roommate who's like also a blue worm. Yeah, we couldn't afford it. So that's part of the- but it's the magical part that hand waves I know, it's a brownstone with like plants and look, there's chalk. Look at the chalk notes. ⁓ that is so cute. So now we have some casting what we're going to breeze through. The first is Okashi, the rainbow furry chaos sprite who communicates in beep squeaks and pure enthusiasm. It is pictured here. He's basically like a rainbow pom-pom with Hello Kitty, you know, ⁓ bracelets in front of a, ⁓ like a sequencer and a MIDI controller, a MIDI controller, sure. ⁓ A touch With a very tiny crate and some tiny records. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's his size. He looks adorable, actually. We've got daytime. Now this is interesting because your daytime originally was like a British ⁓ guy, a cool bluebird crate digger with party promoter confidence and impeccable taste. He lives to hype the room, but underneath the swagger, he genuinely wants everyone to feel included. You're waving your hands like you don't like this guy at all. I'm waving my hands like they did it. They nailed this ⁓ they did it. ⁓ I thought you were rejecting it. Dudes in East London in the 80s, who were like, you know, starting this scene and they were just like wearing cool caps like this. Like you have to hear the accent with it. A lot of people associate British with like posh whatever, but there's like a whole really like, yeah, sure. Of course. Deep scene of British. that's, and part of it is like ⁓ the stereotype of like the person who thinks they know everything about music is very associated with DJing. you know, so he's the know it all, but he's You know, I think he's on a, he's sitting on a crate of rare grooves and he's got like some chains around his neck and a, a leather cap, leather cap. Um, there's some, uh, casting Donald Glover is a good idea. Smooth, playful, cool. David digs Jordan Fisher. Your next roommate is miss Hey, Hey, uh, a glamorous horse diva who treats her hair like a full-time art practice. big, dramatic, and fabulous until you realize how tender and loyal she is. And what I love about this shot is the word Vogue being held up as the word of the day in front of her. I like her yarn hair. The yarn hair is I love her sparkly, crop top vest. It's very like... The pink eyeshadow. Do you guys remember that show, Zubily Zoo? No. It's psychotic. It's like these animal hybrid people who are like, it's like a, it's an artist panda. So it also has a parade. it's like around the time of the cats, cats that musical. Yeah, sure. You and I imagine it like having almost like a Barbie type horse is really fun and doable. And you could just like make up one horse and just kind of have it be. Yeah. I like the casting on this too. Billy Porter. Billy Porter, casting idea. great. Nicole Byer, hilarious, Titus Burgess. Then we have, we have LD. So ⁓ the glow worm lighting designer. little close to Kermit. Who turns feelings into color and I'm feeling copyright infringement. Try brilliant. no, that just looks nothing like Kermit. It's a worm. He's dry or she's dry, brilliant and quietly in control. If it lights up. she meant it to. So they does use a pronoun there. Okay. I mean, I think the cool thing about this is would be like embedding in it oodles of queerness and just like, no question, this is like a butch woman who's like a heavier set. just think it's kids will receive it with the same amount of joy, but it's just more like a nod to the actual culture, even though there's lighting designers of all kinds. I would ⁓ redesign this then with that in mind. Here's Super Super. The building superintendent reimagined his full tilt superhero, loud, earnest, and wildly confident. If something's broken, he will fix it heroically. it went for like Keegan-Michael Key. It's actually Keegan-Michael Key in a Super Super costume. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that's realistic. I think you could get him. He's such a nice guy. He'd be great. ⁓ Landlord, a polite smiling menace who treats rent like a jump scare, never yells, never rushes, always calmly ruining the vibe. one of our casting is one of our ⁓ AI's favorites, which is Steven Rue. Yeah. He's holding a pig. Yeah, the pig is like his like skinless cat in Ace Ventura. Piggy Wiggy, the landlord's smug little sidekick who knows exactly what's going on. Cute, sentimental, and silently complicit. Every snort lands like a punchline. Hmm. All I like that actually. Piggy Wiggy. He's cute. I like Piggy. Then we have Shalina, the gentle mermaid musician whose songs turn feelings into music. Quiet, emotional, and brave. She brings calm, beauty, and a new definition of home. Does that look like Shalina to you? I love Shalina like that. ⁓ I think it's very close. I would die to have it be this. If I was in charge of every aspect of it, it would be a bit more like, well, there's a detail that when she cries, it's pearls that come out. And that's how she ends up being able to pay her rent, because she's kind of depressed. Yeah. Wait a minute, they use her to pay their rent with her pearl tears? Mm-hmm. Do they just keep her depressed the whole time to keep No, no, I think that's the problem. That would be like a problem that arises. It's like as she becomes like more happy and like integrated in the home and having a real family who isn't like her scary dad, like her source of income dries up. Oh, okay. I dig it. And then something we didn't talk about was purple hands. ⁓ Sparkly hand puppets who pop out to teach the word of the day in ASL, encouraging, playful, and never patronizing. They make learning feel like magic. Do you know ASL? Is this part of your, like, I don't know, who you are? Are you an interpreter? Well, it's a huge part of like early language development for kids. It's very like you'll be hard pressed to find. Well, I mean, you tell me you're like a Brooklyn dad. But when I was coming up as a babysitter, I was hard pressed to not find a kid who couldn't go like this for milk or more. And it's like before kids are verbal, you teach them ways to use their hands so they can communicate and then they don't have to just cry. They can tell you what they want. And so we had triplets, so they probably had to cry to get our attention. One more thing to learn was too many for us, probably the number one ⁓ thing that determines their relationship with you. I read this summer is your concept of your relationship with your parents. It colors every. I tried to be really specific about my concept of how I became a DJ. And sometimes it was like, yeah, a guy had to teach me and no guys don't have to teach a woman again. They're gonna learn from a girl and then a girl's gonna learn from a girl. And that's like a lot of kind of anger. like, so I re like was repurposeful about my narrative. It's like two of my best friends in the world taught me how to do this with for free with love. And now I get to like pass on that positive energy to the kids. you know, it's like that person first kind of thing. I try to use in there with the kids. Here's some storyboards from it. ⁓ Some look more like you than others, I would say. But again, we treat this as like a first draft kind of a maybe, yeah, like a sketch that you can expand upon. What we're looking at is a ⁓ page divided into four, the upper left, see DJ Natalie on her block, just being like, hey, you know, come on and join me in my magical apartment. Yes, you're wearing a not leather, a jeans jacket, just like you're wearing right now. Inside the apartment, the landlord is sort of... busting in and all the puppets are sort of hiding a little bit, like what's going on. On the bottom, we see two stacks of you and the puppets peering around the corner from the bathroom where the shower is going. And then to round it out, we've got this portal shot of super, super sort of. behind and you and the puppets are out at the beach on the other side of this portal. Like he has sent you through the portal to Rockaway Beach. That portal one looks so good. does look good. though they randomly like doubled all the characters in the bathroom one. Yeah. I love, I just love like heads popping out one at a time. They used to do that in the Muppets. Just seeing that reference. This is sparking a lot of joy. ⁓ here's a little bio of you. written by AI, DJ Natalie. A picture of you in your Brooklyn apartment at the decks with the crates of records. DJ Natalie is a real life DJ educator. A real life DJ. Real life. Not a puppet. Community builder who uses music as a tool for creativity, connection, and problem solving with a warm, playful authority and deep respect for kids' intelligence. She translates DJ culture, listening, timing, collaboration, and self-expression into experiences children can feel and participate in. In DJ Natalie's Neighborhood, she guides kids and her puppet roommates through big ideas and real world challenges by mixing empathy, curiosity, and joy, showing that music isn't just something you hear, it's something you use to build community and find your place in the world. Nice! Good use of mixing. That's good. There's no like credits though, I mean, if you're looking for that. Sort of thing. True. And that is the end of this deck. Wow. No closure, total fire under my ass. Just want to work on this again. Uh oh. Well wait. Wait, but wait, we made a trailer. that you get to ask for the HDMI cable now next time you show up at Netflix. You pack that HDMI cable. You'll like, all you do is snap your fingers. Give me that cable. We're going to drop this never letting you leave home without one, Natalie. Here we go. DJ Natalie's neighborhood where beats are dope and life is good DJ Natalie's neighborhood who makes along with me DJ Natalie's neighborhood, where it's a dope and life is good. DJ Natalie's mix along with me. We at Da- Kick, go D-E, hip, hip. Lots of great stuff there. There you go. I cannot exist anymore. Wow. I'm so baffled. I don't understand why the record player is going so slow and it's so dusty and the toxic smoke is... That's the magic. The smoke is the magic. equals magic. I just thought the joke was going to be that the AI was so shitty and it's so good. I was surprised because we've had other trailers that get really flattened. Everything gets like flattened and boring and I... I thought whatever Ms. Hey, hey was doing was awesome. And marching on the boardwalk in Coney Island with the puppets, that was rad too, you know? But having your music really made a big difference because you didn't have to like, you know, try to make our own with a voiceover. Yeah. And that's, that's the thing why I'm not scared about AI at all, because I just feel like it's always about the concept and the strength of the concept. And Yeah, yeah, I use chat CPT for a fair amount for things like as needed. I'm like, okay, this is what I wanted to say. But we want to say it like, like a, you know, 1800s, like Irish peasant, you know? Yeah, for example, ⁓ just let's just say. ⁓ So I yeah, this is this is just so great. I really it's and it's just I'm all I'm thinking about is the practical stuff like it's so producible. in like a single kind of shot thing like that poster. Yeah. mean, the thing that I love about this, Natalie, is that it harkens back to that email that you sent, like we could crowdsource and do this DIY, right? And we got roped into this idea. We're going to like set it up and like kids TV and we're going to do all this stuff. But, you know, shows like I don't know if you ever saw like wonder shows and like. It's not quite a kids TV show, you know, they just like it was a band and comedians and they just had a super eight concept and they slung it around and made some stuff and had fun. And I think there's some merit to that. mean, certainly in this environment, new environment where, you know, corporations have sort of taken over a lot of the means of production and distribution. I think like making it a little bit its very own thing and unhinged and taking the core spirit of it, no matter how you can produce it, no matter what the budget. Yeah. It's exciting. Right? Yeah. One of the biggest problems with doing stuff with kids is that you've got like kids and their momagers and like all of like, but when you have babies and you're like, it's a free music class, people are like, sure. Like parents don't have a lot of money. You're saying they can be on TV. and they can like do a music class. it's the kid part is pretty. It was pretty easy when I was doing the baby DJ classes a lot. I had like an infinite source of fun parents and their kids. But now it's all been the business model is a little different. Well, we have ⁓ one more ⁓ thing since you're so ⁓ amped up to work on it again. We have a film development executive. that we'd like to talk to at the end of these shows once you've seen some new stuff generated with AI. Yeah, hopefully we can grab them. Hey, Amy. Hey, Avi. Hi, Natalie. Give me one second. I'm pulling up the pages and the deck. All right, I've got the materials in front of me. So focusing on DJ Natalie's neighborhood. The pilot play is locked around Natalie. and her puppet roommates scrambling to solve the $800 rent hike by subletting their leaky bathtub, opening a magic portal to Rockaway Beach, and finding Shalina the mermaid. The repeatable engine is word of the day, ASL, song, story problem, field trip, wrap up. Next. What part do you want to hit first? The story structure, a character, or the episode's engine? For me, I'm just interested in like how much money you're willing to put down upfront. Yeah, fair question, Natalie. On the DJ Natalie's Neighborhood pilot, the thing is, your cost hinges on a few drivers, puppet design slash build, live action slash animation mix, music rights slash originals, and location work that Portal to Rockaway bit isn't cheap. If you had to start with just the pilot, what's your minimum version? Is it puppet heavy or mostly leave action with puppets as a garnish? That'll swing us from bare bones kid special to something closer to a proper cable pilot. Where do you see it landing? I don't think we need that much money, like maybe half a million just like as an advance for me. ⁓ I would say that's the minimum. Okay, so that's your floor. Half a million as an advance, not including production. That puts this in the premium creator driven territory, not bargain basement kids TV. Just so we're aligned, is that advance for your role as creator slash show runner? Or does it also cover starring music and maybe writing? It's to compensate me. Got it? There was a lot of hangovers, like just slowly slipping Gatorade that I had to go through well before I made this pilot to be, you know, the culturally informed person you're seeing today. And I just feel like I never got paid for those hours I put in. So that's really what it's for. It's for the it's back pay for all the hangovers. That's pretty great, Natalie. appreciate the honesty and the math. So the half million is retroactive hazard pay for becoming a G-line, not just for show running or puppet wrangling. I buy that, but here's my practical. If we break it down for a buyer, do you want that built into the creator feline or called out as cultural R and D? How do you want that positioned in the package? know, I'm, I think it's the latter, the R and D. We've got the creator in proof of concept. and we're flexible on terms to get to green light. So. Next step, do you want to focus on tightening the proof of concept materials for buyers or do you want to talk about which buyers and strategize the pitch? Amy, I'll just add love that to you. Yeah, Finn, I want to know what buyers you know, we I have a lot of connections at Netflix, Amazon, Hulu. So I want to know what you bring to the table like where. What are the top three buyers that you would pitch it to? OK, here's my shortlist. If it's a kids show with music, lingual slash ASL elements and a quirky creator driven vibe like DJ Natalie's neighborhood, I'd prioritize first Apple TV plus there and. Besting and premium kids slash family originals, they like inclusivity and they're open to creator voices. Second, PBS kids, especially if you can keep costs down and really lean into the educational and the. They're slower, but they care that Slate is lighter. So they're looking for distinctive pitches and musical hooks. Those three would be my first calls for a show like this. Want me to zero in on pitch strategy for one or go broader? Yeah, I mean, Finn, think I don't know if PBS is going to exist next month. So I'd love to hear your strategy for pitching ⁓ Apple TV Plus. That sounds like a great... place for us. You know, I know the head of documentary there, but I don't have any connections whatsoever in the television division. He asked me to pass along his thanks to DJ Natalie and will follow up with anything he referenced or promised to send. If you have questions or next steps, you can route them through me. Thanks again for your time today. Hmm. Too hard. I think. Yeah, maybe. Otherwise, I think we should just. make it in my apartment. We could build a set in my garage in South Jersey. Yeah, we have a boardwalk right here that can double for Rockaway. Could you see doing it like DIYing it on on YouTube? mean, 100 million percent you guys have sold it to me. I forgot about the purple magic hands. Like I'm just remembering how much I love the idea. And yeah, I mean, this is like the opposite of closure. That's kind of what closure calls are. Like if you're like, just need to talk to my ex for some closure. And we're like, right. you know, we're really about closure. I'm glad this could be a positive experience. And it also reminded me, you know, ⁓ I thought, you know, sometimes I feel like I didn't do a good job or I didn't try hard enough, but I was reminded we did go all out. Like we We came out of the gate fast, we developed it, and we got out there and pitched it. It's just, we hit a wall. And maybe a little pivot and persistence to a ⁓ more independent approach would have been a thing. Yeah. Cool. So I just need to do these rewrites on Camp Wannatachi screenplay in January and February and hit the ground running. Okay, great. Fantastic. Well, keep this is a great show, Natalie. This was super fun. Thank you for coming on. 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 the industry insights. And please follow us on Instagram and TikTok as films not made. 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