June 17, 2025 • 48 mins
In the 2010s, MoviePass became a cultural phenomenon, but behind the viral success was Stacy Spikes, a Black entrepreneur and visionary who co-founded the company. Then, he was pushed out. But today, he’s back in charge. Stacy joins Bridget to talk about the rise and fall of MoviePass, the power of culture and human creativity, what it was like to be sidelined from his creation, and the rare second chance to take back the company he built from the ground up.
Stacy Spikes is an award-winning entrepreneur and inventor who USA Today named one of the 21 most influential Black professionals in technology. He is the co-founder and CEO of the viral phenomenon MoviePass, now the subject of the HBO documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash. He is also the founder of Urbanworld, the largest international festival dedicated to nurturing Women and Diverse filmmakers.
Stacy's critically acclaimed memoir: Black Founder, The Hidden Power of Being an Outsider
On Reddit, read Stacy's forum: Ask Me Anything
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How often does a founder get to go buy their
baby back and relaunch it.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Toad and this
is there Are No Girls.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
On the Internet.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
The heyday of movie Pass was truly one of those
you had to be there moments in tech and culture.
If you were swiping that I kind of read movie
Pass card back then, like I was, you probably found
yourself wondering how is this even sustainable? Turns out you
weren't alone. That very question is at the heart of
the HBO Max documentary Movie Pass Movie Crash, which just
(00:46):
scored an Emmy nomination. In many ways, the story of
movie Pass is one of those classic tales of what
we call in shitification, right when something good gets wrecked
by private equity, relentless growth chasing and short term things.
But it's also a story about race and what it
means to be a creative black founder steering something huge.
(01:07):
There's also a different story at the heart of this,
a genuine love of movies, that magic moment when the
lights go down and the screen lights up.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
My name is Stacy Spikes and I'm the co founder
of Movie Past.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That deep love of movies is something Stacy and I
both share, and that's where our story begins. So you
love movies, and I've heard you say that your favorite
movie from when you were a kid is a Blade Runner.
What was it about Blade Runner that.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Just did it for you?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I think I was eleven years old when I saw it,
and it was a rated R film, and I had
to beg my parents, and so they wouldn't let me
see it alone. So my dad took me one day
after work, and I remember my father falling asleep completely
and snoring in the film. But there was something about it.
(02:02):
I had already seen Star Wars, but this almost seemed
like a reality you could touch, that you believed was
not that far away, where I think Star Wars was
so far away it was fantasy, but Blade Runner felt like,
you know, this is this is going to happen in
a few years kind of thing. And when you're that young,
(02:24):
you don't know the difference between reality and what's real
and what's not. And I remember, I want to work
in this world or in this business. I want to
work in robotics, want to I want to do this
kind of stuff that these people are talking about and
I just found it a beautiful film and at the time,
I think it touched me like a lot touched a
(02:46):
lot of people. It wasn't a very big box office success,
but it just stole my heart. There's literally on my
wall in my office. I have a poster Blade Runner
still up today.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Do you think your parents knew was a seed that
they were planting in you by exposing you to movies
from such a young age.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Well, both of my parents were really big movie lovers.
My dad was a really big clean Eastwood fan, and
my mom was a type that she's a lot like
me that she just goes It's like it's like part
of your culture, right, It's just part of your life.
And on Saturdays she used to give me and my brother,
(03:26):
like I swear, five bucks each and she would drop
us off and come and pick us up in the
afternoon and she would run all of her errands. And
this is how she had a Saturday babysitter for kids.
And today she would be arrested for that behavior. But
(03:49):
true story. So every Saturday we were whether it was
a double feature or seeing the same movie again, and
the managers knew us and we got our little hot
dog and so popcorn and what was what was quite amazing.
I think after I saw Blade Runner, I told my
parents I wanted to take a screenwriting class. And the
(04:11):
only one they could find was at Rice University, which
was a college course, and they it was a summer course,
and my mom got permission because she knew some people
at Rice. She got permission for this eleven year old
to sit in a movie screenwriting course. And I remember
my feet could really touch the floor that well.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
When I was young, I wanted to work in movies
or something involving like culture or the arts. And I
remember I would watch movies. My parents would take me
to go rent a movie and I would but ending credits,
I would pause it and look at different jobs and
be like, oh, a gaffer, Maybe I could do that.
Like the idea of you know, being able to somehow
(04:52):
be involved in the creation of this thing that was
so magical that could transport you to a different world
from your like suburban town. It was just all like
it really felt like something that was a far away dream.
And then you get older and you're like, oh, somebody
has this job, why not me?
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, it when you said transport you you know, I
always call it riding the light. It's like the lights
go down in the theater and you have even if
you watch the trailer, you have no idea where you're
about to be transported to. You can go back in time,
you can go far off into the future, you can
(05:29):
go you know, metaphysical. It's like you you have no
idea where you're going to go. And I find that
always so exciting about that experience. So I I just
this weekend, the last three weekends, each weekend I went
to see Sinners. And first time I saw it in
(05:52):
the same week and I went to regular screening, and
then I saw it on Imax, and then I went
this weekend. And each time it's a different movie. Right,
there's something different, you see something else, there's an added thing.
And while I've never been a filmmaker, I'm always looking
(06:13):
at where the camera sits. Why did they choose to
come up from below, or why are they coming from
on high or how are they panning? And what they
want you to see and how the cinematographer and different
lighting like the way Dune would change its whole color
palette depending upon what world you were on. Just all
(06:35):
of that stuff, like my mind just geeks out on
all of it.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Movie Pass launched in twenty eleven, but that shiny red
car didn't hit my wallet until a few years later.
By then, it was just nine dollars and ninety five
cents a month for unlimited movies, so going to see
even one movie a month made it totally worth it.
It kind of feels like a fever dream now, but
Movie Past made you feel like a god walking into
(07:01):
that theater. You could be walking down the street, spot
at theater, walk in and watch something, no planning, no hesitation.
And I did that a lot. I saw movies I
never would have picked in theaters I never would have
gone to otherwise. It made movie going feel spontaneous, accessible
and even kind of luxurious. I'm not ashamed to admit
(07:21):
that a few times I even used a movie Pass
just to be able to use a bathroom in a
movie theater while I was out and about. So for me,
we were solidly still in the this is awesome era
of the story. But even then, every time I swiped
that movie pass card, I'd think, how is this sustignables? Like,
how is this making anybody any money? It kind of
(07:41):
felt like the money wasn't even real and if it was, well,
it wasn't my problem. I want to talk about Movie
Past because I remember the height of Movie Pass, and
for people who weren't there, it's like it truly was
that you had to be there moment in culture. It's
kind of a joke in my house. My partner one
of our first dates, I was in a movie and
(08:05):
they texted like, Hey, do you want to get a drink?
You want to hang out? And so I left the
movie to come meet them and they were like, Wow,
you must really be into me if you like left
the theater. And I was like, nah, homie, movie Pass,
I'll just go catch the end tomorrow. What was it
like to be part of it in that heyday, in
its height, when like it was really poppin', you know.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
One of the weirdest, our most outer body experiences that
I had was I remember going to Regal Union Square
and I think it was on a Saturday, and I remember,
so where you go and if you're getting your ticket
in the theater, you walk into kind of this vestibule
and there's two walls, but they kind of sit almost
(08:47):
at an angle. You walk in this way, and there's
one wall here and one wall there. And I was
standing at my wall, and I kid you not, everybody
pulled out a movie pass and I looked over to
the other side and they all had movie passes too,
and people were waiting, and it was surreal. It was
like and people were looking at each other like, yeah,
(09:09):
you're part of the club too, and we know each
other and we're you know, we always had this same
movie passes for movie people, right, and we movie people
understand what that means. And that was a very surreal moment.
That's when I knew we were sitting in another world.
Then you were always on the grind for years, trying
(09:30):
to get this thing and get it up the hill,
and everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not
gonna work and no one's gonna like it, and the
theaters aren't going to allow it. And then boom, it
just it's it's everywhere. And that was that moment.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
How did the idea come to be?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
You know, it wasn't I don't think it's revolutionary. It
was kind of like, we should make Netflix for movie theaters.
It was just this idea that everyone was going in
the direction of subscriptions. So you had music going subscription,
you had you know, streaming, you had everything going from
(10:12):
your people were doing food coming to your house on
a subscription, and movies just seemed to make sense to
a certain number of people who go often enough. And
what you were doing was for the theaters you were
increasing attendance and for the consumer you were driving savings
and reducing mental friction like should I go, shouldn't I go?
(10:37):
Then it just became a question of do I have
the time right? And I know, for me, would my
movie pass, not only being a creator but a customer.
I would be in a city somewhere and oh I
got two hours before my next meeting, and boom, I'm
in a movie, you know. And it kind of changed
(11:00):
the friction of it. While it may not be much
that twenty dollars you make, should I spend the money
on this? It took that friction away, and that's was
a really big difference. You know that I saw it happening.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
It's like you had to be there, if you know,
you know kind of moment and culture. I've tried to
describe what it was like to people who missed it,
and I don't feel like I can articulate that that
cultural shift and like, yeah, just what a time it
was in those early days.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, it was a you know, the big thing was
in taking that friction away. It was about focusing on
behavior and focusing on going and just you know, being
in the habit and it's it's weird, like some people
might not understand it. But it was also not so
(11:50):
much about the money. It was about being a member
of a group of people whose behavior It was like,
there are there are dead heads, right, and you would
hear about deadheads saying like if somebody said to you,
I took three months off my job to go follow
the grateful dead around for the summer, you'd think they were.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Crazy, right, But people do that, And you would see
white people talking about, yeah, I wouldn't follow the debt.
But I felt like movie passed to movie people was
not only this card carrying member that yeah, I'm one
of those people, and it was I'm a centophile.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I love movies. Movies are a way of life, and
movies are something that are so important to me that
I want to make this investment in its future and
my future. And that monthly payment that I was making
was also a forward looking statement of my commitment to
(12:56):
this art form. And so that's what it made it
really powerful to me and what we saw with other people.
It had that that no one had ever built a
community around movie going. There was you're a member of
this theater chain, or you're a member of the Disney
Club or something like that, but no one had ever
(13:18):
done and around just movie going in general. I remember
people saying I'm gonna go see every Oscar nominee on
movie pass right and they would say I'm and they
would post it and they that was that was, you know,
such a huge change, and I thought something great for
our cinematic culture.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah. Like that, Like the cultural in group building I
think is really important because you know, if you're a
movie movie people are a we are a weird type
of people. It's a weird type of person who's like,
I want to see the movie. I want to read
eight reviews about the movie. I want to see what
they're saying on a Reddit, I want to I want
to put it on letter bots. Like that is a
particular kind of person. And I think you built something
(14:01):
that was like a way to signify that you were
in this group.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
So I did a podcast yesterday and I asked them
what movies had they seen lately, And it was very
funny the two movies they named. I said, you saw
that in theaters? They were like, no, no on streaming, Oh no,
no movie, go to the movies. And it's funny how
you have some people who think if I watched it
(14:26):
on my phone, it's the same thing, right, Like if
you got to listen to a print song on your
phone and you got to see Prince, Like, those are
not the same thing.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
No, And I mean not to go back to Sinners,
but I hadn't been to the movies in a while,
and Sinners was the first time I had been to
the theater in the kind of a little bit, and
we were essentially dancing together, having this communal experience. I
forgot how fun and how special it is to go
to a theater, this communal. The lights go down and
(15:01):
all of a sudden, y'all are like family, you're strangers,
especially especially a black movie. It's like it's like it
is a special thing. And there is just no way
I would have had as much fun watching it on
my couch on TV. There's just no way.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
No, I think The most recent most fun I had
was when I went and saw Nope, and it was
like when Kiki's running and people that they're like, run, bitch, run.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yes, there is a special thing.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
You are not going to get that in your house.
It is by yourself. I don't care how animated you
are about the movie you're watching. And when I went
and saw Minecraft, that was crazy.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
When when I saw the Beyonce film and when she
did Uncle Johnny the Uncle Johnny track and the fans
came popping out, I was like, oh shit, it's like,
you know, it's it's It's like whenever somebody says I
watched it at home or Watson on my phone, I
(16:10):
feel bad for him.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Let's take a quick break at our back.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
I believe movies or forever. I think that we'll still
have movie theaters, regardless of whatever technological advancements or changes
might happen. But when I hear about people who are
how can I put this putting up barriers to the
experience of like getting lost in a movie, Like they're
gonna watch it on their phone or they're gonna text
through if you know, they want to have another screen
(16:50):
to occupy their mind. I. Yeah, I just sometimes feel
bad because you know, part of the fun is giving
yourself fully over to this immersive world. And I do
you worry that we are in a climate where some
people are not allowing themselves the beauty of that experience
because it's like, oh, well, I'll get the gist of it,
(17:10):
I'll text through it or what have you do?
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Know what you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, you know. I we have this saying that
adventures should never come with a pause button. And you know,
the powerful thing about it is you can't pause. You
don't want to run to the bathroom. You are in
the middle of an experience that the roller coaster started
(17:34):
and you do not get off until it ends. And
when I'm at home or I'm not in that type
of environment, I cannot help but naturally be distracted and
get a diminished experience, you know. And we talked about
how cinema was going to kill Broadway, and then television
(17:59):
was going to kill cinema, and then streaming was also
going to kill cinema and DVD and VHS and blu
ray and larger screens, and the reality is it is
still the number one out of home entertainment activity in
the world. By far, people go to the movies ten
(18:19):
times more than all sporting events combined. No matter what
part of the world you're in, whether you're in Asia,
whether you're in Africa, or whether you're in India or
even in America, we go ten times more. So I
think I think that the headlines blow it out of proportion.
It's still you know, two thirds of Americans every year
(18:43):
go to the movies at least once, and that's that's
a big music concerts anything. Think of it like this
on one movie that breaks one hundred million dollars in
a single weekend. That movie movie had more people go
to it than all of the games of the entire
(19:05):
NFL season coming up. Wow, one movie. So when people
I think it's the King of the Hill that people
still like to beat up on. But I, like you
think that it is the cheapest experience you can for
a live event. It is accessible, and it's opened three
hundred and sixty five days a year. I don't think
it's going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So what exactly went wrong with Movie Pass? Well, it
was the usual growth at all costs. Remember how I
was describing gleefully swiping into movie theaters thinking good thing.
This math is somebody else's problem. Yeah, there's a reason
that math didn't work. In twenty seventeen, private equity firm
Helios and Matheson bought movie Pass. Mitch Lowe, a former
(19:50):
Netflix executive, and Ted Barnsworth, who as far as I
can tell, was just basically a professional scammer, were brought
in as leadership. There was absolutely a racial dynamic at
play here too. You have a service created by black people,
and then you bring in two white guys who maybe
look the part of what some people assume a tech
CEO looks like, just without any of the actual vision.
(20:12):
Ted and Mitch's big idea to save movie Pass dropped
the price down to nine dollars and ninety five cents
a month for unlimited movies. And as much as my
greedy ass liked that price point, Stacy warned it was unsustainable,
and he was fired from the company for saying. Zone Sure,
subscriber skyrocketed, but the service quickly became unusable. Movie Pass
(20:34):
started blocking users from seeing movies, intentionally resetting passwords and
blaming fake fraud alerts, you know, something the government kind
of thinks of as a crime. According to the FTC
movie Pass did this to seventy five thousand users. The
FTC says that Mitch and Ted knew about ordered and
helped run this so called password disruption program they were
(20:58):
running on paying customers. Meanwhile, Mitch and Ted were also
blowing through movie passes money, like flying the wrapper fifty
cent to Coachella on a movie pass branded private jet.
Why who knows? The Justice Department says this was all
a scam. They lied to investors claiming the nine dollars
(21:18):
and ninety five cents model was profitable when they privately
admitted it wasn't. They also hyped up some powerful AI
that was meant to monetize movie pass user data, only
that AI didn't actually exist. Classic AI washing, a tech
CEO vaguely claiming that AI is doing a thing it
is absolutely not doing. Both Mitch and Ted eventually applied
(21:41):
guilty to securities fraud. They faced actual jail time. In
just eight years, movie Pass went from massive growth to
total collapse and stacy while he was out of the
company that he founded. What did it feel like to
be pushed out of something that you built, you know,
(22:02):
that was that was your baby?
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Well you you know you watch movies and you watch
stuff and if you saw a biopic and I don't know,
Cinderellaman or some movie where some some lead characters something
goes wrong with him, you like, you shouldn't have let
that happen. You should have you know. And it's funny
when you're inside of it and it's unfolding in real time.
(22:28):
And it was very simple, kind of big boy chess
moves where it was like we got some investor capital,
the we had three board seats that additional money asked
to expand the board to five, and he had then
three seats and we had two. And then he brought
Mitch in and the next thing, you know, the dynamics
(22:51):
of the board had changed and they were then able
to make decisions that we couldn't stop. And it you
kind of think, oh, we're all friends here and we
all have the same purpose and we're rowing in the
same direction, and then quickly the dynamics had shifted, and
then you realize too late you're out. But people say,
(23:15):
what would you have done differently? And I said, I
honestly don't know. Because you're out raising capital and there
are some businesses you can go make a little hair salon, our,
a pizza shop, and you have your initial startup capital
and you work your way up over many years. But
when you're building something that is like a national theater
(23:39):
subscription circuit, you can't do a little at a time.
You kind of have to do it all, and so
you have that build cost, and so you have to
build fast and someone or someone else is going to
build it and beat you to the race. Like Netflix,
if you can get there, and you can get there
first and established dominance, you can withstand the storm because
(24:02):
you were first to the party. And even when people
cut away like they're starting to do with streaming services,
they're still going to keep the one. Back in the day,
nobody would cancel HBO, right, it was like you had
your HBO. So it's similar to that, and that having
gone through that experience, you realize how how many you
(24:26):
know a lot of diverse founders are artists woke up,
whether it was Sammy Davis Junior or Red Fox or
Richard Pryor, and they woke up and they were broke.
How I broke? You got to walk through something similar
and you realize it can happen to you too, no
matter how smart you are.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
So.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I remember watching the girl group TLC give one of
the most honest interviews I have ever seen after winning
a Grammy for their breakout album Crazy Sexy Cool, but asked,
how can you sell million records and still be broke?
Their answer was a sobering reminder.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Trust me, you can sell ten million nails and be
broke if you have greedy people behind.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
It's kind of a warning no matter how talented, successful,
or smart you are, you can still end up on
the outs especially if you're a black creative. Stacy's story
it's ultimately about what it means to navigate this kind
of dynamic. Getting pushed out of the very community that
you built and being left to feel like you have
nothing on the other end of it is a story
(25:31):
far too many of us know all too well. Stacy
writes about this in his book Black Founder, The Hidden
Power of being an Outsider. Watching the documentary, I was
really struck by the ways that it was a story
about race, and you know, the reality is not great
for you know, folks of like entrepreneurs of color. I
(25:55):
think it was what like less than one percent of
a funding goes to us, and so is there a
negative perception that comes with Thunders handing over a big
check and a lot of trust over to a black founder.
Do they feel more comfortable handing over that trust and
handing over that money to somebody who looks like Mitch
and Ted versus somebody that looks like me or you.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, I mean, I definitely. I think there is a
black tax that you have to pay, and I think
that you know people. Well, let me, I'm going to
say something that it's my experience, but it may it
may sound funny the way it's going to come out.
I think we are creatures of habits and we follow
(26:39):
pattern recognition, and I'll give you a thought experiment and
what I mean. So I was being interviewed by I
think it was a New York Times and it was
a woman writer, and she asked me a similar question,
and I said, you know, if we go outside. We
were at the Angelica, and I said, if we walk
outside onto Houston Street and we start asking people, close
(27:04):
your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. Right,
they're gonna describe or give me a name, or tell
me what you think of tech founder. I told her,
they're not gonna describe someone who looks like me, and
they're not gonna describe someone who looks like you. But
I said, tell me what a star basketball player looks like,
or tell me what a star athlete looks like, or
(27:27):
even give me a star player in golf or even tennis,
or even gymnastics or any of those things. Well, they
may describe someone who looks like me when it comes
to that. And again that's that thing about pattern recognition.
And I think when I was working on my book
and we were deciding what the cover was gonna be,
(27:50):
we talked about black founder and it was like I
wanted to put my face on the cover so that
more and more you're gonna see this is what founders
look like too write. And once upon a time we
were not in any sports, and so we had negro leagues,
but we weren't on the main field. So over time,
(28:12):
I think it can change, but there needs to be
more of us who are out there making it happen,
and that they get to see us and they start
to realize, Okay, this is acceptable. I don't think it's
like racism, like they're not as good. I think it's
it's a categorizing in a way to say because I
(28:34):
don't see this that often, I'm going to trust it
less or I need more to be convinced that it works.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I was reading an interview before we got on. I
think it was with the make the director of the film.
One of the instances that did not make it into
the film was that folks would come into the room
and automatically assume by pass you and automatically assume like, well,
certainly this white person is the founder. And I think
that speaks to what you're talking about. It's not a
(29:03):
question of ability. If every time you walk into a
room like that, the white guy is the founder. I
can understand how we need to see more and more
founders that look like you, founders look like me, so
that folks break those patterns.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
One hundred percent. It's just pattern recognition. Once you start
changing the pattern enough, people become fine with it. I think,
you know, with pattern recognition and being able to see
how things can change over time. Like first black love
on screen was crazy. You didn't see that interracial love
(29:38):
on screen was you remember with Jungle Fever, right, that
was so taboo? And then I remember Denzel doing people
were saying, why don't you ever kiss anybody in a movie, right,
but he would have Julia Roberts or some lead across
him and they couldn't. They never touched each other. And
(29:59):
then when I saw Moonlight, I was like, that's a
huge accomplishment. You saw black love. You saw same sex
black love, and it wasn't even Broke Back Mountain violent
in the tent. I'm taking this shit. Black Love. It
was beautiful. And that's what I mean by now you
(30:25):
can see people moving around in the world and it's fine.
It's like pattern recognition. It's one of those strange things
about our time, how people are trying to roll back
things that are now commonplace and trying to roll history
back to the nineteen fifties, as if that's something more
(30:46):
sacred but interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
More after a quick break, let's get right back into it.
In Stacy's book Black Founder, The Hidden Power of being
an Outsider, Stacy says that being traditionally marginalized as an
(31:12):
entrepreneur does come with challenges, but it's not always a
bad thing. Sometimes it gives you the perspective to see
needs others might overlook. That outsider's insight is what led
Stacy to create Urban World, now the largest Academy Award
qualifying Black and Multicultural film festival in the world, and
nearly three decades later, it's still going strong and it's
(31:33):
twenty ninth year. The subtitle of your book the Hidden
Power of being of being an outsider. I've always thought
this that, you know, being at the margins or being
someone who's like traditionally marginalized, it can actually be a
place of power for folks who want to build something sometimes,
Like for instance, with Urban World, you saw an overload
(31:55):
need in your own people and in the community, and
we're able to build something that spoke to this need
that existed, right, And so I feel like some of
what you're trying to do is like reframe this thing
that is so often we're told as like a negative,
as like a kind of a source of strength. It's like, yeah,
I bring a different perspective. I can see things that
maybe other folks can't see, and that is a that
(32:15):
is a in some ways a gift.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
That's right. So when we started Urban World, it was
like you had John Singleton, you had Spike Lee, and
you amazed occasionally had another director who would pop up
and do something, but there was so many other directors
trying to break in and trying to get on the scene,
(32:38):
and it's kind of like, you know, if we get
to play, we're gonna rock this, like and and and
the fact that the gatekeepers there was a very systematic
type of gatekeeping. And what I struggled with was, Ah,
I'm not I don't want to get on my soapbots
too much. But what I struggled with was the well
(33:01):
intentioned gatekeepers, often white. Their version of what they liked
to see was black pain. And sometimes those of us
who are coming from the experience don't just want to
see that. We want to see us having fun. We
(33:23):
want to see us being the Cosby's. We want to
see us making money, we want to see us in love.
We don't just want to see that. Oh, I feel
so bad about what happened during slavery or during civil
rights and the black pain experience. What about the black
beautiful fun experience?
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Right?
Speaker 1 (33:45):
And so the things that were bubbling to the top
were still those same experiences, but regular black life or
fun black life wasn't getting seen because it wasn't critically acclaimed,
and we felt that all all of it needed to
be seen. And at some point someone said Urban World
(34:06):
became to cinema what Showtime at the Apollo became to music.
It became this curation place and if you made it here,
you can make it anywhere. Kind of think, if we
say it's great and we think you're great, then you're great.
And that was like if you rub the stone at
(34:28):
the Apollo and you made it there, forget about it.
We don't care what the rest of the world says.
We know you're the best because we are tough critics.
And I remember when Ava Duverney was our publicist, and
I remember Ava sitting in the theater we were watching
dream Girls. Her mom's next to her, and she goes,
you know, I really want to make a movie. I go, well, Ava,
(34:50):
we got Urban World. Make it. We'll premiere it. And
she made her first short film and almost every film
Ava's ever made, she's come back to Urban World and Showcase.
So it's it was our moment to move civil rights
from music to film, and an Urban World was that
thing to help make that happen.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
That's so beautiful. And I don't know, I mean, I
think those investments that you make in people and their
stories and their vision, they really come back. It says
something that she continues to come back.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Course. Yeah, and I think it's great to have a
home base. And it just feels good to have a home,
have a people that are supporting you and rooting you
and watching you go out around the world changing the world.
And our stories, you know, our experience and our struggle.
I travel all over the world, and what's really funny
(35:45):
about these times we're walking through America's greatest export is us.
When you go to France, or you go to England,
or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are where
wearing Jordan's They're wearing Kobe's shirt, They're watching Black Panther.
(36:07):
It's like we are what they are most proud of.
And when you think of the possibilities of America, the
Black experience is the one that everyone holds up as, Oh,
that's why I want to go there. Sure you can
be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, but we
have such a unique experience about coming from the bottom
(36:30):
up that that is one of America's greatest exports. And
yet why would you want to kill that? People love
the idea of coming here because of those possibilities, and
they see it in music and film they love walking
around Brooklyn, knowing the streets where so much of hip hop,
and coming to the Blue Note and seeing jazz and
(36:53):
seeing all of these things where constant waves of our
experience dominate the world code. So I just I think
it's really important about that's what God gave to us
to share to the world.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
You did a TED talk about the use of AI
in filmmaking, and you sounded like you really do think
that film and music and culture and stories have the
ability to literally change the world, and that if more
people have the ability to make projects like this, that
power only grows.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
I'm gonna tell you a quick little story. So back
in Warner Brothers music history, and I know this from
the music industry because I was there before I came
into film. When you take you used to have to
go into a recording studio and you had to record stuff,
and it was very expensive. And the first person to
(37:48):
really do that in our community was Barry Gordy with Motown.
Now Here comes MIDI recording, where you can do a
drum machine and you can do all this stuff. And
this seventeen eighteen year old kid has a demo and
the head of music at Warner brothers went to see him,
(38:12):
and it's Prince. And he asked, Prince, who played on
your album? And he said, I played all the instruments, okay,
But he had the drum machine, he had the task
Can four track, he had the synthesizers, he had the guitar,
and he sang, and you could now go and make
(38:32):
an album r at least a demo in your bedroom, okay.
And what that did, and the sampling and being able
to sample music and put the samples in the keyboard
exploded music. So what do you think is gonna happen
when filmmaking gets affordable, that kids in bedrooms can now
(38:55):
make movies. The same thing that happened with hip hop
is about to happen with the longer visual form of storytelling.
And you can't stop it. And that's what I talked
about during my ted Ai talk. We've seen this before
in technology with music industry. You can make you can
make a full album off of your iPhone right now,
(39:15):
right So the distance between what you imagine and what
you you believe to happen, the distance between those two
gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And AI is going
to make that and it's going to bring the cost
way down. Movie making is a very rich person's game.
You're about to make it that kids are going to
(39:36):
blow our minds with the place that they're going to
take us.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Now, it's a very I mean, I love to hear
an optimistic vision for the future for once, But what
do you say to people who say the opposite, that
AI is simply going to kill creativity in film.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
You have people on both sides of the argument kind
of promoting doomsday scenario. On either side, filmmaking is going
to become so expensive it's going to die, or filmmaking
is going to become soho cheap, no one's gonna make
it anymore. Well, it never happens that way because as
artists mature up. Prince didn't just stay recording in his bedroom, right,
(40:20):
And when you saw many synthesizer bands, the ones who survived,
they all went to real instruments, and you saw bands
who hadn't used synthesize or pre recorded stuff go the
other way. So why do you see Christopher Nolan and
others shooting on imax and shooting on film stock. Why
(40:40):
do you see that because they look at the masters
that came before them, and there's stuff that they want
to do, and they play with the technology and they
go forward and backwards in time, and that's how all
art is, you know, And so I'm not worried about it. Artists,
artist tools change and change and change and change, but
(41:02):
we are still connected to the artists and their journey
and experience. And a robot or an AI system still
needs to run through the human, you know, vessel that
we as people will care about, right We want to
know where you're from, what block you grew up on,
(41:24):
what trials and tribulations you went through to make this
piece of content. And that's when when the audience will
care if you If it's just I spit it out
on my computer, no one's gonna care, you know, we don't.
We didn't care if Whitney, Houston are are what do
you call? Dolly Pardon wrote I Will Always Love You.
(41:47):
But when that song came out through Whitney, we heard
we heard her mother, we heard Dion Warwick, her aunt,
we heard her church upbringing, We heard all of that
come through Whitney, and you can't replace that, you know.
That's the part that I think is very special.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
So it sounds like you're saying that even if creators
are finding ways to use tech in their work, it
really all comes down to whether or not they're doing
so in service of creating something authentic, you know, something new,
something real, because if it's not authentic, your audience is
really going to be able to sniff it out, like
well know, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
We've had do you remember Milli Vanilli and sampling and
people not singing on their own albums, whether it was
AI or something else. We still crave authenticity, and authenticity
will always trump that which someone didn't do. Even when
it came to sampling, we wanted to know where did
that sample come from? Oh that's Frank Sinatra. Are it's
(42:48):
a hard knock life? Right? We wanted to know, And
then the sample wasn't cheating. The sample was. I'm gonna
I'm going to bring another world, this white experience, into
our black experience, and show you how they're the same.
I'm gonna have Annie tell you it's a hard knock life.
(43:09):
And then I'm gonna pull Brooklyn in here right well
that that pollenization is so beautiful and we've been doing
it forever, so I'm again I'm not overly worried or
concerned about it. We love authenticity and artists are going
to have to be authentic in their own way, whether
you're using voice samples or whatever. And we know the
(43:31):
real deal and what we want because we get goosebumps when.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
It happens, and you you can't deny it, like real,
recognize real. You know something when it's authentic and it's
grounded in that experience, you can.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Tell that's right one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
In twenty twenty two, Stacey was able to repurchase movie Pass.
He still runs it today along with the Mogul, a
brand new platform that lets movie fans compete in fantasy
style tournaments based on their favorite entertainment. Relaunched movie Pass,
nearly one million people were waiting to sign up. I
asked Stacy that it felt like he was recapturing someone
(44:07):
the magic of the old days.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
It was crazy. So in four days we had eight
hundred thousand people sign up for the wait list and
people join and it went, you know, instantly, it was
back and so we were very excited about that, and
you know, we were catching back up when we first
(44:31):
were born. We were the first to the party, and
then afterwards it's been Now that you have sixty percent
of theaters have some form of movie pass right, they
have a subscription of their own. So now with Mogul
and other things, we're even changing the space more. But
it was such a How often does a founder get
(44:53):
to go buy their baby back and relaunch it, you know,
it just rarely happens.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
You know.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
That's like Steve Job and Michael Bell, Michael Dell from
Dell Computers have gotten to go back and do that.
That is a very rare thing. So I know how
lucky we were to be able to do it. And
it just meant so much of the fans that were
so excited and we're posting like I want my movie
(45:19):
pass back and that they were there when we were
ready to bring it back. They were there. They were
like I'm down. They love the idea that you can
just go to any theater, to anywhere you want and
just boom, here's my movie past. Let's go, you know,
And that's what's really exciting, where all of the others
you can only go to just that theater, that theater chain,
(45:40):
but Movie Past you go wherever you want. So it's
still a beautiful thing. And we are continuing to grow
it and love being that epicenter for fans and fan fandom,
if you will, and being able to have that voice
for so many people.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Stacey, I could talk to you all day.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Thank you so much for gug like honestly, just the
fact that you have built such a great career and
presence out of like nerdy like black nerd shit, I
really like, Yeah, it really warms my heart. And you
have such a passion for filmmaking and a passion for
film It really is beautiful. So thank you for being here.
(46:20):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Bridget, thank you so much. And I'm actually working on
a book called how to Watch Movies, and I there's
so many times I was talking to people and I
would say, like going see a kid's film, don't go
see it at night. Go see it early in the
afternoon when the theaters packed the kids, like you get
(46:42):
a different experience. Like telling people how to go see
movies can give you a different experience than just thinking, oh,
I'm gonna just go at eight o'clock at night or
six o'clock at night? Are where to go see a movie?
You go see a horror film, go see it uptown
that's what you finished, right right. It's like there's places
that you're gonna get a whole different experience if you
(47:05):
go do things in different ways and help educate people
on how to how to watch movies. It's a whole
different thing.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
I cannot wait for this book when it comes back,
when it comes out, please come back to the show.
This is yes, you have no idea. You are like
very much speaking of my language. I have a whole
thing about how I go see a movie. Where I
go see a movie, who I see it with, who
I don't see it with. I have a whole philosophy.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, it's it's a bad experience if you pick the
wrong person to go. Oh my gosh, I'll go by
myself before I'll take the wrong persona same.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Oh look, I love movies for myself. That's like my
special place.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, Bridgie, thank you so much. This
was so awesome and wonderful.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
Oh the pleasure was all mine. Got a story about
an interesting thing in tech. I just want to say hi.
You can be just said hello at ten go. You
can also find transcripts for today's episode at tagoiti dot com.
There are no girls on the Internet. Was created by
me Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed
(48:08):
creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amado is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, bridget Todd. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
Us on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How often does a founder get to go buy their
baby back and relaunch it.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Toad and this
is there Are No Girls.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
On the Internet.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
The heyday of movie Pass was truly one of those
you had to be there moments in tech and culture.
If you were swiping that I kind of read movie
Pass card back then, like I was, you probably found
yourself wondering how is this even sustainable? Turns out you
weren't alone. That very question is at the heart of
the HBO Max documentary Movie Pass Movie Crash, which just
(00:46):
scored an Emmy nomination. In many ways, the story of
movie Pass is one of those classic tales of what
we call in shitification, right when something good gets wrecked
by private equity, relentless growth chasing and short term things.
But it's also a story about race and what it
means to be a creative black founder steering something huge.
(01:07):
There's also a different story at the heart of this,
a genuine love of movies, that magic moment when the
lights go down and the screen lights up.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
My name is Stacy Spikes and I'm the co founder
of Movie Past.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That deep love of movies is something Stacy and I
both share, and that's where our story begins. So you
love movies, and I've heard you say that your favorite
movie from when you were a kid is a Blade Runner.
What was it about Blade Runner that.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Just did it for you?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I think I was eleven years old when I saw it,
and it was a rated R film, and I had
to beg my parents, and so they wouldn't let me
see it alone. So my dad took me one day
after work, and I remember my father falling asleep completely
and snoring in the film. But there was something about it.
(02:02):
I had already seen Star Wars, but this almost seemed
like a reality you could touch, that you believed was
not that far away, where I think Star Wars was
so far away it was fantasy, but Blade Runner felt like,
you know, this is this is going to happen in
a few years kind of thing. And when you're that young,
(02:24):
you don't know the difference between reality and what's real
and what's not. And I remember, I want to work
in this world or in this business. I want to
work in robotics, want to I want to do this
kind of stuff that these people are talking about and
I just found it a beautiful film and at the time,
I think it touched me like a lot touched a
(02:46):
lot of people. It wasn't a very big box office success,
but it just stole my heart. There's literally on my
wall in my office. I have a poster Blade Runner
still up today.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Do you think your parents knew was a seed that
they were planting in you by exposing you to movies
from such a young age.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Well, both of my parents were really big movie lovers.
My dad was a really big clean Eastwood fan, and
my mom was a type that she's a lot like
me that she just goes It's like it's like part
of your culture, right, It's just part of your life.
And on Saturdays she used to give me and my brother,
(03:26):
like I swear, five bucks each and she would drop
us off and come and pick us up in the
afternoon and she would run all of her errands. And
this is how she had a Saturday babysitter for kids.
And today she would be arrested for that behavior. But
(03:49):
true story. So every Saturday we were whether it was
a double feature or seeing the same movie again, and
the managers knew us and we got our little hot
dog and so popcorn and what was what was quite amazing.
I think after I saw Blade Runner, I told my
parents I wanted to take a screenwriting class. And the
(04:11):
only one they could find was at Rice University, which
was a college course, and they it was a summer course,
and my mom got permission because she knew some people
at Rice. She got permission for this eleven year old
to sit in a movie screenwriting course. And I remember
my feet could really touch the floor that well.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
When I was young, I wanted to work in movies
or something involving like culture or the arts. And I
remember I would watch movies. My parents would take me
to go rent a movie and I would but ending credits,
I would pause it and look at different jobs and
be like, oh, a gaffer, Maybe I could do that.
Like the idea of you know, being able to somehow
(04:52):
be involved in the creation of this thing that was
so magical that could transport you to a different world
from your like suburban town. It was just all like
it really felt like something that was a far away dream.
And then you get older and you're like, oh, somebody
has this job, why not me?
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, it when you said transport you you know, I
always call it riding the light. It's like the lights
go down in the theater and you have even if
you watch the trailer, you have no idea where you're
about to be transported to. You can go back in time,
you can go far off into the future, you can
(05:29):
go you know, metaphysical. It's like you you have no
idea where you're going to go. And I find that
always so exciting about that experience. So I I just
this weekend, the last three weekends, each weekend I went
to see Sinners. And first time I saw it in
(05:52):
the same week and I went to regular screening, and
then I saw it on Imax, and then I went
this weekend. And each time it's a different movie. Right,
there's something different, you see something else, there's an added thing.
And while I've never been a filmmaker, I'm always looking
(06:13):
at where the camera sits. Why did they choose to
come up from below, or why are they coming from
on high or how are they panning? And what they
want you to see and how the cinematographer and different
lighting like the way Dune would change its whole color
palette depending upon what world you were on. Just all
(06:35):
of that stuff, like my mind just geeks out on
all of it.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Movie Pass launched in twenty eleven, but that shiny red
car didn't hit my wallet until a few years later.
By then, it was just nine dollars and ninety five
cents a month for unlimited movies, so going to see
even one movie a month made it totally worth it.
It kind of feels like a fever dream now, but
Movie Past made you feel like a god walking into
(07:01):
that theater. You could be walking down the street, spot
at theater, walk in and watch something, no planning, no hesitation.
And I did that a lot. I saw movies I
never would have picked in theaters I never would have
gone to otherwise. It made movie going feel spontaneous, accessible
and even kind of luxurious. I'm not ashamed to admit
(07:21):
that a few times I even used a movie Pass
just to be able to use a bathroom in a
movie theater while I was out and about. So for me,
we were solidly still in the this is awesome era
of the story. But even then, every time I swiped
that movie pass card, I'd think, how is this sustignables? Like,
how is this making anybody any money? It kind of
(07:41):
felt like the money wasn't even real and if it was, well,
it wasn't my problem. I want to talk about Movie
Past because I remember the height of Movie Pass, and
for people who weren't there, it's like it truly was
that you had to be there moment in culture. It's
kind of a joke in my house. My partner one
of our first dates, I was in a movie and
(08:05):
they texted like, Hey, do you want to get a drink?
You want to hang out? And so I left the
movie to come meet them and they were like, Wow,
you must really be into me if you like left
the theater. And I was like, nah, homie, movie Pass,
I'll just go catch the end tomorrow. What was it
like to be part of it in that heyday, in
its height, when like it was really poppin', you know.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
One of the weirdest, our most outer body experiences that
I had was I remember going to Regal Union Square
and I think it was on a Saturday, and I remember,
so where you go and if you're getting your ticket
in the theater, you walk into kind of this vestibule
and there's two walls, but they kind of sit almost
(08:47):
at an angle. You walk in this way, and there's
one wall here and one wall there. And I was
standing at my wall, and I kid you not, everybody
pulled out a movie pass and I looked over to
the other side and they all had movie passes too,
and people were waiting, and it was surreal. It was
like and people were looking at each other like, yeah,
(09:09):
you're part of the club too, and we know each
other and we're you know, we always had this same
movie passes for movie people, right, and we movie people
understand what that means. And that was a very surreal moment.
That's when I knew we were sitting in another world.
Then you were always on the grind for years, trying
(09:30):
to get this thing and get it up the hill,
and everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not
gonna work and no one's gonna like it, and the
theaters aren't going to allow it. And then boom, it
just it's it's everywhere. And that was that moment.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
How did the idea come to be?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
You know, it wasn't I don't think it's revolutionary. It
was kind of like, we should make Netflix for movie theaters.
It was just this idea that everyone was going in
the direction of subscriptions. So you had music going subscription,
you had you know, streaming, you had everything going from
(10:12):
your people were doing food coming to your house on
a subscription, and movies just seemed to make sense to
a certain number of people who go often enough. And
what you were doing was for the theaters you were
increasing attendance and for the consumer you were driving savings
and reducing mental friction like should I go, shouldn't I go?
(10:37):
Then it just became a question of do I have
the time right? And I know, for me, would my
movie pass, not only being a creator but a customer.
I would be in a city somewhere and oh I
got two hours before my next meeting, and boom, I'm
in a movie, you know. And it kind of changed
(11:00):
the friction of it. While it may not be much
that twenty dollars you make, should I spend the money
on this? It took that friction away, and that's was
a really big difference. You know that I saw it happening.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
It's like you had to be there, if you know,
you know kind of moment and culture. I've tried to
describe what it was like to people who missed it,
and I don't feel like I can articulate that that
cultural shift and like, yeah, just what a time it
was in those early days.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, it was a you know, the big thing was
in taking that friction away. It was about focusing on
behavior and focusing on going and just you know, being
in the habit and it's it's weird, like some people
might not understand it. But it was also not so
(11:50):
much about the money. It was about being a member
of a group of people whose behavior It was like,
there are there are dead heads, right, and you would
hear about deadheads saying like if somebody said to you,
I took three months off my job to go follow
the grateful dead around for the summer, you'd think they were.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Crazy, right, But people do that, And you would see
white people talking about, yeah, I wouldn't follow the debt.
But I felt like movie passed to movie people was
not only this card carrying member that yeah, I'm one
of those people, and it was I'm a centophile.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I love movies. Movies are a way of life, and
movies are something that are so important to me that
I want to make this investment in its future and
my future. And that monthly payment that I was making
was also a forward looking statement of my commitment to
(12:56):
this art form. And so that's what it made it
really powerful to me and what we saw with other people.
It had that that no one had ever built a
community around movie going. There was you're a member of
this theater chain, or you're a member of the Disney
Club or something like that, but no one had ever
(13:18):
done and around just movie going in general. I remember
people saying I'm gonna go see every Oscar nominee on
movie pass right and they would say I'm and they
would post it and they that was that was, you know,
such a huge change, and I thought something great for
our cinematic culture.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah. Like that, Like the cultural in group building I
think is really important because you know, if you're a
movie movie people are a we are a weird type
of people. It's a weird type of person who's like,
I want to see the movie. I want to read
eight reviews about the movie. I want to see what
they're saying on a Reddit, I want to I want
to put it on letter bots. Like that is a
particular kind of person. And I think you built something
(14:01):
that was like a way to signify that you were
in this group.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
So I did a podcast yesterday and I asked them
what movies had they seen lately, And it was very
funny the two movies they named. I said, you saw
that in theaters? They were like, no, no on streaming, Oh no,
no movie, go to the movies. And it's funny how
you have some people who think if I watched it
(14:26):
on my phone, it's the same thing, right, Like if
you got to listen to a print song on your
phone and you got to see Prince, Like, those are
not the same thing.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
No, And I mean not to go back to Sinners,
but I hadn't been to the movies in a while,
and Sinners was the first time I had been to
the theater in the kind of a little bit, and
we were essentially dancing together, having this communal experience. I
forgot how fun and how special it is to go
to a theater, this communal. The lights go down and
(15:01):
all of a sudden, y'all are like family, you're strangers,
especially especially a black movie. It's like it's like it
is a special thing. And there is just no way
I would have had as much fun watching it on
my couch on TV. There's just no way.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
No, I think The most recent most fun I had
was when I went and saw Nope, and it was
like when Kiki's running and people that they're like, run, bitch, run.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yes, there is a special thing.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
You are not going to get that in your house.
It is by yourself. I don't care how animated you
are about the movie you're watching. And when I went
and saw Minecraft, that was crazy.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
When when I saw the Beyonce film and when she
did Uncle Johnny the Uncle Johnny track and the fans
came popping out, I was like, oh shit, it's like,
you know, it's it's It's like whenever somebody says I
watched it at home or Watson on my phone, I
(16:10):
feel bad for him.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Let's take a quick break at our back.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
I believe movies or forever. I think that we'll still
have movie theaters, regardless of whatever technological advancements or changes
might happen. But when I hear about people who are
how can I put this putting up barriers to the
experience of like getting lost in a movie, Like they're
gonna watch it on their phone or they're gonna text
through if you know, they want to have another screen
(16:50):
to occupy their mind. I. Yeah, I just sometimes feel
bad because you know, part of the fun is giving
yourself fully over to this immersive world. And I do
you worry that we are in a climate where some
people are not allowing themselves the beauty of that experience
because it's like, oh, well, I'll get the gist of it,
(17:10):
I'll text through it or what have you do?
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Know what you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, you know. I we have this saying that
adventures should never come with a pause button. And you know,
the powerful thing about it is you can't pause. You
don't want to run to the bathroom. You are in
the middle of an experience that the roller coaster started
(17:34):
and you do not get off until it ends. And
when I'm at home or I'm not in that type
of environment, I cannot help but naturally be distracted and
get a diminished experience, you know. And we talked about
how cinema was going to kill Broadway, and then television
(17:59):
was going to kill cinema, and then streaming was also
going to kill cinema and DVD and VHS and blu
ray and larger screens, and the reality is it is
still the number one out of home entertainment activity in
the world. By far, people go to the movies ten
(18:19):
times more than all sporting events combined. No matter what
part of the world you're in, whether you're in Asia,
whether you're in Africa, or whether you're in India or
even in America, we go ten times more. So I
think I think that the headlines blow it out of proportion.
It's still you know, two thirds of Americans every year
(18:43):
go to the movies at least once, and that's that's
a big music concerts anything. Think of it like this
on one movie that breaks one hundred million dollars in
a single weekend. That movie movie had more people go
to it than all of the games of the entire
(19:05):
NFL season coming up. Wow, one movie. So when people
I think it's the King of the Hill that people
still like to beat up on. But I, like you
think that it is the cheapest experience you can for
a live event. It is accessible, and it's opened three
hundred and sixty five days a year. I don't think
it's going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So what exactly went wrong with Movie Pass? Well, it
was the usual growth at all costs. Remember how I
was describing gleefully swiping into movie theaters thinking good thing.
This math is somebody else's problem. Yeah, there's a reason
that math didn't work. In twenty seventeen, private equity firm
Helios and Matheson bought movie Pass. Mitch Lowe, a former
(19:50):
Netflix executive, and Ted Barnsworth, who as far as I
can tell, was just basically a professional scammer, were brought
in as leadership. There was absolutely a racial dynamic at
play here too. You have a service created by black people,
and then you bring in two white guys who maybe
look the part of what some people assume a tech
CEO looks like, just without any of the actual vision.
(20:12):
Ted and Mitch's big idea to save movie Pass dropped
the price down to nine dollars and ninety five cents
a month for unlimited movies. And as much as my
greedy ass liked that price point, Stacy warned it was unsustainable,
and he was fired from the company for saying. Zone Sure,
subscriber skyrocketed, but the service quickly became unusable. Movie Pass
(20:34):
started blocking users from seeing movies, intentionally resetting passwords and
blaming fake fraud alerts, you know, something the government kind
of thinks of as a crime. According to the FTC
movie Pass did this to seventy five thousand users. The
FTC says that Mitch and Ted knew about ordered and
helped run this so called password disruption program they were
(20:58):
running on paying customers. Meanwhile, Mitch and Ted were also
blowing through movie passes money, like flying the wrapper fifty
cent to Coachella on a movie pass branded private jet.
Why who knows? The Justice Department says this was all
a scam. They lied to investors claiming the nine dollars
(21:18):
and ninety five cents model was profitable when they privately
admitted it wasn't. They also hyped up some powerful AI
that was meant to monetize movie pass user data, only
that AI didn't actually exist. Classic AI washing, a tech
CEO vaguely claiming that AI is doing a thing it
is absolutely not doing. Both Mitch and Ted eventually applied
(21:41):
guilty to securities fraud. They faced actual jail time. In
just eight years, movie Pass went from massive growth to
total collapse and stacy while he was out of the
company that he founded. What did it feel like to
be pushed out of something that you built, you know,
(22:02):
that was that was your baby?
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Well you you know you watch movies and you watch
stuff and if you saw a biopic and I don't know,
Cinderellaman or some movie where some some lead characters something
goes wrong with him, you like, you shouldn't have let
that happen. You should have you know. And it's funny
when you're inside of it and it's unfolding in real time.
(22:28):
And it was very simple, kind of big boy chess
moves where it was like we got some investor capital,
the we had three board seats that additional money asked
to expand the board to five, and he had then
three seats and we had two. And then he brought
Mitch in and the next thing, you know, the dynamics
(22:51):
of the board had changed and they were then able
to make decisions that we couldn't stop. And it you
kind of think, oh, we're all friends here and we
all have the same purpose and we're rowing in the
same direction, and then quickly the dynamics had shifted, and
then you realize too late you're out. But people say,
(23:15):
what would you have done differently? And I said, I
honestly don't know. Because you're out raising capital and there
are some businesses you can go make a little hair salon, our,
a pizza shop, and you have your initial startup capital
and you work your way up over many years. But
when you're building something that is like a national theater
(23:39):
subscription circuit, you can't do a little at a time.
You kind of have to do it all, and so
you have that build cost, and so you have to
build fast and someone or someone else is going to
build it and beat you to the race. Like Netflix,
if you can get there, and you can get there
first and established dominance, you can withstand the storm because
(24:02):
you were first to the party. And even when people
cut away like they're starting to do with streaming services,
they're still going to keep the one. Back in the day,
nobody would cancel HBO, right, it was like you had
your HBO. So it's similar to that, and that having
gone through that experience, you realize how how many you
(24:26):
know a lot of diverse founders are artists woke up,
whether it was Sammy Davis Junior or Red Fox or
Richard Pryor, and they woke up and they were broke.
How I broke? You got to walk through something similar
and you realize it can happen to you too, no
matter how smart you are.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
So.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I remember watching the girl group TLC give one of
the most honest interviews I have ever seen after winning
a Grammy for their breakout album Crazy Sexy Cool, but asked,
how can you sell million records and still be broke?
Their answer was a sobering reminder.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Trust me, you can sell ten million nails and be
broke if you have greedy people behind.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
It's kind of a warning no matter how talented, successful,
or smart you are, you can still end up on
the outs especially if you're a black creative. Stacy's story
it's ultimately about what it means to navigate this kind
of dynamic. Getting pushed out of the very community that
you built and being left to feel like you have
nothing on the other end of it is a story
(25:31):
far too many of us know all too well. Stacy
writes about this in his book Black Founder, The Hidden
Power of being an Outsider. Watching the documentary, I was
really struck by the ways that it was a story
about race, and you know, the reality is not great
for you know, folks of like entrepreneurs of color. I
(25:55):
think it was what like less than one percent of
a funding goes to us, and so is there a
negative perception that comes with Thunders handing over a big
check and a lot of trust over to a black founder.
Do they feel more comfortable handing over that trust and
handing over that money to somebody who looks like Mitch
and Ted versus somebody that looks like me or you.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, I mean, I definitely. I think there is a
black tax that you have to pay, and I think
that you know people. Well, let me, I'm going to
say something that it's my experience, but it may it
may sound funny the way it's going to come out.
I think we are creatures of habits and we follow
(26:39):
pattern recognition, and I'll give you a thought experiment and
what I mean. So I was being interviewed by I
think it was a New York Times and it was
a woman writer, and she asked me a similar question,
and I said, you know, if we go outside. We
were at the Angelica, and I said, if we walk
outside onto Houston Street and we start asking people, close
(27:04):
your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. Right,
they're gonna describe or give me a name, or tell
me what you think of tech founder. I told her,
they're not gonna describe someone who looks like me, and
they're not gonna describe someone who looks like you. But
I said, tell me what a star basketball player looks like,
or tell me what a star athlete looks like, or
(27:27):
even give me a star player in golf or even tennis,
or even gymnastics or any of those things. Well, they
may describe someone who looks like me when it comes
to that. And again that's that thing about pattern recognition.
And I think when I was working on my book
and we were deciding what the cover was gonna be,
(27:50):
we talked about black founder and it was like I
wanted to put my face on the cover so that
more and more you're gonna see this is what founders
look like too write. And once upon a time we
were not in any sports, and so we had negro leagues,
but we weren't on the main field. So over time,
(28:12):
I think it can change, but there needs to be
more of us who are out there making it happen,
and that they get to see us and they start
to realize, Okay, this is acceptable. I don't think it's
like racism, like they're not as good. I think it's
it's a categorizing in a way to say because I
(28:34):
don't see this that often, I'm going to trust it
less or I need more to be convinced that it works.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I was reading an interview before we got on. I
think it was with the make the director of the film.
One of the instances that did not make it into
the film was that folks would come into the room
and automatically assume by pass you and automatically assume like, well,
certainly this white person is the founder. And I think
that speaks to what you're talking about. It's not a
(29:03):
question of ability. If every time you walk into a
room like that, the white guy is the founder. I
can understand how we need to see more and more
founders that look like you, founders look like me, so
that folks break those patterns.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
One hundred percent. It's just pattern recognition. Once you start
changing the pattern enough, people become fine with it. I think,
you know, with pattern recognition and being able to see
how things can change over time. Like first black love
on screen was crazy. You didn't see that interracial love
(29:38):
on screen was you remember with Jungle Fever, right, that
was so taboo? And then I remember Denzel doing people
were saying, why don't you ever kiss anybody in a movie, right,
but he would have Julia Roberts or some lead across
him and they couldn't. They never touched each other. And
(29:59):
then when I saw Moonlight, I was like, that's a
huge accomplishment. You saw black love. You saw same sex
black love, and it wasn't even Broke Back Mountain violent
in the tent. I'm taking this shit. Black Love. It
was beautiful. And that's what I mean by now you
(30:25):
can see people moving around in the world and it's fine.
It's like pattern recognition. It's one of those strange things
about our time, how people are trying to roll back
things that are now commonplace and trying to roll history
back to the nineteen fifties, as if that's something more
(30:46):
sacred but interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
More after a quick break, let's get right back into it.
In Stacy's book Black Founder, The Hidden Power of being
an Outsider, Stacy says that being traditionally marginalized as an
(31:12):
entrepreneur does come with challenges, but it's not always a
bad thing. Sometimes it gives you the perspective to see
needs others might overlook. That outsider's insight is what led
Stacy to create Urban World, now the largest Academy Award
qualifying Black and Multicultural film festival in the world, and
nearly three decades later, it's still going strong and it's
(31:33):
twenty ninth year. The subtitle of your book the Hidden
Power of being of being an outsider. I've always thought
this that, you know, being at the margins or being
someone who's like traditionally marginalized, it can actually be a
place of power for folks who want to build something sometimes,
Like for instance, with Urban World, you saw an overload
(31:55):
need in your own people and in the community, and
we're able to build something that spoke to this need
that existed, right, And so I feel like some of
what you're trying to do is like reframe this thing
that is so often we're told as like a negative,
as like a kind of a source of strength. It's like, yeah,
I bring a different perspective. I can see things that
maybe other folks can't see, and that is a that
(32:15):
is a in some ways a gift.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
That's right. So when we started Urban World, it was
like you had John Singleton, you had Spike Lee, and
you amazed occasionally had another director who would pop up
and do something, but there was so many other directors
trying to break in and trying to get on the scene,
(32:38):
and it's kind of like, you know, if we get
to play, we're gonna rock this, like and and and
the fact that the gatekeepers there was a very systematic
type of gatekeeping. And what I struggled with was, Ah,
I'm not I don't want to get on my soapbots
too much. But what I struggled with was the well
(33:01):
intentioned gatekeepers, often white. Their version of what they liked
to see was black pain. And sometimes those of us
who are coming from the experience don't just want to
see that. We want to see us having fun. We
(33:23):
want to see us being the Cosby's. We want to
see us making money, we want to see us in love.
We don't just want to see that. Oh, I feel
so bad about what happened during slavery or during civil
rights and the black pain experience. What about the black
beautiful fun experience?
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Right?
Speaker 1 (33:45):
And so the things that were bubbling to the top
were still those same experiences, but regular black life or
fun black life wasn't getting seen because it wasn't critically acclaimed,
and we felt that all all of it needed to
be seen. And at some point someone said Urban World
(34:06):
became to cinema what Showtime at the Apollo became to music.
It became this curation place and if you made it here,
you can make it anywhere. Kind of think, if we
say it's great and we think you're great, then you're great.
And that was like if you rub the stone at
(34:28):
the Apollo and you made it there, forget about it.
We don't care what the rest of the world says.
We know you're the best because we are tough critics.
And I remember when Ava Duverney was our publicist, and
I remember Ava sitting in the theater we were watching
dream Girls. Her mom's next to her, and she goes,
you know, I really want to make a movie. I go, well, Ava,
(34:50):
we got Urban World. Make it. We'll premiere it. And
she made her first short film and almost every film
Ava's ever made, she's come back to Urban World and Showcase.
So it's it was our moment to move civil rights
from music to film, and an Urban World was that
thing to help make that happen.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
That's so beautiful. And I don't know, I mean, I
think those investments that you make in people and their
stories and their vision, they really come back. It says
something that she continues to come back.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Course. Yeah, and I think it's great to have a
home base. And it just feels good to have a home,
have a people that are supporting you and rooting you
and watching you go out around the world changing the world.
And our stories, you know, our experience and our struggle.
I travel all over the world, and what's really funny
(35:45):
about these times we're walking through America's greatest export is us.
When you go to France, or you go to England,
or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are where
wearing Jordan's They're wearing Kobe's shirt, They're watching Black Panther.
(36:07):
It's like we are what they are most proud of.
And when you think of the possibilities of America, the
Black experience is the one that everyone holds up as, Oh,
that's why I want to go there. Sure you can
be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, but we
have such a unique experience about coming from the bottom
(36:30):
up that that is one of America's greatest exports. And
yet why would you want to kill that? People love
the idea of coming here because of those possibilities, and
they see it in music and film they love walking
around Brooklyn, knowing the streets where so much of hip hop,
and coming to the Blue Note and seeing jazz and
(36:53):
seeing all of these things where constant waves of our
experience dominate the world code. So I just I think
it's really important about that's what God gave to us
to share to the world.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
You did a TED talk about the use of AI
in filmmaking, and you sounded like you really do think
that film and music and culture and stories have the
ability to literally change the world, and that if more
people have the ability to make projects like this, that
power only grows.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
I'm gonna tell you a quick little story. So back
in Warner Brothers music history, and I know this from
the music industry because I was there before I came
into film. When you take you used to have to
go into a recording studio and you had to record stuff,
and it was very expensive. And the first person to
(37:48):
really do that in our community was Barry Gordy with Motown.
Now Here comes MIDI recording, where you can do a
drum machine and you can do all this stuff. And
this seventeen eighteen year old kid has a demo and
the head of music at Warner brothers went to see him,
(38:12):
and it's Prince. And he asked, Prince, who played on
your album? And he said, I played all the instruments, okay,
But he had the drum machine, he had the task
Can four track, he had the synthesizers, he had the guitar,
and he sang, and you could now go and make
(38:32):
an album r at least a demo in your bedroom, okay.
And what that did, and the sampling and being able
to sample music and put the samples in the keyboard
exploded music. So what do you think is gonna happen
when filmmaking gets affordable, that kids in bedrooms can now
(38:55):
make movies. The same thing that happened with hip hop
is about to happen with the longer visual form of storytelling.
And you can't stop it. And that's what I talked
about during my ted Ai talk. We've seen this before
in technology with music industry. You can make you can
make a full album off of your iPhone right now,
(39:15):
right So the distance between what you imagine and what
you you believe to happen, the distance between those two
gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And AI is going
to make that and it's going to bring the cost
way down. Movie making is a very rich person's game.
You're about to make it that kids are going to
(39:36):
blow our minds with the place that they're going to
take us.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Now, it's a very I mean, I love to hear
an optimistic vision for the future for once, But what
do you say to people who say the opposite, that
AI is simply going to kill creativity in film.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
You have people on both sides of the argument kind
of promoting doomsday scenario. On either side, filmmaking is going
to become so expensive it's going to die, or filmmaking
is going to become soho cheap, no one's gonna make
it anymore. Well, it never happens that way because as
artists mature up. Prince didn't just stay recording in his bedroom, right,
(40:20):
And when you saw many synthesizer bands, the ones who survived,
they all went to real instruments, and you saw bands
who hadn't used synthesize or pre recorded stuff go the
other way. So why do you see Christopher Nolan and
others shooting on imax and shooting on film stock. Why
(40:40):
do you see that because they look at the masters
that came before them, and there's stuff that they want
to do, and they play with the technology and they
go forward and backwards in time, and that's how all
art is, you know, And so I'm not worried about it. Artists,
artist tools change and change and change and change, but
(41:02):
we are still connected to the artists and their journey
and experience. And a robot or an AI system still
needs to run through the human, you know, vessel that
we as people will care about, right We want to
know where you're from, what block you grew up on,
(41:24):
what trials and tribulations you went through to make this
piece of content. And that's when when the audience will
care if you If it's just I spit it out
on my computer, no one's gonna care, you know, we don't.
We didn't care if Whitney, Houston are are what do
you call? Dolly Pardon wrote I Will Always Love You.
(41:47):
But when that song came out through Whitney, we heard
we heard her mother, we heard Dion Warwick, her aunt,
we heard her church upbringing, We heard all of that
come through Whitney, and you can't replace that, you know.
That's the part that I think is very special.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
So it sounds like you're saying that even if creators
are finding ways to use tech in their work, it
really all comes down to whether or not they're doing
so in service of creating something authentic, you know, something new,
something real, because if it's not authentic, your audience is
really going to be able to sniff it out, like
well know, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
We've had do you remember Milli Vanilli and sampling and
people not singing on their own albums, whether it was
AI or something else. We still crave authenticity, and authenticity
will always trump that which someone didn't do. Even when
it came to sampling, we wanted to know where did
that sample come from? Oh that's Frank Sinatra. Are it's
(42:48):
a hard knock life? Right? We wanted to know, And
then the sample wasn't cheating. The sample was. I'm gonna
I'm going to bring another world, this white experience, into
our black experience, and show you how they're the same.
I'm gonna have Annie tell you it's a hard knock life.
(43:09):
And then I'm gonna pull Brooklyn in here right well
that that pollenization is so beautiful and we've been doing
it forever, so I'm again I'm not overly worried or
concerned about it. We love authenticity and artists are going
to have to be authentic in their own way, whether
you're using voice samples or whatever. And we know the
(43:31):
real deal and what we want because we get goosebumps when.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
It happens, and you you can't deny it, like real,
recognize real. You know something when it's authentic and it's
grounded in that experience, you can.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Tell that's right one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
In twenty twenty two, Stacey was able to repurchase movie Pass.
He still runs it today along with the Mogul, a
brand new platform that lets movie fans compete in fantasy
style tournaments based on their favorite entertainment. Relaunched movie Pass,
nearly one million people were waiting to sign up. I
asked Stacy that it felt like he was recapturing someone
(44:07):
the magic of the old days.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
It was crazy. So in four days we had eight
hundred thousand people sign up for the wait list and
people join and it went, you know, instantly, it was
back and so we were very excited about that, and
you know, we were catching back up when we first
(44:31):
were born. We were the first to the party, and
then afterwards it's been Now that you have sixty percent
of theaters have some form of movie pass right, they
have a subscription of their own. So now with Mogul
and other things, we're even changing the space more. But
it was such a How often does a founder get
(44:53):
to go buy their baby back and relaunch it, you know,
it just rarely happens.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
You know.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
That's like Steve Job and Michael Bell, Michael Dell from
Dell Computers have gotten to go back and do that.
That is a very rare thing. So I know how
lucky we were to be able to do it. And
it just meant so much of the fans that were
so excited and we're posting like I want my movie
(45:19):
pass back and that they were there when we were
ready to bring it back. They were there. They were
like I'm down. They love the idea that you can
just go to any theater, to anywhere you want and
just boom, here's my movie past. Let's go, you know,
And that's what's really exciting, where all of the others
you can only go to just that theater, that theater chain,
(45:40):
but Movie Past you go wherever you want. So it's
still a beautiful thing. And we are continuing to grow
it and love being that epicenter for fans and fan fandom,
if you will, and being able to have that voice
for so many people.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Stacey, I could talk to you all day.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Thank you so much for gug like honestly, just the
fact that you have built such a great career and
presence out of like nerdy like black nerd shit, I
really like, Yeah, it really warms my heart. And you
have such a passion for filmmaking and a passion for
film It really is beautiful. So thank you for being here.
(46:20):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Bridget, thank you so much. And I'm actually working on
a book called how to Watch Movies, and I there's
so many times I was talking to people and I
would say, like going see a kid's film, don't go
see it at night. Go see it early in the
afternoon when the theaters packed the kids, like you get
(46:42):
a different experience. Like telling people how to go see
movies can give you a different experience than just thinking, oh,
I'm gonna just go at eight o'clock at night or
six o'clock at night? Are where to go see a movie?
You go see a horror film, go see it uptown
that's what you finished, right right. It's like there's places
that you're gonna get a whole different experience if you
(47:05):
go do things in different ways and help educate people
on how to how to watch movies. It's a whole
different thing.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
I cannot wait for this book when it comes back,
when it comes out, please come back to the show.
This is yes, you have no idea. You are like
very much speaking of my language. I have a whole
thing about how I go see a movie. Where I
go see a movie, who I see it with, who
I don't see it with. I have a whole philosophy.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, it's it's a bad experience if you pick the
wrong person to go. Oh my gosh, I'll go by
myself before I'll take the wrong persona same.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Oh look, I love movies for myself. That's like my
special place.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, Bridgie, thank you so much. This
was so awesome and wonderful.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
Oh the pleasure was all mine. Got a story about
an interesting thing in tech. I just want to say hi.
You can be just said hello at ten go. You
can also find transcripts for today's episode at tagoiti dot com.
There are no girls on the Internet. Was created by
me Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed
(48:08):
creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amado is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, bridget Todd. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
Us on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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