Today on the podcast, Jimmy sits down with Benton Crane, a powerhouse entrepreneur and marketer who’s done it all — from growing Angel Studios into a global media force to leading Harmon Brothers, the agency behind some of the most viral ads on the planet. Benton shares his unique journey through the worlds of storytelling, branding, and building companies that truly change the game.
Benton also dives into his latest project: Young Washington, a new feature film that brings to life the untold story of a young George Washington. This movie explores how a single misstep sparked the French and Indian War and ultimately shaped the destiny of a future nation. It’s a fresh, human take on history that you won’t want to miss.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a creative, or just love a good story about big risks and even bigger visions, this episode is packed with insight and inspiration. Tune in to hear how Benton thinks about faith, freedom, and chasing audacious ideas — and why he believes now is the most exciting time ever to create content that matters.
Benton also dives into his latest project: Young Washington, a new feature film that brings to life the untold story of a young George Washington. This movie explores how a single misstep sparked the French and Indian War and ultimately shaped the destiny of a future nation. It’s a fresh, human take on history that you won’t want to miss.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a creative, or just love a good story about big risks and even bigger visions, this episode is packed with insight and inspiration. Tune in to hear how Benton thinks about faith, freedom, and chasing audacious ideas — and why he believes now is the most exciting time ever to create content that matters.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Jimmy Rex Show.
And today on the podcast, I have Benton Crane and
this dude has done a little bit of everything. He
is one of the co founders of Angels Studios and
also the ex CEO at Harmon Brothers marketing agency. You
guys will hear a little bit about that in the podcast,
but they are some of the most brilliant marketers on
the planet. He's also the founder and now executive producer
(00:25):
of a company called the ten Ton where they start where.
He's been the producer of the movie Homestead if you've
seen that, and an exciting one that he is going
to talk about on this podcast coming out next year.
But got a lot of projects in the work, So
super excited to sit down and talk with Benton today.
And this is a podcast you're going to want to
listen to. So without further ado, let's get to the show. Also,
(00:48):
today's podcast is brought to you by Bucked Up Protein.
I drink at least one of these a days, sometimes twice.
They are twenty five grams of protein one hundred calories
and you can pick them up at your local Harmon
or anywhere that bucked up products are sold. This one
is rainbow candy flavored, and I don't know how they
came up with that, but it seems perfect. When you
taste it, you know exactly what they are talking about.
(01:09):
So these are amazing. Give them a try. You will
be addicted. And with that, let's get to the show. Well, Ben,
good to have you on.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Man, Hey, my pleasure to be here. Thanks Jimmy.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, you know, I when I was in college, gosh,
fifteen years ago, I had this was before Netflix really
kicked off or anything. I had probably six hundred DVDs
and so everybody would come check out their DVDs for me,
and I had one of the clear Plays, which was
kind of the original thing before vid, Angel and everything
else kicked off. But so I was one of the
(01:48):
first customers of what has kind of become Angel Studios.
It's kind of fun to have you on.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah, yeah, I also was a customer of clear Play.
I had the DVD player. I didn't have a collection
quite like yours, but yeah, I that was a service
that I loved. It kind of gave me access to
content that I otherwise wouldn't have watched, just because you know,
sometimes I'm not comfortable with the you know, heavy profanity
and you know, nudity, violence, whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Well, it's really interesting, I mean, from the longest period
of time, you know, Hollywood has really kind of led
people down the direction that it wants to with a
lot of different things. I was watching a TikTok recently.
It talked about how many of these child actors, like
the Britney Spears or the Mickey Mouse Club, you know,
(02:33):
Christine Aguilera, there's a couple recent ones that are and
then you know, people kind of fall in love with
them when their children, and then they kind of start
putting them into roles where they lead people into a
different form of morality that is kind of a dangerous road.
And girls are already super attached and loved them because
you know, they grew up with them, and so they
kind of follow them through. And it's you see how
(02:53):
Hollywood really does have their hand in everything, almost like
a puppet master, and they can, you know, change the
entire society based on the morality that they start injecting
into movies, entertainment and music and all those things. So
it's very needed what you guys have decided to provide.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yeah, So you know Jeff Harmon, he's one of my
co founders at Angel Studios.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
He always says.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
That, like, the key innovation over at Angel Studios is
the gatekeeper model, And what he means by that is,
in Hollywood, you have this very small group of gatekeepers
who they control what gets made, what doesn't get made,
what gets the green light, what hits the trash can.
And Angel has come along and said, well, what would
(03:39):
happen if we put that power in the hands of
the viewers.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
We just asked the viewer, what do.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
You want to see? What do you want to get made?
And it totally changes that dynamic. And it's been interesting
because oftentimes, you know, I kind of talked about Hollywood
as like this big amorphous blob of like, oh, it's
just kind of this cesspool where nothing good comes out
of there. But I've since realized that that's not the case.
(04:06):
There are amazing people, incredibly talented storytellers who are just
working in this environment where they're all kind of beholden
to these gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers are the ones who
get to say, yeah, make this or don't make that.
And when you actually provide all these creators with an
(04:27):
alternative where the viewers get to choose. Then all of
a sudden, these creators get freed up to make just
the most beautiful pieces of art and tell the greatest
stories you can imagine. And so gosh, I'm so grateful
to you know, Neil and Jeff and Jordan and the
guys over that whole team over at Angel Studios who
(04:48):
has broken through on that innovation of just put the
power in the hands of the viewers. It's groundbreaking.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah, it really is an I you know, watching you
guys kind of make these different pivots and you really
decided we're going to take on this giant task and
kind of see how it goes. But then now you
look at it, it's only been a couple of years
and already goes, oh, that makes so much sense. And
there's so much money being willing to be a part
of this and be thrown into it because people want entertainment,
(05:17):
but they want to be able to watch it with families.
They want to be able to tell the real stories
of history and of America, and you know some of
the stories about the Bible and you know King of
Kings that you guys are a part of. I mean
just an incredible story, right, the chosen series. These different
things you're doing now, these are the stories that people
want to watch. These are the stories that help you
(05:39):
build those memories with your family where you watch movies together.
Remember when I was a kid and we used to
always watch movies together. I remember one year my brother,
I can remember it was some Steven Sigall movie. He
got on accident and it was just this really inappropriate
movie and it kind of just ruined the whole Christmas.
It was like a Christmas even, it kind of ruined
the whole night. And you know it does matter. You know,
you sit down, you watch a really wholesome, beautiful video together,
(06:03):
it builds a strong memory or bond with you know,
your parents or the kids.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
One point of clarification when we talk about Angel Studios,
you'll actually hear me talk about they or them. And yes,
I am an original co founder all the way back
to the days when it started as vid Angel and
then it later became Angel Studios. But I am now
an independent creator who's making movies and TV series that
(06:32):
I then take to Angel Studios for distribution. And so
even though I'm one of the original co founders. I'll
talk about Angel Studios as they them, and so when
we look at, you know, the innovations and stuff that
have come out of Angel Studios, I'll be careful not
to take credit for them, because they have an amazing
team over there who have done that well.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
And how did you decide? I mean, yeah, I mean
you've had your hand in this from the beginning. That's
why I talk about it as such. But so maybe
give us a little bit of your background of kind
of how you evolved into that role from where you
were before.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
So the original co founders were the Harmon brothers Neil, Jeff, Jordan,
and Daniel and myself. I'm a cousin, so I go
way back with these guys. We grew up together. In fact,
Jeff and I are the same age, and so you know,
we were best buddies growing up and we were always
into you know, some sort of Miss Jeff together. But
(07:26):
we ended up as college roommates. And while we were
college roommates, we had another roommate named Devin Graham. Everyone
knows him now as Devin Supertramp.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Well, Devin was into videography and at the time he
was you know, just taking wedding photos and doing videos
and stuff. In fact, he shot my engagement photos with
me and my wife. But it was funny because he
offered us a wedding video and at the time, wedding
videos weren't really a thing, and he showed us one,
(07:59):
and my wife, well at the time, my fiance, we
both looked at it and we're like, oh, that seems
kind of cheesy. Thanks Devin, but no thanks. So we
took a pass on it. And then he became you know,
world famous just a few years later, and we're like, oh, man,
we probably should have said yes. But anyways, after you know,
we all roomed together, I got married and left went
(08:21):
off started my career, and Jeff and Devin and it
ended up being a couple of other guys. They started
playing around with YouTube, right and at the time it
had barely been purchased by Google. It was like this
new thing, you know, mostly just viral cap videos or whatever.
And they came up with this hair brained idea of like, well,
(08:43):
what if you tried to grow a business on YouTube?
And so they launched this YouTube video for a little
company called Ora Brush, which was a tongue scraper that
gets rid of Bad Breath and went crazy viral. It
was huge, and they ended up becoming the first company
to buy ads in mass on YouTube, which was super
(09:05):
exciting for Google because they had this vision of turning
it into an ad platform, right, but at the time,
nobody understood that or got it well. Jeff and Devin
and these guys got it with Ora Brush. So at
this point, I'm now married, I've gone off to Washington,
(09:25):
d C. I've started my career. I'm working as a
statistician later as an intelligence analyst, And I'm watching all
of this from afar, and as I'm seeing what these
guys are doing, I'm realizing, like, this is way bigger
than Bad Breath. This is way bigger than you know,
tongue scrapers. They're onto something. This is the tip of
(09:47):
an iceberg. That's something huge. And so as as I
was staying in touch with Jeff, he called me one
day and we were talking about Pooper E, this funny
poop spray little company in Texas who had reached out
to Jeff and like, Hey, we love what you did
(10:08):
with ore Brush, can you come do that for Pooperree?
And I remember he was kind of like you know,
it's a funny product, but it actually works, like it
really works. And he's like, you know, they're trying to
recruit me, but I just don't know if I'm interested
or not. And I had one of those moments where
like I don't really know how to describe it other
(10:29):
than like almost a conduit of communication, you know, straight
from heaven.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, we call those downloads, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, I had one of those instant downloads where I
felt like God was just saying to me, like, here's
your opportunity.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Take it.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
And I told Jeff right then and there, like zero hesitation.
I was like, I will come do this with you,
like we need to do this. And I remember his
reaction was one of surprise, because like I had a
good stable job out you know, I lived in Virginia,
we had bought a house and had the white picket fence,
and you know we were kind of starting the dreams,
(11:08):
so to speak, and and you know, without a moment's hesitation,
I was just like, yeah, we'll we'll leave all that,
I'll move my family back to Utah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Let's do this.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
And so Jeff was like, Okay, let's do this.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
So he went and rounded.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Up Neil and Daniel Jordan Day left or brush, I
left Deloitte was where I was working at the time,
moved across the country, and so we started the Pooparee campaign,
and of course, you know, it's all history now, but
it was wildly successful.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
You know, it sold gosh.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
I don't remember the exact number, but in the first
four or five months, it sold something like eighteen million
dollars worth of worth of pooperree. And prior to that,
I think they had done in their whole history, they
had done a few tens of thousands online they had
a more healthy retail presence, but online they had almost nothing.
And all of a sudden, we're selling millions of dollars
(12:08):
of this stuff. Well, we had a six month contract
with pooperre and the original thinking was, Hey, if this works,
then we'll just merge into Poopery and we'll kind of
become the marketing arm. But it was pretty clear pretty
quick that that wasn't a long term fit, and so
(12:29):
we started realizing, like, okay, well, at the end of
this six months, you know, we're going to have to
figure something else out. And I had just come from Deloitte,
so I kind of understood the you know, the the
world of a services business, you know this agency type
type structure, and so you know, my vote was, hey,
(12:50):
let's go build an agency. And at the time, the
brothers didn't love the idea of building an agency. But
Neil basically in his spare time, had coded this little
app where you could go watch YouTube videos and turn
off cusswords. You could choose which cuss words you wanted
(13:12):
to turn off, and and he had originally kind of
built this thing like, hey, is this something I could
do for my kids, because he was trying to unlock
this at this world of like, there's so much amazing
stuff happening on YouTube, how can I make it more
accessible to my kids? And so when he did that,
that kind of opened up the possibility of like, wait,
(13:34):
we could actually build a business around this. And that's
when vid Angel was born. And so gosh, for the
next I don't I don't remember the exact timeline, but
there was good nine or so months where we just
all dove in and just went full steam on vid Angel.
(13:54):
Neil Neil coated it. Jordan was huge and kind of
like building out the structure of it and stuff. Jeff
and Daniel and myself. We were more focused on marketing it.
So some people still remember the original marketing videos. We
took this family and shot them with I don't remember
how many thousands of paintballs to represent you know, each
paintball represents a cussword. Got yah, yeah yeah, And so anyways,
(14:19):
you know, we did some stuff like that. Some of
them went viral. You know, it was pretty exciting. But ultimately,
after you know, eight nine months of that, we realized
the product we had built was actually pretty crappy.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Like I couldn't even get my.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Wife to use it because it was so buggy and
so problematic.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
I remember watching early in those early days, I watched
I was trying to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
if you remember that, and the movie is kind of confusing,
and so it would cut out total parts and I
was so lost. I couldn't even I had to turn
it off, but I couldn't even follow the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember that early on.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, So that that was when we realized that, like
we realized we actually had to go back to the
drawing board and rebuild it, start from scratch, take everything
we had learned and so Neil and Jordan went heads
down on rebuilding vid Angel and so during that time
that left Jeff, Daniel and myself to be like, okay,
(15:15):
well what do we do? Like still got to put
food on the table, and so we went out and started,
you know, pounding the pavement to drum up some work.
We're like, I guess, let's go, you know, give someone
some marketing help. Well, out of that effort came Squatty
Potty and then of course Squatty Potty and the pooping Unicorn.
(15:35):
It went wild.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
I had the founder of that on my podcast a
couple of years ago, which one is it? Bobby? Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I love Bobby. I didn't st George.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
By the way, Bobby was like to launch that pooping unicorn.
All of Squatty Potty's investors and board were like, no
way know how, like this is brand's suicide. And Bobby
was the one who like he caught the vision and
he saw it and he greenlighted us. And so to
this day, I'd like give Bobby his props carilliant. He
(16:07):
had the courage too. Well, I give you guys all
so much credit. I mean, you guys had so much
foresight where this was all going. It's easy to remember now, right,
to think about it now and be like, oh, yeah,
of course this is what people were gonna want, but
it was.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
So not obvious during those times. Nobody knew how to
use these tools like YouTube and social media. And you know,
I had the founder of blenech on and that was
one of the few guys that caught it as well.
And I just think, now, my god, you guys were
so brilliant, because it was really hard to understand. Even today,
a lot of people don't have any clue how to
(16:40):
use these amazing tools that are in front of us.
But you know, to have that foresight clear back then,
it's just very admirable.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And looking back, I don't feel like I had all
the foresight other than just kind of knowing there's something here,
right and we need to dig in and figure out
what that something is.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
So, of course out of this squatty potty success spun
several others. So right on the heels of squatty potty,
purple mattresses happened blew up huge success. Then chatbook blew
up huge success, and so by the time Neil and
Jordan had finished rebuilding you know, the next version of
vid Angel, and it was time to go back and
(17:21):
work on vid Angel. Things had like taken off for us,
and so what we ended up deciding to do so
Jeff shifted his focus back over to vid Angel. So
as Neil, Jeff, and Jordan were focused on vid Angel,
Daniel and I decided to stay full time focused on
just building the agency, which became known as Harmon Brothers.
(17:43):
So Daniel was the chief creative officer. I was the CEO.
We built an agency that gosh, we had a you know,
in the nine years that I ran it, if I
remember correctly, we had five of our clients became billion
dollar brands and another six of them became one hundred
(18:04):
million dollar brands, and so gosh, that's like eleven super
successes in the course of nine years. And then in
addition to that, there was like a bunch of you know,
smaller base hit you know.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah, like Squatty Squotify. I was gonna say yeah, because
I think, yeah, they sold for tens of millions, but
it wasn't like a billion dollar company anything. But I
remember talking to somebody a couple of years back, and
he said to me, he said, you got to watch
we were talking about marketing. He said, you got to
watch the Herman Brothers like their agency. He said, they
are the best in the world at what they do.
They're the best, and it's like interesting. And so I've
(18:39):
always kind of had this little side interest in what,
you know, your guys' company was doing because somebody that
I respected a lot told me that you guys were
literally the best at doing it. And so I mean
it goes to say, for what you guys were pulling off, well.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Thank you, thank you. I really feel like we had
a special group of people. We built a special team
and got that team just pulled off amazing things. But
if I was to identify one thing of like pulling
back the curtain and saying like, hey, here's what we
were doing that made it special, we so, like very early,
(19:18):
almost at the beginning, Daniel Harmon read a book by
the CEO of Pixar. It's called Creativity, Inc. And man,
it became like almost our company bible. Like we required
everybody to read it. And we studied that book inside
and out and in it ed Capmell the he basically
(19:43):
you know, peeled back the curtain of Pixar and showed
this is how Pixar has done what it's done, and
we went and like we we were maniacal about trying
to reverse engineer Pixar's process and apply it to advertising,
and like, if I had to sum up what that means,
(20:04):
it's basically like if you think about startup world, you
know how there's kind of this like lean startup method
where it's like, come up with the minimal viable product
the MVP, right, come up with it as fast and
cheap as possible, and the test, see what you learn,
and then iterate, test, iterate, test, iterate, test, iterate. Well,
that's essentially what Pixar does with storytelling. They're like, oh,
(20:29):
here's an idea, Okay, how do we test it? All right,
let's take those learnings. Now, let's iterate, test, learn, iterate, test, learn, iterate,
and they do that over and over again. And that
was the process that we applied to advertising. And at
the time, it just seemed like the best way to
do things, and we were industry outsiders, so we didn't
(20:51):
know that there was any other way. But it turns
out most of the industry doesn't do that. They don't
think that way, most of the industry will be like, Okay,
let's go write a script.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
All right, we'll ititerate a.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Couple times on the script. Okay, script is locked, done,
and now everything moving forward is beholden to that script
that can't change anymore because it's locked and they have
this process. Well, it turns out Hollywood does a lot
of that too, where Hollywood structures are built such that
if you go hire a writer from the Writer's Guild,
(21:25):
which is this union of writers, right, you're allowed X
number of revisions on that script, and once you get
through those X number of revisions, if you want any more,
you have to go re up and rehire these writers.
Otherwise your script is locked and it can't change. And
what that means is like if you're on set and
(21:47):
somebody has a brilliant idea to just improv something and
try something new, you don't necessarily have the flexibility to
even do that. Whereas Pixar's methodology of constant iteration and
the methodology that we used at Harmon Brothers, we're constantly, constantly,
(22:07):
constantly tweaking tweak, tweak, and sometimes people hated us for
it because we'd be like two days from launch, and
somebody would realize like, I've got this idea on how
to make this better, and everyone would be like, oh man,
that is a good idea, but that is so much work,
and now we have to let go back and you know,
make major changes or refilm something and and and that's
(22:30):
just the nature of doing it that way.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Well, there's a real intelligence and not being having great ideas,
but not being attached to the idea, you know, more
so obsessing over what you're trying to get as an outcome.
And it's one of the things that I've always tried
to do on my business as my you know, clients
and customers always say the same thing. They said, did
I've never met somebody that can pivot so fast off
of one of his own ideas. You just you don't
have this ego attached to it. I don't have this
(22:54):
need for my idea to be the right one. I'm
just trying to get it all right. And so when
you can do that, and you as a company, when
you're willing to go gosh, it'd be a lot easier
to just put this out as it is, but to
be able to pivot knowing that there's a little bit
better way to do it, you know, it just it
takes a lot of humility in those moments to do that.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
I feel like entrepreneurs learn that pretty quickly. It's almost
like forced into entrepreneurs, right, always doing that. But artists,
that is a skill set that I'm going to be honest, like,
most artists haven't learned that skill set. And having you know,
now trained dozens, you know of artists on that skill set,
(23:33):
it's hard to learn and it requires an enormous amount
of humility because typically when you bring an artist onto
a project, and I use the term artists loosely, right,
it can be a writer, it can be anybody creating things,
yeah yeah. But when they come onto a project, they
feel this need and this desire to kind of put
their fingerprint on it, right, They want to have an
impact on it, and so, you know, they fall in
(23:57):
love with their ideas a little bit, and it's really
hard to be told like, well, actually this idea sucks,
or that idea was a pretty good one, but here's
a better one. And initially, when artists go through that process,
it shakes their confidence. They feel like, oh my gosh,
(24:20):
like am I failing? Am I getting kicked out of that,
but you have to help them realize that. Like no, Like,
even though we didn't land on your idea, your ideas
still helped us go through the process to get to
where we eventually landed, and that part of the process
is essential. And it's also like when you get ninety
(24:42):
percent of the way there and then you have to
make a big pivot, you'll hear a lot of people
be like, well, that would have been really nice to know,
you know, last week or last month or whatever, and
you're like, yeah, I hear you. I empathize with you,
but we didn't know.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, I also didn't think of it last week. Huh.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
We had to get to here, yes, in order for
it to trigger that idea and that learning that realization
now we know now we can pivot, go make the changes,
make it amazing. But it's just part of the process.
It's work. It's really hard work.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Amazing. So how'd you decide to go from that to
where you're at today with you know and making these
movies that are you know, you're getting ready on.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
So having studied Pixar, we discovered that they actually started
in advertising too, So everybody knows Pixar. You know, nineteen
ninety five, that's when Toy Story came out and they
shook the world with you know, this three D computer
animation that had never been seen before. Well, not a
lot of people know that there were several years prior
to that where they were developing this technology and using
(25:46):
it in advertising. So you can go back and if
you go on YouTube and looks up look up Pixar ads,
you'll see this portfolio of ads. One that I remember
was like Jelly life savers. I don't know if you
might remember from when you were a kid, like they
had these animated life savers because they're jelly, you know,
they you know.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
What, it would make sense that they would start as
an advertising agency because you only have to make thirty
second clibs or sixty second clibs. They could do that
and have a budget and the size of company that
it was at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
And it turns out there's actually a lot of great
storytellers who start in in ads. So Michael Bay, I
believe Ron Howard. Wow, shoot, I'm having a brain fart.
But the super famous Apple commercial from nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, what was his name? Lhammer?
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Through yeah, yeah, I'm having a total brain fart. But
he went on to have you know, great storytelling career,
and even Disney did some Walt Disney way back in
the day, even he did some mad work. And so
we realized that, you know, this skill set and this
team that we.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Had built were.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Actually really set up to shift focus and go into
long format storytelling. Like you know, we we came into
advertising at a time when you couldn't just force feed
whatever crap you.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Wanted to to your audience.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Like but think back to the TV days where you
have this thirty second spot.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You had to watch whatever it was on.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Your audience is captive, right, yeah, And so as advertisers
like you didn't actually have to do that good of
a job entertaining you.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Just it just had to make sure the brand stuck
with you. Yeah. Yeah, Well you.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Fast forward to internet days where you've got the YouTube
skip button, you know. Then you get into news feeds
like Facebook and later Instagram and so on and so forth,
and if something's not entertainment entertaining, you just scroll right by, right,
And so to be successful, we had to make our
ads incredibly entertaining, and so we had developed the stability
(28:00):
to not only sell convince somebody to take action. But
we did it in a very entertaining way. And I
remember our customers would often ask us, like, how long
of an ad is too long? And we had ads
that ranged from fifteen seconds and thirty seconds all the
way up to ten twelve minutes, and I would say,
(28:23):
kind of our average was like in that two to
three minute space, which in the world of advertising, that's
an eternity.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Right. If you think about like when you're watching a
basketball game or whatever, and and a sixty second ad
comes on for some pharmaceutical, you're.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Just like, oh my gosh, this is so longet In
on Hulu, it'll be like it'll say like one hundred
and twenty seconds until you're next one. You're like, ohy,
do I even want to keep watching this show in
It's only two minutes, you know, but if you're watching
it to watch an ad, you'll watch it, yeah, twelve minutes.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
That was what we realized is that if you make
it entertaining, So we would always tell our customers, like,
we make it as long as it needs to be,
but not a second longer. And so if you make
it so entertaining, and you have great rhythm and great pace,
people will totally forget about the time. They'll watch a
four minute add not even realize that four minutes went by,
(29:18):
because they're engaged, they're enjoying it. And we actually developed
a process to test ourselves to see how we were doing.
And originally we called it a laugh graph. I've since
come to think of it more as like an attention graph.
What we would do is we would take a script
and we'd go read it to people and we would
(29:39):
film how they were reacting during it, and then we
would take that recording back and we would have an
intern sit down and they would watch that person's face
and we would be looking for clues of I'm engaged
or clues of I'm distracted. And as soon as somebody
would get distracted, they're checking their watch, they're glancing away,
we would note exactly where that happened. Then we would
(30:02):
go back in and we'd say, what's wrong with.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
The script right here? We got to fix it. We
got to tighten it up.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
We need something more entertaining, we need a joke, we
need to cut it out, and needs to move faster.
Whatever it is, we've got to fix it, and we
would do that at the script phase. Then later we
would do it on rough cut edits. You know, you'd
put your initial edit together and then you'd go out.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
And test it.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
What we realized is we had built this ability to
actually see how well we're entertaining people, and if we're
failing at any point in the process, we can stop
and fix it. And so that was this realization of like,
we could actually apply this to long format storytelling, to movies,
(30:45):
to TV series, and in doing so, we can get
to tell stories that have bigger impacts on society that
you know, we can you know, impact society in positive
ways and tell stories that move people, inspire people.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
So on and so forth.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
So Daniel and I decided that we were going to
take the agency and we were going to pivot away
from being an agency. We were going to become a studio.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
And so our first attempt at that was the TV
series Tuttle Twins.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You work with Connor on that. He's been on the show.
He's a good good friend of mine.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
So Connor Boyac and Elijah Stanfield, they authored the books,
which I think last I heard, they've sold well over
four million copies they might five million or phenomenally successful
and important.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
So they're focused on teaching principles that don't get taught
in schools.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
So things like American Principle is a conservative principles, liberty, family.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Entrepreneurship, family, you know, all all those types of things. Well,
they had hired us to help them with marketing, right,
and so we really learned Tuttle Twins inside and out
and how to sell it because we were helping with
their marketing. We were helping sell you know, thoughts.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
On the book side.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah, on the books.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Well, meanwhile, we're using them at home. You know, we
have all the books, we're reading them to our kids,
and so like we really get immersed in this. Well,
when the books kind of blow up, that opens up
this door of like okay, this could be adapted into
a TV series, but it doesn't really align with industry uh,
(32:35):
industry safe politics, you know, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
You're going to get blackballed basically if you come up
with this material.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah. Yeah, So even though they have the numbers behind
their book sales that would totally justify it, a Netflix
or an Amazon probably not interested.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Well, I saw something the other day, it was like,
you know, the most popular or most well known human
ever exists was Jesus, but nobody will touch them. And
it shows that even Hollywood, they'll they won't touch something
like Jesus. If it's gonna they would rather not do
it than get the money for doing it. And so
like a lot of those gatekeepers that you talked about
the beginning, the one thing they care about more than
(33:11):
money is not sharing these types of values.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah, it seems crazy, right, but that's a perfect example
of like Dallas Jenkins, creator of The Chosen, you know,
had his uh, you know, he had some failures inside
of the system, right, the gatekeeper system that found him
(33:36):
at kind of rock bottom and at his career at
a point where he was willing to go try something
outside the system, outside the norm, and you know, in
collaboration with Angel it built The Chosen, which is this
amazing success, and it was so successful that now even
mainstream Hollywood you know, has to accept it right, right,
(33:59):
and you know now it's on Amazon, you know. So yeah,
going back to Tuttle Twins, I think it was Jeff
Harmon who first came to me and he was like
he knew we were wanting to do a TV series,
and he was the one who came to me and
he was like, you really ought to start with Tuttle Twins.
(34:20):
And initially I was kind of like, ah, man, is
he right? Do we really want to start with something
that you know has a little bit of polarizing you
know nature to it?
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Kind of a are we doing this moment?
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Like I started thinking like is this going to pigeonhole us?
Like if we start with tuttle Twins, then is that
just going to pigeonhole us to like, oh, now we
only do you know, political type material. But as I
thought about it, I was like, this is actually the
perfect project to start on for a number of reasons.
(34:55):
First off, we're really good at edge educating plus entertaining. Right,
So when you're teaching about squatty potty, right, you're like
covering this super gross topic and educating people on the colon,
but doing it in a fun, safe way, right. And
if we can do that with pooperre and squatty potty
(35:16):
and like deodorant and you know these kind of like
more icky subjects, like we could totally take on a
political subject and make it safe, make it entertaining, make
it fun, make it safe, make it non controversial, like
prior to squatty potty, like having any sort of like
(35:38):
poop talk in a group setting, like you know, you
just don't go there. But then if you can make
it safe and fun, then like, okay, now people can
go there. So that was reason number one. And then
reason number two was we all loved Tuttle Twins. And
(35:58):
to be able to take some thing that you're already
passionate about, you.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Already love it, it's a huge difference.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Oh yeah, when you have something that you can just
throw your passion behind. So I remember going to Daniel
and he took some convincing too. I remember trying to
convince him that hey, Tuttle Twins is the one, and
and you know, he had to kind of stew on
it for a while, but eventually he came around and saw,
(36:25):
you know, saw the possibility there. And so we went
to Connor and we're like, hey, Connor, we're going to
be making a TV series. Why don't we do Tuttle Twins?
And and you know, he caught the vision eventually too,
and so we we set out on it and we
went and made Tuttle Twins. We crowdfunded it, similar to
the Chosen where we went out to the crowd and said, hey,
we want to make this, we need your help, please invest.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And you have customer information of millions of people too,
that helps.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
So so that was round one of our attempt to
leave the agency world to become And.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
That's just a gutsy move because I mean, you're having
a lot of success as a marketing agency to just
make that pivot, I mean, you already had use the
same formula. So it's not a matter of whether I
think you felt it would work or not. It's just
you had to leave something that was already working really
well in order to do this new thing.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Well, that's actually where the story gets interesting, because yes,
we had to take a sizeable chunk of our team
and move them off of ADS right, and of course
ADS pay the bills right and put them over onto
Tuttle Twins, where Tuttle Twins does not pay the bills
you know, in fact, it costs us money. And we
(37:37):
hope that someday in the future it becomes this, you know,
profitable thing, but for now it's all speculative.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
It's a hope, right.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
And so that was the first year in our history
that we didn't grow. We had a flat year from
a revenue perspective, But because we took all these people
off of ADS and put them on tuttle Twins, profits
were lower that year. Bonuses were lower that year. And
so even though when we set out to pivot, everybody
(38:08):
was nodding their heads.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
On board, but it's still kind of like.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Everybody was excited.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
But then when brass tax hit and I was like, oh,
there's actually going to be some sacrifice in making this pivot.
We kind of had to come to Jesus moment as
a as a company where it was like, Okay, is
this really what we want? Or do we want to
stay an agency and you know, stay who we are
(38:36):
and and you know, the the overall voice was that
they wanted to stay an agency. And I felt like
I had done nine years of building an agency and
and and I was ready to move my focus over
to longer format storytelling. And so I said, Okay, no problem,
(38:59):
you guys be an agent, see, but I'm going to
step down and I'm going to I'm going to go
independently build a studio. Daniel also stepped down from his
role and he went full time on Tuttle Twins, and
so we we put successors in place to step in
behind us so that they could continue to thrive and
(39:21):
be successful. And Daniel to this day is now just
focused on building Tuttle Twins. They finished season three, they're
starting season four. Now it's going phenomenally well. It's consistently,
you know, one of the top three or four shows
on the Angel platform. So it's really hit it stride
and it's it's doing great. And I went and spun
(39:44):
up my studio. It's called ten Ton, and our first
project was Homestead, which that launched in theaters this past Christmas.
It was a you know, as our first project. It
you know, we had a relatively small budget. It was
(40:05):
a six million dollar film and it did twenty one
million dollars in theaters, which that's not a blockbuster but
for an independent movie.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Though.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, yeah, I think it surprised a lot of people
at how well it did. And U and then since
then it launched inside of Angel Studio's ecosystem and it
has consistently been one of the top one or two
shows on their whole platform. Then it went for rent On.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Say, I think I bought it on Amazon.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Yeah, you can get it on Amazon.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
I bought it, and you can get it on Apple
a couple months ago.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
So we stayed in Amazon's top ten for two and
a half months.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Amazing, which you look on either.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Side of Homestead and there was always you know, two
hundred million dollar film, three hundred million dollar film, and
then Homestead and we were you know.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Well, what was cool about is it didn't it doesn't
feel like a small budget movie. You know, you got
good actors and you can tell it's got a good screenwriter,
and and you didn't go cheap the setting and any
of that kind of stuff. I think there was a
frustration around Utah forever that, you know, just things felt
and looked a little bit less quality than Hollywood. And
I think that's probably why you stayed in Amazon's top
(41:11):
ten for songs, because it doesn't have that fail to it.
I mean, and you can you watch it, you just
feel like you're watching normal movie. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Like, man, I have to give a ton of credit
to several people, but so Jason Ross, he was a
co author of the book series Black Autumn, that's what
Homestead is based on. Yeah, Yeah, we ended up pivoting
away from the Black Autumn name because he kind of
wrote it more as a military thriller, so it's kind
of more aimed at like young, you know, twenty to
thirty something males. They don't mind a lot of swearing,
(41:41):
a lot of violence, you know, that type of thing.
And then we all of a sudden, we're bringing it
into the Angel Studios ecosystem, and we're like, we have
to come up with a family safe. We need to
appeal more to women, which the themes of the original
books were all about this idea of like when the
crap it's the fan, it's actually faith in family and
(42:03):
community that rise from the ashes, and that's a theme
that totally works inside the Angel ecosystem. But we had
to come at it kind of a different way, and
so in working through that, we decided to rebrand so
that everyone would kind of understand like, yes, they're related,
but Homestead is a different approach than Black Autum. But anyways, Jason,
(42:28):
he not only was he a co author on the
book series, but he was one of the writers the
main ride. He was the lead writer on the screenplay,
and he actually provided his whole home and his whole
homestead for filming, which gave us this world class location
where on our budget we never could have afforded something
like that, but because he opened that up to us,
(42:51):
now all of a sudden, we have this setting where like, okay,
we can make this look big budget right awesome. And
then huge credit to Ben kas and Ben Smallbone. They
like they're just they did so much with so little
and just made it awesome. But anyways, yeah, thank you
(43:13):
for saying that.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Well, no, for I mean for a first project too, man, geez,
Like that's you know, very impressive, and so that allowed you,
I'm guessing to get a lot more bigger budget type
things going coming in afterwards, because I think that's where
you've kind of gone with it from there, right. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:29):
Yeah, So our project that we have coming down the pipeline,
and I guess, depending on when this goes live. July one,
twenty twenty five, we're announcing Young Washington, which is a
movie about basically the coming of age story of George Washington.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Which, by the way, sorry but like has never been told.
I'm a history buff, I'm an American. I flew the
American flag above my ceiling as a child, and I
don't know that story that well, nobody does.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
It's really not a well known story. But people don't
realize that when George Washington was young, twenty two years old,
he went out and made some of the biggest mistakes
that you can make that should have just demolished his career,
Like he accidentally started a global war. He accidents I.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Think a French Indian War, Okay, because I mean that's
all I know about him, but.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Like, yeah, and I won't get into spoilers here, but
but essentially he makes as bad of mistakes as you
can possibly make, torpedoes his career. But then by going
through like the worst of the worst mistakes, that forges
his character to where he has this comeback moment where
(44:50):
now they're in the French and Indian War and he
is serving as General Braddock's aid and they end up
in this battle where the British are just getting thumped on.
General Braddock dies, the troops are are getting demolished, and
he has to round up everybody and perform a safe evacuation,
(45:12):
and in order to do so, he has to jump
on a horse and charge the enemy lines.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
And he gets two horses shot.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
Out from underneath him. He gets bullet holes in his coat,
a bullet hole in his hat, but he goes unscathed,
and in doing so, he rounds up everybody, gets it organized,
leads a safe retreat, saves hundreds of lives, and becomes
George Washington. Right, And this was the moment when all
(45:42):
of a sudden he earned the respect of everybody and
became this legend. And later toward the end of his life,
he ends up meeting an Indian chief. This Indian chief
tells him I was on the other side and we
were shooting at you. We were all aimed at you,
and we could not hit you, and and basically says
(46:06):
like you were protected by some sort.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Of Was there a book that came out a couple
of years ago I told like five stories that saved
the America or something like that, And I swear that
story is in there.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
It could be.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Yeah, yeah, it's the only time because most people don't
know that story. I mean, I know it because I
read a lot of history, but most people have never
heard that. It's just a does the movie cover all this?
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Oh wow, okay, cool?
Speaker 3 (46:28):
Yeah, So the man, I'm so excited about this for
a whole bunch of reasons. One because the story is
just awesome, and two we have John Irwin to direct this,
which a lot of your listeners are already familiar with.
John Irwin. He did House of David most recently, which
is one of the top shows in all streaming right now.
(46:50):
It's on Amazon Prime. He did I can only imagine
Jesus Revolution American Underdog, which is the Kurt Warner. Yeah,
and not a ton of people realize it, but John
Irwin is the only director in the whole entire industry
who has ever achieved an A plus Cinema score four
(47:11):
different times. So for context, cinema score started, I think
it was about forty years ago. It was like early eighties,
maybe late seventies, sometime in there. Since then, every show
that goes through the theaters receives a Cinema score, and
it's an A plus down to an F. And in
the whole history forty something year history of cinema score,
(47:34):
I think we're up to like one hundred and eight
movies have achieved an A plus Cinema score, So it's rare.
John has done it four times. He's the only one.
So not only is John like the perfect director for this.
But he's an American history buff. He loves this stuff.
George Washington is his personal hero, and so he sees
(47:57):
this project as you know, amazing.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yes, his life's work.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Right, And and so I'm like, Okay, we've got Angel Studios,
who is giving us worldwide distribution, We've got Genre when
the perfect director for this thing. We have this amazing story.
And I'm like, now we just have to go out
and execute and take this thing to the world. And
(48:22):
we have the opportunity, in my opinion, to have such
a positive impact.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Well, the country needs. I mean, if you want to
destroy a nation, you destroy their history, just you make
you weaken their leaders from the past, not even from
the future or from the present. You you know, you
destroy the heroes that people look up to. And so
more than ever, we need to tell the stories of
our founding fathers and of the amazing people that came
and built this country, you know, along the way. And
(48:49):
what's cool about this is it opens it up for you.
I Mean it's endless how many stories you could tell, right.
I Mean George Washington obviously that story goes first. I
mean he was the first. You know, he's the g
but yeah, at the end of the day. So my hero,
one of my heroes is Paul Revere, and I just
love him because he used kind of becoming It's kind
of like me having a podcast in a weird sense.
(49:10):
In twenty twenty five. It's like he was the most
networked dude in the whole land. And that's why when
he went and he told people's stuff, they listened. He
knew how to get everyone together. And that's kind of
what I am. I'm kind of a community builder above everything,
and I've just always loved how fearless he was and
everything else. But these stories of these guys, and especially
kids nowadays, they don't know American history. They don't know
(49:30):
these stories. Every July fourth, I get so frustrated. I
go to watch a movie and there's nothing. There's no
good TV shows, there's no good movies about the Founding Fathers.
I mean, you got Patriot, and besides that good, it
was amazing, you know, Patri's good, but it's also like
the not as good version of Brave Art, you know
what I mean. It's like it's still not even like
as good as Brave Heart. So you're like, Okay, it's
(49:52):
good it is, but it's also kind of more fiction
than anything, right, I doesn't actually tell this any history.
You know, there's one TV series I like about the
Sons of Liberty. Though they're my favorite, they were just
rebels and that's kind of my spirit, you know. And
there's a couple things like that. But unless you really
know how to search for it, there's there's not a
whole lot out there.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
So there's John Adams, Yeah, John Adams's there's some good
stuff out there, but nothing has kind.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
Of like brought it all together act.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Under one umbrella. And like, I hope that.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Young Washington is just the beginning so that we can
tell all those amazing stories because I agree like telling
these stories, what better way to inspire the future, you know,
this up and coming generation. Like I feel like so
much of society only wants to talk about the founding
father's flaws, right.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, they want to fly every flag, but America, it's like,
hold on a second. You know.
Speaker 3 (50:50):
Look, the simple reality is humans aren't perfect, none of
us are. But that doesn't mean that imperfect people can't
do amazing things. That doesn't mean that imperfect people can't
impact the world in such positive amazing ways. And that's
what the Founding Fathers did. They were imperfect human beings.
(51:11):
They had their flaws, they had their weaknesses. Everybody does,
but despite all that, they did amazing things. And I
love the term that I believe it was. Washington used
the term the divine hand of providence. He felt like
there was something guiding all of it, and he called
it the divine hand of Providence. And I'm really excited
(51:33):
in our opportunity to tell this story. We can include
the divine hand of Providence. We don't have to write
God out of.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
This story, which a really good point. It's really cool
part of it. Yeah, yeah, it's well and I think
I don't know if people are familiar with it, but
there's this whole industry in the South of these Christian
based movies and they're not even done that well, but
they do well at the like they sell well, they
get a lot of bring a lot of money, and
so like, some people might be listening to this and
being like, well, it sounds risky. If you're gonna include God,
(52:01):
you're going to cut out so many people. But I
don't believe that. I mean, you saw what happened with
you know, when you know, the Passion of the Christ
came out, or even the Sound of Freedom a couple
or some of these movies, Like people are afraid to
do this, but Americans are starved for it. There's such
a giant number of people that want these stories. We
want the story the way it was God wasn't it
did have his hand in it, you know, that is
(52:21):
the way that the story was told through the history.
And so to be able to bring that to the
big theater, man, it's going to be It's going to
be gonna be awesome.
Speaker 3 (52:29):
I've heard Jeff Harmon say something to the effect of
it's ironic that the group of people who believe in
the Creator are sometimes terrible creators when it comes to media.
And I think you bring up a super valid point
that just because we're including God in the story, that
(52:49):
doesn't mean it's going to become some cheesy, preachy you know,
call it, you know, cheesy faith film or whatever. No,
this is going to be a proper This is going
to be an exciting adventure movie with all the peril,
all the drama that you would expect, great storytelling, great acting,
(53:11):
great cinematography.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
It's all going to be there.
Speaker 1 (53:14):
Are you just curious? Are you announcing yet either like
what is the budget or any of the actors that
are going to be like who's going to be playing
other rush.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
We haven't announced casting just yet. That's you know, by
the time this podcast comes out, will probably only be
a month or so away from announcing casting, So so
stay tuned for that. But one thing that we are doing,
and as far as I know, this has never been
done before, we're actually opening up ticket sales a full
year in advance. So July fourth, twenty twenty five, we're
(53:45):
opening up ticket sales for July fourth, twenty twenty six.
Now why are we doing that? It comes down to this,
when you have a story that's this important, we want
to open it up so that our viewers can actually
help make it a success. And the way that they
can help is when you launch in theaters, particularly on
(54:07):
July fourth, there's a lot of competition. It's yeah, big weekend,
so we're going to be up against the biggest of
the big blockbusters, you know, probably a bunch of superhero
reboots and.
Speaker 2 (54:21):
You know whatever.
Speaker 3 (54:23):
And in order for us to compete, we've got to
get as many screens as possible. So For instance, a
little independent movie, it might open on one thousand screens nationwide,
whereas a big blockbuster will open on four thousand screens nationwide.
What determines how many screens you get is how much
(54:46):
the they call them the exhibitors, it's basically the theaters.
How much do they believe that this is going to
make money? And one way to make them believe is
to show them ticket pre sales in advance.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Brilliant.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
That's a way to signal to the whole industry that
there's demand for this and this story needs to be told.
Speaker 1 (55:07):
That's your your marketing mind coming in, bro, Yeah, I
love it. Well, you guys, you know you're again. It's
just I love talking to marketers because I believe that's
what I think. I am too, almost above everything else.
Is like I'm just you see where the balls go,
and you see where the puck's going. You can just
see things before other people, right, And it seems so obvious.
But even when you say that now, it's like, yeah,
(55:28):
if I'm gonna buy it next year, all right, I'll
buy the ticket now whatever. And then if enough people
do that, not only does it, you know, it just
signals to the big box offices that Okay, we need
to get more screens for these guys. And then from
there and just all I have to do is put
out a good product in it.
Speaker 3 (55:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:44):
Yeah, If you put out a good product, tell the.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Story well, market it well, then yeah, that key is
getting on enough screens, because if we open on a
thousand screens, we're never going to be able to compete.
But if we open on three thousand screens, then all
of a sudden, we're going toe to toe with all
the big boys. And so that's giving everyone who feels
passionate about this story being told and about how this
(56:09):
can impact society in a positive way. This is giving
all those people the opportunity to say I can actually help,
I can make an impact. I'm going to see the
movie anyway.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
I'm going to I'll buy a bunch. I mean, I
feel like, dude, like I love telling the stories of
these people. They were heroes and like you said, they
were so imperfect, but man, they had such balls, you know,
such courage. Like I feel like kind of in my life.
You know, I know that God works through me and
I'm a total idiot half the time. Like I know
how flawed I am, but I know God works through me,
(56:41):
and so I can look at their imperfections and go
those men deserve to be honored for what they did
and what they built. And you know, America, the idea,
the experiment of America was the greatest experiment.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
It works.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
Now. We have all the things that can corrupt and
society and everything get played into it over a couple
hundred years. But at the end of the day, what
they built and what they set up, we're benefiting it
from today hundreds of years later, you know.
Speaker 3 (57:03):
And what better way to inspire our kids, right because
think about it. If your kids are hearing this message
of like, oh, if you're not perfect, then like.
Speaker 2 (57:12):
Sit down and shut up.
Speaker 3 (57:14):
Whereas if they're hearing this message of like, no, these
guys aren't perfect, but look what they did, what better
way to make you know, my fourteen year old son
look up and say what can I do? How can
I make an impact? And coming out of Young Washington,
I want everybody to walk away with this feeling of
optimism for our future. You know, it wasn't just a
(57:38):
bright future once upon a time. In fact, the icon
the Rising Sun, this is the Young Washington icon. This
was inspired by George Washington's chair that he sat in
much later at the Constitutional Convention. There was a son
engraved on the back of his chair, and after they
ratified the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin made the famous comment where
(57:59):
he said, I and wondering if that's a rising sun
or a setting son. And I believe it's a rising
sun on this you know, on this nation. Well, we
still believe it's rising and so that we've made the
icon for young Washington, this rising sun because it's this
message of optimism, of hope, and we want our kids
and grandkids and we want the next generation to feel
(58:22):
that hope and that optimism, so that that's what they say.
Speaker 2 (58:26):
That's what this is all about.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
So this podcast is going to come out about when
you're releasing these ticket sales, how do people buy or support?
Speaker 3 (58:33):
So let's get a ur L set up for your listeners.
So it'll be Angel dot Com Forward Slash.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
Just put Jimmy Rexshow.
Speaker 3 (58:42):
Okay, let's do Angel dot Com Forward Slash Jimmy Rex Show.
I'll go talk to Angel and make sure that happens.
Speaker 1 (58:48):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (58:48):
But so Angel dot Com Jimmy Rex Show. You go there,
you buy your tickets. And by the way, as a
thank you to anyone who stands up and buys their tickets. Now,
every ticket that you buy enters you into a chance
to win a vintage custom f two fifty that we're
(59:09):
giving away. It's just our way of saying thank you
to anyone who stands up and says, yeah, let's help
support this early.
Speaker 1 (59:16):
Well, can we buy specific theaters or how does it work?
You just buy a ticket and then you can redeem
it at theaters.
Speaker 3 (59:22):
Yeah, yeah, So what happens is you buy your tickets now,
and then later once the show gets listed in theaters,
then you can actually go and redeem it and you
can choose your seat and got it and your showtime
and all that stuff. But for now, you're just buying
the ticket that reserves that ability for you in the future.
And in doing so, once again, this is huge. It
(59:44):
is what signals to the whole industry that there's demand
for this story and it's what is going to allow
us to compete with the big boys. And if we
can succeed competing with the big boys, that's what's going
to unlock the ability to not just tell the story
of young Washington, but that's when we get to dive in,
go deeper on all the founding fathers. I love them
and really make these stories known.
Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
I love that. Well, appreciate you, man. I appreciate what
you're doing. It's needed, it's fun, and can't wait to
see where it goes. I can't wait to watch the
videos you make about the films you make about Paul
Revere and Sam Adams and the rest of them.
Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
So oh man, that'll be so exciting.
Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
Well, I appreciate you, man, and thanks again that this
has been fun my pleasure.
Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
Thanks Jimmy, Thank you again for listening to The Jimmy
Rex Show.
Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
And if you liked what you heard, please like and subscribe.
It really helps me to get better guests, to be
able to get the type of people on this podcast.
It's going to make it the most interesting. Also, want
to tell everybody about my podcast studio, The Rookery Studios,
now available in Salt Lake City and or in Utah.
If you live in Utah and want to produce your
(01:00:47):
own podcast, we take all of the guests, work out
of it for you and make it so simple. All
you do is you come in, you sit down, you talk,
and leave. We record it, edit it, even post it.
For you. Interested in doing your own podcast, visit our
Instagram and send us a DM at Rookery Studios, or
go to our website, The Rookery Studios dot com
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Jimmy Rex Show.
And today on the podcast, I have Benton Crane and
this dude has done a little bit of everything. He
is one of the co founders of Angels Studios and
also the ex CEO at Harmon Brothers marketing agency. You
guys will hear a little bit about that in the podcast,
but they are some of the most brilliant marketers on
the planet. He's also the founder and now executive producer
(00:25):
of a company called the ten Ton where they start where.
He's been the producer of the movie Homestead if you've
seen that, and an exciting one that he is going
to talk about on this podcast coming out next year.
But got a lot of projects in the work, So
super excited to sit down and talk with Benton today.
And this is a podcast you're going to want to
listen to. So without further ado, let's get to the show. Also,
(00:48):
today's podcast is brought to you by Bucked Up Protein.
I drink at least one of these a days, sometimes twice.
They are twenty five grams of protein one hundred calories
and you can pick them up at your local Harmon
or anywhere that bucked up products are sold. This one
is rainbow candy flavored, and I don't know how they
came up with that, but it seems perfect. When you
taste it, you know exactly what they are talking about.
(01:09):
So these are amazing. Give them a try. You will
be addicted. And with that, let's get to the show. Well, Ben,
good to have you on.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Man, Hey, my pleasure to be here. Thanks Jimmy.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, you know, I when I was in college, gosh,
fifteen years ago, I had this was before Netflix really
kicked off or anything. I had probably six hundred DVDs
and so everybody would come check out their DVDs for me,
and I had one of the clear Plays, which was
kind of the original thing before vid, Angel and everything
else kicked off. But so I was one of the
(01:48):
first customers of what has kind of become Angel Studios.
It's kind of fun to have you on.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah, yeah, I also was a customer of clear Play.
I had the DVD player. I didn't have a collection
quite like yours, but yeah, I that was a service
that I loved. It kind of gave me access to
content that I otherwise wouldn't have watched, just because you know,
sometimes I'm not comfortable with the you know, heavy profanity
and you know, nudity, violence, whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Well, it's really interesting, I mean, from the longest period
of time, you know, Hollywood has really kind of led
people down the direction that it wants to with a
lot of different things. I was watching a TikTok recently.
It talked about how many of these child actors, like
the Britney Spears or the Mickey Mouse Club, you know,
(02:33):
Christine Aguilera, there's a couple recent ones that are and
then you know, people kind of fall in love with
them when their children, and then they kind of start
putting them into roles where they lead people into a
different form of morality that is kind of a dangerous road.
And girls are already super attached and loved them because
you know, they grew up with them, and so they
kind of follow them through. And it's you see how
(02:53):
Hollywood really does have their hand in everything, almost like
a puppet master, and they can, you know, change the
entire society based on the morality that they start injecting
into movies, entertainment and music and all those things. So
it's very needed what you guys have decided to provide.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yeah, So you know Jeff Harmon, he's one of my
co founders at Angel Studios.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
He always says.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
That, like, the key innovation over at Angel Studios is
the gatekeeper model, And what he means by that is,
in Hollywood, you have this very small group of gatekeepers
who they control what gets made, what doesn't get made,
what gets the green light, what hits the trash can.
And Angel has come along and said, well, what would
(03:39):
happen if we put that power in the hands of
the viewers.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
We just asked the viewer, what do.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
You want to see? What do you want to get made?
And it totally changes that dynamic. And it's been interesting
because oftentimes, you know, I kind of talked about Hollywood
as like this big amorphous blob of like, oh, it's
just kind of this cesspool where nothing good comes out
of there. But I've since realized that that's not the case.
(04:06):
There are amazing people, incredibly talented storytellers who are just
working in this environment where they're all kind of beholden
to these gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers are the ones who
get to say, yeah, make this or don't make that.
And when you actually provide all these creators with an
(04:27):
alternative where the viewers get to choose. Then all of
a sudden, these creators get freed up to make just
the most beautiful pieces of art and tell the greatest
stories you can imagine. And so gosh, I'm so grateful
to you know, Neil and Jeff and Jordan and the
guys over that whole team over at Angel Studios who
(04:48):
has broken through on that innovation of just put the
power in the hands of the viewers. It's groundbreaking.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah, it really is an I you know, watching you
guys kind of make these different pivots and you really
decided we're going to take on this giant task and
kind of see how it goes. But then now you
look at it, it's only been a couple of years
and already goes, oh, that makes so much sense. And
there's so much money being willing to be a part
of this and be thrown into it because people want entertainment,
(05:17):
but they want to be able to watch it with families.
They want to be able to tell the real stories
of history and of America, and you know some of
the stories about the Bible and you know King of
Kings that you guys are a part of. I mean
just an incredible story, right, the chosen series. These different
things you're doing now, these are the stories that people
want to watch. These are the stories that help you
(05:39):
build those memories with your family where you watch movies together.
Remember when I was a kid and we used to
always watch movies together. I remember one year my brother,
I can remember it was some Steven Sigall movie. He
got on accident and it was just this really inappropriate
movie and it kind of just ruined the whole Christmas.
It was like a Christmas even, it kind of ruined
the whole night. And you know it does matter. You know,
you sit down, you watch a really wholesome, beautiful video together,
(06:03):
it builds a strong memory or bond with you know,
your parents or the kids.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
One point of clarification when we talk about Angel Studios,
you'll actually hear me talk about they or them. And yes,
I am an original co founder all the way back
to the days when it started as vid Angel and
then it later became Angel Studios. But I am now
an independent creator who's making movies and TV series that
(06:32):
I then take to Angel Studios for distribution. And so
even though I'm one of the original co founders. I'll
talk about Angel Studios as they them, and so when
we look at, you know, the innovations and stuff that
have come out of Angel Studios, I'll be careful not
to take credit for them, because they have an amazing
team over there who have done that well.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
And how did you decide? I mean, yeah, I mean
you've had your hand in this from the beginning. That's
why I talk about it as such. But so maybe
give us a little bit of your background of kind
of how you evolved into that role from where you
were before.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
So the original co founders were the Harmon brothers Neil, Jeff, Jordan,
and Daniel and myself. I'm a cousin, so I go
way back with these guys. We grew up together. In fact,
Jeff and I are the same age, and so you know,
we were best buddies growing up and we were always
into you know, some sort of Miss Jeff together. But
(07:26):
we ended up as college roommates. And while we were
college roommates, we had another roommate named Devin Graham. Everyone
knows him now as Devin Supertramp.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Well, Devin was into videography and at the time he
was you know, just taking wedding photos and doing videos
and stuff. In fact, he shot my engagement photos with
me and my wife. But it was funny because he
offered us a wedding video and at the time, wedding
videos weren't really a thing, and he showed us one,
(07:59):
and my wife, well at the time, my fiance, we
both looked at it and we're like, oh, that seems
kind of cheesy. Thanks Devin, but no thanks. So we
took a pass on it. And then he became you know,
world famous just a few years later, and we're like, oh, man,
we probably should have said yes. But anyways, after you know,
we all roomed together, I got married and left went
(08:21):
off started my career, and Jeff and Devin and it
ended up being a couple of other guys. They started
playing around with YouTube, right and at the time it
had barely been purchased by Google. It was like this
new thing, you know, mostly just viral cap videos or whatever.
And they came up with this hair brained idea of like, well,
(08:43):
what if you tried to grow a business on YouTube?
And so they launched this YouTube video for a little
company called Ora Brush, which was a tongue scraper that
gets rid of Bad Breath and went crazy viral. It
was huge, and they ended up becoming the first company
to buy ads in mass on YouTube, which was super
(09:05):
exciting for Google because they had this vision of turning
it into an ad platform, right, but at the time,
nobody understood that or got it well. Jeff and Devin
and these guys got it with Ora Brush. So at
this point, I'm now married, I've gone off to Washington,
(09:25):
d C. I've started my career. I'm working as a
statistician later as an intelligence analyst, And I'm watching all
of this from afar, and as I'm seeing what these
guys are doing, I'm realizing, like, this is way bigger
than Bad Breath. This is way bigger than you know,
tongue scrapers. They're onto something. This is the tip of
(09:47):
an iceberg. That's something huge. And so as as I
was staying in touch with Jeff, he called me one
day and we were talking about Pooper E, this funny
poop spray little company in Texas who had reached out
to Jeff and like, Hey, we love what you did
(10:08):
with ore Brush, can you come do that for Pooperree?
And I remember he was kind of like you know,
it's a funny product, but it actually works, like it
really works. And he's like, you know, they're trying to
recruit me, but I just don't know if I'm interested
or not. And I had one of those moments where
like I don't really know how to describe it other
(10:29):
than like almost a conduit of communication, you know, straight
from heaven.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, we call those downloads, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, I had one of those instant downloads where I
felt like God was just saying to me, like, here's
your opportunity.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Take it.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
And I told Jeff right then and there, like zero hesitation.
I was like, I will come do this with you,
like we need to do this. And I remember his
reaction was one of surprise, because like I had a
good stable job out you know, I lived in Virginia,
we had bought a house and had the white picket fence,
and you know we were kind of starting the dreams,
(11:08):
so to speak, and and you know, without a moment's hesitation,
I was just like, yeah, we'll we'll leave all that,
I'll move my family back to Utah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Let's do this.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
And so Jeff was like, Okay, let's do this.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
So he went and rounded.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Up Neil and Daniel Jordan Day left or brush, I
left Deloitte was where I was working at the time,
moved across the country, and so we started the Pooparee campaign,
and of course, you know, it's all history now, but
it was wildly successful.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
You know, it sold gosh.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
I don't remember the exact number, but in the first
four or five months, it sold something like eighteen million
dollars worth of worth of pooperree. And prior to that,
I think they had done in their whole history, they
had done a few tens of thousands online they had
a more healthy retail presence, but online they had almost nothing.
And all of a sudden, we're selling millions of dollars
(12:08):
of this stuff. Well, we had a six month contract
with pooperre and the original thinking was, Hey, if this works,
then we'll just merge into Poopery and we'll kind of
become the marketing arm. But it was pretty clear pretty
quick that that wasn't a long term fit, and so
(12:29):
we started realizing, like, okay, well, at the end of
this six months, you know, we're going to have to
figure something else out. And I had just come from Deloitte,
so I kind of understood the you know, the the
world of a services business, you know this agency type
type structure, and so you know, my vote was, hey,
(12:50):
let's go build an agency. And at the time, the
brothers didn't love the idea of building an agency. But
Neil basically in his spare time, had coded this little
app where you could go watch YouTube videos and turn
off cusswords. You could choose which cuss words you wanted
(13:12):
to turn off, and and he had originally kind of
built this thing like, hey, is this something I could
do for my kids, because he was trying to unlock
this at this world of like, there's so much amazing
stuff happening on YouTube, how can I make it more
accessible to my kids? And so when he did that,
that kind of opened up the possibility of like, wait,
(13:34):
we could actually build a business around this. And that's
when vid Angel was born. And so gosh, for the
next I don't I don't remember the exact timeline, but
there was good nine or so months where we just
all dove in and just went full steam on vid Angel.
(13:54):
Neil Neil coated it. Jordan was huge and kind of
like building out the structure of it and stuff. Jeff
and Daniel and myself. We were more focused on marketing it.
So some people still remember the original marketing videos. We
took this family and shot them with I don't remember
how many thousands of paintballs to represent you know, each
paintball represents a cussword. Got yah, yeah yeah, And so anyways,
(14:19):
you know, we did some stuff like that. Some of
them went viral. You know, it was pretty exciting. But ultimately,
after you know, eight nine months of that, we realized
the product we had built was actually pretty crappy.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Like I couldn't even get my.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Wife to use it because it was so buggy and
so problematic.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
I remember watching early in those early days, I watched
I was trying to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
if you remember that, and the movie is kind of confusing,
and so it would cut out total parts and I
was so lost. I couldn't even I had to turn
it off, but I couldn't even follow the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember that early on.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, So that that was when we realized that, like
we realized we actually had to go back to the
drawing board and rebuild it, start from scratch, take everything
we had learned and so Neil and Jordan went heads
down on rebuilding vid Angel and so during that time
that left Jeff, Daniel and myself to be like, okay,
(15:15):
well what do we do? Like still got to put
food on the table, and so we went out and started,
you know, pounding the pavement to drum up some work.
We're like, I guess, let's go, you know, give someone
some marketing help. Well, out of that effort came Squatty
Potty and then of course Squatty Potty and the pooping Unicorn.
(15:35):
It went wild.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
I had the founder of that on my podcast a
couple of years ago, which one is it? Bobby? Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I love Bobby. I didn't st George.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
By the way, Bobby was like to launch that pooping unicorn.
All of Squatty Potty's investors and board were like, no
way know how, like this is brand's suicide. And Bobby
was the one who like he caught the vision and
he saw it and he greenlighted us. And so to
this day, I'd like give Bobby his props carilliant. He
(16:07):
had the courage too. Well, I give you guys all
so much credit. I mean, you guys had so much
foresight where this was all going. It's easy to remember now, right,
to think about it now and be like, oh, yeah,
of course this is what people were gonna want, but
it was.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
So not obvious during those times. Nobody knew how to
use these tools like YouTube and social media. And you know,
I had the founder of blenech on and that was
one of the few guys that caught it as well.
And I just think, now, my god, you guys were
so brilliant, because it was really hard to understand. Even today,
a lot of people don't have any clue how to
(16:40):
use these amazing tools that are in front of us.
But you know, to have that foresight clear back then,
it's just very admirable.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And looking back, I don't feel like I had all
the foresight other than just kind of knowing there's something here,
right and we need to dig in and figure out
what that something is.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
So, of course out of this squatty potty success spun
several others. So right on the heels of squatty potty,
purple mattresses happened blew up huge success. Then chatbook blew
up huge success, and so by the time Neil and
Jordan had finished rebuilding you know, the next version of
vid Angel, and it was time to go back and
(17:21):
work on vid Angel. Things had like taken off for us,
and so what we ended up deciding to do so
Jeff shifted his focus back over to vid Angel. So
as Neil, Jeff, and Jordan were focused on vid Angel,
Daniel and I decided to stay full time focused on
just building the agency, which became known as Harmon Brothers.
(17:43):
So Daniel was the chief creative officer. I was the CEO.
We built an agency that gosh, we had a you know,
in the nine years that I ran it, if I
remember correctly, we had five of our clients became billion
dollar brands and another six of them became one hundred
(18:04):
million dollar brands, and so gosh, that's like eleven super
successes in the course of nine years. And then in
addition to that, there was like a bunch of you know,
smaller base hit you know.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah, like Squatty Squotify. I was gonna say yeah, because
I think, yeah, they sold for tens of millions, but
it wasn't like a billion dollar company anything. But I
remember talking to somebody a couple of years back, and
he said to me, he said, you got to watch
we were talking about marketing. He said, you got to
watch the Herman Brothers like their agency. He said, they
are the best in the world at what they do.
They're the best, and it's like interesting. And so I've
(18:39):
always kind of had this little side interest in what,
you know, your guys' company was doing because somebody that
I respected a lot told me that you guys were
literally the best at doing it. And so I mean
it goes to say, for what you guys were pulling off, well.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Thank you, thank you. I really feel like we had
a special group of people. We built a special team
and got that team just pulled off amazing things. But
if I was to identify one thing of like pulling
back the curtain and saying like, hey, here's what we
were doing that made it special, we so, like very early,
(19:18):
almost at the beginning, Daniel Harmon read a book by
the CEO of Pixar. It's called Creativity, Inc. And man,
it became like almost our company bible. Like we required
everybody to read it. And we studied that book inside
and out and in it ed Capmell the he basically
(19:43):
you know, peeled back the curtain of Pixar and showed
this is how Pixar has done what it's done, and
we went and like we we were maniacal about trying
to reverse engineer Pixar's process and apply it to advertising,
and like, if I had to sum up what that means,
(20:04):
it's basically like if you think about startup world, you
know how there's kind of this like lean startup method
where it's like, come up with the minimal viable product
the MVP, right, come up with it as fast and
cheap as possible, and the test, see what you learn,
and then iterate, test, iterate, test, iterate, test, iterate. Well,
that's essentially what Pixar does with storytelling. They're like, oh,
(20:29):
here's an idea, Okay, how do we test it? All right,
let's take those learnings. Now, let's iterate, test, learn, iterate, test, learn, iterate,
and they do that over and over again. And that
was the process that we applied to advertising. And at
the time, it just seemed like the best way to
do things, and we were industry outsiders, so we didn't
(20:51):
know that there was any other way. But it turns
out most of the industry doesn't do that. They don't
think that way, most of the industry will be like, Okay,
let's go write a script.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
All right, we'll ititerate a.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Couple times on the script. Okay, script is locked, done,
and now everything moving forward is beholden to that script
that can't change anymore because it's locked and they have
this process. Well, it turns out Hollywood does a lot
of that too, where Hollywood structures are built such that
if you go hire a writer from the Writer's Guild,
(21:25):
which is this union of writers, right, you're allowed X
number of revisions on that script, and once you get
through those X number of revisions, if you want any more,
you have to go re up and rehire these writers.
Otherwise your script is locked and it can't change. And
what that means is like if you're on set and
(21:47):
somebody has a brilliant idea to just improv something and
try something new, you don't necessarily have the flexibility to
even do that. Whereas Pixar's methodology of constant iteration and
the methodology that we used at Harmon Brothers, we're constantly, constantly,
(22:07):
constantly tweaking tweak, tweak, and sometimes people hated us for
it because we'd be like two days from launch, and
somebody would realize like, I've got this idea on how
to make this better, and everyone would be like, oh man,
that is a good idea, but that is so much work,
and now we have to let go back and you know,
make major changes or refilm something and and and that's
(22:30):
just the nature of doing it that way.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Well, there's a real intelligence and not being having great ideas,
but not being attached to the idea, you know, more
so obsessing over what you're trying to get as an outcome.
And it's one of the things that I've always tried
to do on my business as my you know, clients
and customers always say the same thing. They said, did
I've never met somebody that can pivot so fast off
of one of his own ideas. You just you don't
have this ego attached to it. I don't have this
(22:54):
need for my idea to be the right one. I'm
just trying to get it all right. And so when
you can do that, and you as a company, when
you're willing to go gosh, it'd be a lot easier
to just put this out as it is, but to
be able to pivot knowing that there's a little bit
better way to do it, you know, it just it
takes a lot of humility in those moments to do that.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
I feel like entrepreneurs learn that pretty quickly. It's almost
like forced into entrepreneurs, right, always doing that. But artists,
that is a skill set that I'm going to be honest, like,
most artists haven't learned that skill set. And having you know,
now trained dozens, you know of artists on that skill set,
(23:33):
it's hard to learn and it requires an enormous amount
of humility because typically when you bring an artist onto
a project, and I use the term artists loosely, right,
it can be a writer, it can be anybody creating things,
yeah yeah. But when they come onto a project, they
feel this need and this desire to kind of put
their fingerprint on it, right, They want to have an
impact on it, and so, you know, they fall in
(23:57):
love with their ideas a little bit, and it's really
hard to be told like, well, actually this idea sucks,
or that idea was a pretty good one, but here's
a better one. And initially, when artists go through that process,
it shakes their confidence. They feel like, oh my gosh,
(24:20):
like am I failing? Am I getting kicked out of that,
but you have to help them realize that. Like no, Like,
even though we didn't land on your idea, your ideas
still helped us go through the process to get to
where we eventually landed, and that part of the process
is essential. And it's also like when you get ninety
(24:42):
percent of the way there and then you have to
make a big pivot, you'll hear a lot of people
be like, well, that would have been really nice to know,
you know, last week or last month or whatever, and
you're like, yeah, I hear you. I empathize with you,
but we didn't know.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, I also didn't think of it last week. Huh.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
We had to get to here, yes, in order for
it to trigger that idea and that learning that realization
now we know now we can pivot, go make the changes,
make it amazing. But it's just part of the process.
It's work. It's really hard work.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Amazing. So how'd you decide to go from that to
where you're at today with you know and making these
movies that are you know, you're getting ready on.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
So having studied Pixar, we discovered that they actually started
in advertising too, So everybody knows Pixar. You know, nineteen
ninety five, that's when Toy Story came out and they
shook the world with you know, this three D computer
animation that had never been seen before. Well, not a
lot of people know that there were several years prior
to that where they were developing this technology and using
(25:46):
it in advertising. So you can go back and if
you go on YouTube and looks up look up Pixar ads,
you'll see this portfolio of ads. One that I remember
was like Jelly life savers. I don't know if you
might remember from when you were a kid, like they
had these animated life savers because they're jelly, you know,
they you know.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
What, it would make sense that they would start as
an advertising agency because you only have to make thirty
second clibs or sixty second clibs. They could do that
and have a budget and the size of company that
it was at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
And it turns out there's actually a lot of great
storytellers who start in in ads. So Michael Bay, I
believe Ron Howard. Wow, shoot, I'm having a brain fart.
But the super famous Apple commercial from nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, what was his name? Lhammer?
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Through yeah, yeah, I'm having a total brain fart. But
he went on to have you know, great storytelling career,
and even Disney did some Walt Disney way back in
the day, even he did some mad work. And so
we realized that, you know, this skill set and this
team that we.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Had built were.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Actually really set up to shift focus and go into
long format storytelling. Like you know, we we came into
advertising at a time when you couldn't just force feed
whatever crap you.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Wanted to to your audience.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Like but think back to the TV days where you
have this thirty second spot.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You had to watch whatever it was on.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Your audience is captive, right, yeah, And so as advertisers
like you didn't actually have to do that good of
a job entertaining you.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Just it just had to make sure the brand stuck
with you. Yeah. Yeah, Well you.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Fast forward to internet days where you've got the YouTube
skip button, you know. Then you get into news feeds
like Facebook and later Instagram and so on and so forth,
and if something's not entertainment entertaining, you just scroll right by, right,
And so to be successful, we had to make our
ads incredibly entertaining, and so we had developed the stability
(28:00):
to not only sell convince somebody to take action. But
we did it in a very entertaining way. And I
remember our customers would often ask us, like, how long
of an ad is too long? And we had ads
that ranged from fifteen seconds and thirty seconds all the
way up to ten twelve minutes, and I would say,
(28:23):
kind of our average was like in that two to
three minute space, which in the world of advertising, that's
an eternity.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Right. If you think about like when you're watching a
basketball game or whatever, and and a sixty second ad
comes on for some pharmaceutical, you're.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Just like, oh my gosh, this is so longet In
on Hulu, it'll be like it'll say like one hundred
and twenty seconds until you're next one. You're like, ohy,
do I even want to keep watching this show in
It's only two minutes, you know, but if you're watching
it to watch an ad, you'll watch it, yeah, twelve minutes.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
That was what we realized is that if you make
it entertaining, So we would always tell our customers, like,
we make it as long as it needs to be,
but not a second longer. And so if you make
it so entertaining, and you have great rhythm and great pace,
people will totally forget about the time. They'll watch a
four minute add not even realize that four minutes went by,
(29:18):
because they're engaged, they're enjoying it. And we actually developed
a process to test ourselves to see how we were doing.
And originally we called it a laugh graph. I've since
come to think of it more as like an attention graph.
What we would do is we would take a script
and we'd go read it to people and we would
(29:39):
film how they were reacting during it, and then we
would take that recording back and we would have an
intern sit down and they would watch that person's face
and we would be looking for clues of I'm engaged
or clues of I'm distracted. And as soon as somebody
would get distracted, they're checking their watch, they're glancing away,
we would note exactly where that happened. Then we would
(30:02):
go back in and we'd say, what's wrong with.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
The script right here? We got to fix it. We
got to tighten it up.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
We need something more entertaining, we need a joke, we
need to cut it out, and needs to move faster.
Whatever it is, we've got to fix it, and we
would do that at the script phase. Then later we
would do it on rough cut edits. You know, you'd
put your initial edit together and then you'd go out.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
And test it.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
What we realized is we had built this ability to
actually see how well we're entertaining people, and if we're
failing at any point in the process, we can stop
and fix it. And so that was this realization of like,
we could actually apply this to long format storytelling, to movies,
(30:45):
to TV series, and in doing so, we can get
to tell stories that have bigger impacts on society that
you know, we can you know, impact society in positive
ways and tell stories that move people, inspire people.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
So on and so forth.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
So Daniel and I decided that we were going to
take the agency and we were going to pivot away
from being an agency. We were going to become a studio.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
And so our first attempt at that was the TV
series Tuttle Twins.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You work with Connor on that. He's been on the show.
He's a good good friend of mine.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
So Connor Boyac and Elijah Stanfield, they authored the books,
which I think last I heard, they've sold well over
four million copies they might five million or phenomenally successful
and important.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
So they're focused on teaching principles that don't get taught
in schools.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
So things like American Principle is a conservative principles, liberty, family.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Entrepreneurship, family, you know, all all those types of things. Well,
they had hired us to help them with marketing, right,
and so we really learned Tuttle Twins inside and out
and how to sell it because we were helping with
their marketing. We were helping sell you know, thoughts.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
On the book side.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah, on the books.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Well, meanwhile, we're using them at home. You know, we
have all the books, we're reading them to our kids,
and so like we really get immersed in this. Well,
when the books kind of blow up, that opens up
this door of like okay, this could be adapted into
a TV series, but it doesn't really align with industry uh,
(32:35):
industry safe politics, you know, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
You're going to get blackballed basically if you come up
with this material.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah. Yeah, So even though they have the numbers behind
their book sales that would totally justify it, a Netflix
or an Amazon probably not interested.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Well, I saw something the other day, it was like,
you know, the most popular or most well known human
ever exists was Jesus, but nobody will touch them. And
it shows that even Hollywood, they'll they won't touch something
like Jesus. If it's gonna they would rather not do
it than get the money for doing it. And so
like a lot of those gatekeepers that you talked about
the beginning, the one thing they care about more than
(33:11):
money is not sharing these types of values.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah, it seems crazy, right, but that's a perfect example
of like Dallas Jenkins, creator of The Chosen, you know,
had his uh, you know, he had some failures inside
of the system, right, the gatekeeper system that found him
(33:36):
at kind of rock bottom and at his career at
a point where he was willing to go try something
outside the system, outside the norm, and you know, in
collaboration with Angel it built The Chosen, which is this
amazing success, and it was so successful that now even
mainstream Hollywood you know, has to accept it right, right,
(33:59):
and you know now it's on Amazon, you know. So yeah,
going back to Tuttle Twins, I think it was Jeff
Harmon who first came to me and he was like
he knew we were wanting to do a TV series,
and he was the one who came to me and
he was like, you really ought to start with Tuttle Twins.
(34:20):
And initially I was kind of like, ah, man, is
he right? Do we really want to start with something
that you know has a little bit of polarizing you
know nature to it?
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Kind of a are we doing this moment?
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Like I started thinking like is this going to pigeonhole us?
Like if we start with tuttle Twins, then is that
just going to pigeonhole us to like, oh, now we
only do you know, political type material. But as I
thought about it, I was like, this is actually the
perfect project to start on for a number of reasons.
(34:55):
First off, we're really good at edge educating plus entertaining. Right,
So when you're teaching about squatty potty, right, you're like
covering this super gross topic and educating people on the colon,
but doing it in a fun, safe way, right. And
if we can do that with pooperre and squatty potty
(35:16):
and like deodorant and you know these kind of like
more icky subjects, like we could totally take on a
political subject and make it safe, make it entertaining, make
it fun, make it safe, make it non controversial, like
prior to squatty potty, like having any sort of like
(35:38):
poop talk in a group setting, like you know, you
just don't go there. But then if you can make
it safe and fun, then like, okay, now people can
go there. So that was reason number one. And then
reason number two was we all loved Tuttle Twins. And
(35:58):
to be able to take some thing that you're already
passionate about, you.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Already love it, it's a huge difference.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Oh yeah, when you have something that you can just
throw your passion behind. So I remember going to Daniel
and he took some convincing too. I remember trying to
convince him that hey, Tuttle Twins is the one, and
and you know, he had to kind of stew on
it for a while, but eventually he came around and saw,
(36:25):
you know, saw the possibility there. And so we went
to Connor and we're like, hey, Connor, we're going to
be making a TV series. Why don't we do Tuttle Twins?
And and you know, he caught the vision eventually too,
and so we we set out on it and we
went and made Tuttle Twins. We crowdfunded it, similar to
the Chosen where we went out to the crowd and said, hey,
we want to make this, we need your help, please invest.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And you have customer information of millions of people too,
that helps.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
So so that was round one of our attempt to
leave the agency world to become And.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
That's just a gutsy move because I mean, you're having
a lot of success as a marketing agency to just
make that pivot, I mean, you already had use the
same formula. So it's not a matter of whether I
think you felt it would work or not. It's just
you had to leave something that was already working really
well in order to do this new thing.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Well, that's actually where the story gets interesting, because yes,
we had to take a sizeable chunk of our team
and move them off of ADS right, and of course
ADS pay the bills right and put them over onto
Tuttle Twins, where Tuttle Twins does not pay the bills
you know, in fact, it costs us money. And we
(37:37):
hope that someday in the future it becomes this, you know,
profitable thing, but for now it's all speculative.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
It's a hope, right.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
And so that was the first year in our history
that we didn't grow. We had a flat year from
a revenue perspective, But because we took all these people
off of ADS and put them on tuttle Twins, profits
were lower that year. Bonuses were lower that year. And
so even though when we set out to pivot, everybody
(38:08):
was nodding their heads.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
On board, but it's still kind of like.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Everybody was excited.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
But then when brass tax hit and I was like, oh,
there's actually going to be some sacrifice in making this pivot.
We kind of had to come to Jesus moment as
a as a company where it was like, Okay, is
this really what we want? Or do we want to
stay an agency and you know, stay who we are
(38:36):
and and you know, the the overall voice was that
they wanted to stay an agency. And I felt like
I had done nine years of building an agency and
and and I was ready to move my focus over
to longer format storytelling. And so I said, Okay, no problem,
(38:59):
you guys be an agent, see, but I'm going to
step down and I'm going to I'm going to go
independently build a studio. Daniel also stepped down from his
role and he went full time on Tuttle Twins, and
so we we put successors in place to step in
behind us so that they could continue to thrive and
(39:21):
be successful. And Daniel to this day is now just
focused on building Tuttle Twins. They finished season three, they're
starting season four. Now it's going phenomenally well. It's consistently,
you know, one of the top three or four shows
on the Angel platform. So it's really hit it stride
and it's it's doing great. And I went and spun
(39:44):
up my studio. It's called ten Ton, and our first
project was Homestead, which that launched in theaters this past Christmas.
It was a you know, as our first project. It
you know, we had a relatively small budget. It was
(40:05):
a six million dollar film and it did twenty one
million dollars in theaters, which that's not a blockbuster but
for an independent movie.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Though.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, yeah, I think it surprised a lot of people
at how well it did. And U and then since
then it launched inside of Angel Studio's ecosystem and it
has consistently been one of the top one or two
shows on their whole platform. Then it went for rent On.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Say, I think I bought it on Amazon.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Yeah, you can get it on Amazon.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
I bought it, and you can get it on Apple
a couple months ago.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
So we stayed in Amazon's top ten for two and
a half months.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Amazing, which you look on either.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Side of Homestead and there was always you know, two
hundred million dollar film, three hundred million dollar film, and
then Homestead and we were you know.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Well, what was cool about is it didn't it doesn't
feel like a small budget movie. You know, you got
good actors and you can tell it's got a good screenwriter,
and and you didn't go cheap the setting and any
of that kind of stuff. I think there was a
frustration around Utah forever that, you know, just things felt
and looked a little bit less quality than Hollywood. And
I think that's probably why you stayed in Amazon's top
(41:11):
ten for songs, because it doesn't have that fail to it.
I mean, and you can you watch it, you just
feel like you're watching normal movie. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Like, man, I have to give a ton of credit
to several people, but so Jason Ross, he was a
co author of the book series Black Autumn, that's what
Homestead is based on. Yeah, Yeah, we ended up pivoting
away from the Black Autumn name because he kind of
wrote it more as a military thriller, so it's kind
of more aimed at like young, you know, twenty to
thirty something males. They don't mind a lot of swearing,
(41:41):
a lot of violence, you know, that type of thing.
And then we all of a sudden, we're bringing it
into the Angel Studios ecosystem, and we're like, we have
to come up with a family safe. We need to
appeal more to women, which the themes of the original
books were all about this idea of like when the
crap it's the fan, it's actually faith in family and
(42:03):
community that rise from the ashes, and that's a theme
that totally works inside the Angel ecosystem. But we had
to come at it kind of a different way, and
so in working through that, we decided to rebrand so
that everyone would kind of understand like, yes, they're related,
but Homestead is a different approach than Black Autum. But anyways, Jason,
(42:28):
he not only was he a co author on the
book series, but he was one of the writers the
main ride. He was the lead writer on the screenplay,
and he actually provided his whole home and his whole
homestead for filming, which gave us this world class location
where on our budget we never could have afforded something
like that, but because he opened that up to us,
(42:51):
now all of a sudden, we have this setting where like, okay,
we can make this look big budget right awesome. And
then huge credit to Ben kas and Ben Smallbone. They
like they're just they did so much with so little
and just made it awesome. But anyways, yeah, thank you
(43:13):
for saying that.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Well, no, for I mean for a first project too, man, geez,
Like that's you know, very impressive, and so that allowed you,
I'm guessing to get a lot more bigger budget type
things going coming in afterwards, because I think that's where
you've kind of gone with it from there, right. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:29):
Yeah, So our project that we have coming down the pipeline,
and I guess, depending on when this goes live. July one,
twenty twenty five, we're announcing Young Washington, which is a
movie about basically the coming of age story of George Washington.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Which, by the way, sorry but like has never been told.
I'm a history buff, I'm an American. I flew the
American flag above my ceiling as a child, and I
don't know that story that well, nobody does.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
It's really not a well known story. But people don't
realize that when George Washington was young, twenty two years old,
he went out and made some of the biggest mistakes
that you can make that should have just demolished his career,
Like he accidentally started a global war. He accidents I.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Think a French Indian War, Okay, because I mean that's
all I know about him, but.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Like, yeah, and I won't get into spoilers here, but
but essentially he makes as bad of mistakes as you
can possibly make, torpedoes his career. But then by going
through like the worst of the worst mistakes, that forges
his character to where he has this comeback moment where
(44:50):
now they're in the French and Indian War and he
is serving as General Braddock's aid and they end up
in this battle where the British are just getting thumped on.
General Braddock dies, the troops are are getting demolished, and
he has to round up everybody and perform a safe evacuation,
(45:12):
and in order to do so, he has to jump
on a horse and charge the enemy lines.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
And he gets two horses shot.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
Out from underneath him. He gets bullet holes in his coat,
a bullet hole in his hat, but he goes unscathed,
and in doing so, he rounds up everybody, gets it organized,
leads a safe retreat, saves hundreds of lives, and becomes
George Washington. Right, And this was the moment when all
(45:42):
of a sudden he earned the respect of everybody and
became this legend. And later toward the end of his life,
he ends up meeting an Indian chief. This Indian chief
tells him I was on the other side and we
were shooting at you. We were all aimed at you,
and we could not hit you, and and basically says
(46:06):
like you were protected by some sort.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Of Was there a book that came out a couple
of years ago I told like five stories that saved
the America or something like that, And I swear that
story is in there.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
It could be.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Yeah, yeah, it's the only time because most people don't
know that story. I mean, I know it because I
read a lot of history, but most people have never
heard that. It's just a does the movie cover all this?
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Oh wow, okay, cool?
Speaker 3 (46:28):
Yeah, So the man, I'm so excited about this for
a whole bunch of reasons. One because the story is
just awesome, and two we have John Irwin to direct this,
which a lot of your listeners are already familiar with.
John Irwin. He did House of David most recently, which
is one of the top shows in all streaming right now.
(46:50):
It's on Amazon Prime. He did I can only imagine
Jesus Revolution American Underdog, which is the Kurt Warner. Yeah,
and not a ton of people realize it, but John
Irwin is the only director in the whole entire industry
who has ever achieved an A plus Cinema score four
(47:11):
different times. So for context, cinema score started, I think
it was about forty years ago. It was like early eighties,
maybe late seventies, sometime in there. Since then, every show
that goes through the theaters receives a Cinema score, and
it's an A plus down to an F. And in
the whole history forty something year history of cinema score,
(47:34):
I think we're up to like one hundred and eight
movies have achieved an A plus Cinema score, So it's rare.
John has done it four times. He's the only one.
So not only is John like the perfect director for this.
But he's an American history buff. He loves this stuff.
George Washington is his personal hero, and so he sees
(47:57):
this project as you know, amazing.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yes, his life's work.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Right, And and so I'm like, Okay, we've got Angel Studios,
who is giving us worldwide distribution, We've got Genre when
the perfect director for this thing. We have this amazing story.
And I'm like, now we just have to go out
and execute and take this thing to the world. And
(48:22):
we have the opportunity, in my opinion, to have such
a positive impact.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Well, the country needs. I mean, if you want to
destroy a nation, you destroy their history, just you make
you weaken their leaders from the past, not even from
the future or from the present. You you know, you
destroy the heroes that people look up to. And so
more than ever, we need to tell the stories of
our founding fathers and of the amazing people that came
and built this country, you know, along the way. And
(48:49):
what's cool about this is it opens it up for you.
I Mean it's endless how many stories you could tell, right.
I Mean George Washington obviously that story goes first. I
mean he was the first. You know, he's the g
but yeah, at the end of the day. So my hero,
one of my heroes is Paul Revere, and I just
love him because he used kind of becoming It's kind
of like me having a podcast in a weird sense.
(49:10):
In twenty twenty five. It's like he was the most
networked dude in the whole land. And that's why when
he went and he told people's stuff, they listened. He
knew how to get everyone together. And that's kind of
what I am. I'm kind of a community builder above everything,
and I've just always loved how fearless he was and
everything else. But these stories of these guys, and especially
kids nowadays, they don't know American history. They don't know
(49:30):
these stories. Every July fourth, I get so frustrated. I
go to watch a movie and there's nothing. There's no
good TV shows, there's no good movies about the Founding Fathers.
I mean, you got Patriot, and besides that good, it
was amazing, you know, Patri's good, but it's also like
the not as good version of Brave Art, you know
what I mean. It's like it's still not even like
as good as Brave Heart. So you're like, Okay, it's
(49:52):
good it is, but it's also kind of more fiction
than anything, right, I doesn't actually tell this any history.
You know, there's one TV series I like about the
Sons of Liberty. Though they're my favorite, they were just
rebels and that's kind of my spirit, you know. And
there's a couple things like that. But unless you really
know how to search for it, there's there's not a
whole lot out there.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
So there's John Adams, Yeah, John Adams's there's some good
stuff out there, but nothing has kind.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
Of like brought it all together act.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Under one umbrella. And like, I hope that.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Young Washington is just the beginning so that we can
tell all those amazing stories because I agree like telling
these stories, what better way to inspire the future, you know,
this up and coming generation. Like I feel like so
much of society only wants to talk about the founding
father's flaws, right.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, they want to fly every flag, but America, it's like,
hold on a second. You know.
Speaker 3 (50:50):
Look, the simple reality is humans aren't perfect, none of
us are. But that doesn't mean that imperfect people can't
do amazing things. That doesn't mean that imperfect people can't
impact the world in such positive amazing ways. And that's
what the Founding Fathers did. They were imperfect human beings.
(51:11):
They had their flaws, they had their weaknesses. Everybody does,
but despite all that, they did amazing things. And I
love the term that I believe it was. Washington used
the term the divine hand of providence. He felt like
there was something guiding all of it, and he called
it the divine hand of Providence. And I'm really excited
(51:33):
in our opportunity to tell this story. We can include
the divine hand of Providence. We don't have to write
God out of.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
This story, which a really good point. It's really cool
part of it. Yeah, yeah, it's well and I think
I don't know if people are familiar with it, but
there's this whole industry in the South of these Christian
based movies and they're not even done that well, but
they do well at the like they sell well, they
get a lot of bring a lot of money, and
so like, some people might be listening to this and
being like, well, it sounds risky. If you're gonna include God,
(52:01):
you're going to cut out so many people. But I
don't believe that. I mean, you saw what happened with
you know, when you know, the Passion of the Christ
came out, or even the Sound of Freedom a couple
or some of these movies, Like people are afraid to
do this, but Americans are starved for it. There's such
a giant number of people that want these stories. We
want the story the way it was God wasn't it
did have his hand in it, you know, that is
(52:21):
the way that the story was told through the history.
And so to be able to bring that to the
big theater, man, it's going to be It's going to
be gonna be awesome.
Speaker 3 (52:29):
I've heard Jeff Harmon say something to the effect of
it's ironic that the group of people who believe in
the Creator are sometimes terrible creators when it comes to media.
And I think you bring up a super valid point
that just because we're including God in the story, that
(52:49):
doesn't mean it's going to become some cheesy, preachy you know,
call it, you know, cheesy faith film or whatever. No,
this is going to be a proper This is going
to be an exciting adventure movie with all the peril,
all the drama that you would expect, great storytelling, great acting,
(53:11):
great cinematography.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
It's all going to be there.
Speaker 1 (53:14):
Are you just curious? Are you announcing yet either like
what is the budget or any of the actors that
are going to be like who's going to be playing
other rush.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
We haven't announced casting just yet. That's you know, by
the time this podcast comes out, will probably only be
a month or so away from announcing casting, So so
stay tuned for that. But one thing that we are doing,
and as far as I know, this has never been
done before, we're actually opening up ticket sales a full
year in advance. So July fourth, twenty twenty five, we're
(53:45):
opening up ticket sales for July fourth, twenty twenty six.
Now why are we doing that? It comes down to this,
when you have a story that's this important, we want
to open it up so that our viewers can actually
help make it a success. And the way that they
can help is when you launch in theaters, particularly on
(54:07):
July fourth, there's a lot of competition. It's yeah, big weekend,
so we're going to be up against the biggest of
the big blockbusters, you know, probably a bunch of superhero
reboots and.
Speaker 2 (54:21):
You know whatever.
Speaker 3 (54:23):
And in order for us to compete, we've got to
get as many screens as possible. So For instance, a
little independent movie, it might open on one thousand screens nationwide,
whereas a big blockbuster will open on four thousand screens nationwide.
What determines how many screens you get is how much
(54:46):
the they call them the exhibitors, it's basically the theaters.
How much do they believe that this is going to
make money? And one way to make them believe is
to show them ticket pre sales in advance.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Brilliant.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
That's a way to signal to the whole industry that
there's demand for this and this story needs to be told.
Speaker 1 (55:07):
That's your your marketing mind coming in, bro, Yeah, I
love it. Well, you guys, you know you're again. It's
just I love talking to marketers because I believe that's
what I think. I am too, almost above everything else.
Is like I'm just you see where the balls go,
and you see where the puck's going. You can just
see things before other people, right, And it seems so obvious.
But even when you say that now, it's like, yeah,
(55:28):
if I'm gonna buy it next year, all right, I'll
buy the ticket now whatever. And then if enough people
do that, not only does it, you know, it just
signals to the big box offices that Okay, we need
to get more screens for these guys. And then from
there and just all I have to do is put
out a good product in it.
Speaker 3 (55:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:44):
Yeah, If you put out a good product, tell the.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Story well, market it well, then yeah, that key is
getting on enough screens, because if we open on a
thousand screens, we're never going to be able to compete.
But if we open on three thousand screens, then all
of a sudden, we're going toe to toe with all
the big boys. And so that's giving everyone who feels
passionate about this story being told and about how this
(56:09):
can impact society in a positive way. This is giving
all those people the opportunity to say I can actually help,
I can make an impact. I'm going to see the
movie anyway.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
I'm going to I'll buy a bunch. I mean, I
feel like, dude, like I love telling the stories of
these people. They were heroes and like you said, they
were so imperfect, but man, they had such balls, you know,
such courage. Like I feel like kind of in my life.
You know, I know that God works through me and
I'm a total idiot half the time. Like I know
how flawed I am, but I know God works through me,
(56:41):
and so I can look at their imperfections and go
those men deserve to be honored for what they did
and what they built. And you know, America, the idea,
the experiment of America was the greatest experiment.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
It works.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
Now. We have all the things that can corrupt and
society and everything get played into it over a couple
hundred years. But at the end of the day, what
they built and what they set up, we're benefiting it
from today hundreds of years later, you know.
Speaker 3 (57:03):
And what better way to inspire our kids, right because
think about it. If your kids are hearing this message
of like, oh, if you're not perfect, then like.
Speaker 2 (57:12):
Sit down and shut up.
Speaker 3 (57:14):
Whereas if they're hearing this message of like, no, these
guys aren't perfect, but look what they did, what better
way to make you know, my fourteen year old son
look up and say what can I do? How can
I make an impact? And coming out of Young Washington,
I want everybody to walk away with this feeling of
optimism for our future. You know, it wasn't just a
(57:38):
bright future once upon a time. In fact, the icon
the Rising Sun, this is the Young Washington icon. This
was inspired by George Washington's chair that he sat in
much later at the Constitutional Convention. There was a son
engraved on the back of his chair, and after they
ratified the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin made the famous comment where
(57:59):
he said, I and wondering if that's a rising sun
or a setting son. And I believe it's a rising
sun on this you know, on this nation. Well, we
still believe it's rising and so that we've made the
icon for young Washington, this rising sun because it's this
message of optimism, of hope, and we want our kids
and grandkids and we want the next generation to feel
(58:22):
that hope and that optimism, so that that's what they say.
Speaker 2 (58:26):
That's what this is all about.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
So this podcast is going to come out about when
you're releasing these ticket sales, how do people buy or support?
Speaker 3 (58:33):
So let's get a ur L set up for your listeners.
So it'll be Angel dot Com Forward Slash.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
Just put Jimmy Rexshow.
Speaker 3 (58:42):
Okay, let's do Angel dot Com Forward Slash Jimmy Rex Show.
I'll go talk to Angel and make sure that happens.
Speaker 1 (58:48):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (58:48):
But so Angel dot Com Jimmy Rex Show. You go there,
you buy your tickets. And by the way, as a
thank you to anyone who stands up and buys their tickets. Now,
every ticket that you buy enters you into a chance
to win a vintage custom f two fifty that we're
(59:09):
giving away. It's just our way of saying thank you
to anyone who stands up and says, yeah, let's help
support this early.
Speaker 1 (59:16):
Well, can we buy specific theaters or how does it work?
You just buy a ticket and then you can redeem
it at theaters.
Speaker 3 (59:22):
Yeah, yeah, So what happens is you buy your tickets now,
and then later once the show gets listed in theaters,
then you can actually go and redeem it and you
can choose your seat and got it and your showtime
and all that stuff. But for now, you're just buying
the ticket that reserves that ability for you in the future.
And in doing so, once again, this is huge. It
(59:44):
is what signals to the whole industry that there's demand
for this story and it's what is going to allow
us to compete with the big boys. And if we
can succeed competing with the big boys, that's what's going
to unlock the ability to not just tell the story
of young Washington, but that's when we get to dive in,
go deeper on all the founding fathers. I love them
and really make these stories known.
Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
I love that. Well, appreciate you, man. I appreciate what
you're doing. It's needed, it's fun, and can't wait to
see where it goes. I can't wait to watch the
videos you make about the films you make about Paul
Revere and Sam Adams and the rest of them.
Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
So oh man, that'll be so exciting.
Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
Well, I appreciate you, man, and thanks again that this
has been fun my pleasure.
Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
Thanks Jimmy, Thank you again for listening to The Jimmy
Rex Show.
Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
And if you liked what you heard, please like and subscribe.
It really helps me to get better guests, to be
able to get the type of people on this podcast.
It's going to make it the most interesting. Also, want
to tell everybody about my podcast studio, The Rookery Studios,
now available in Salt Lake City and or in Utah.
If you live in Utah and want to produce your
(01:00:47):
own podcast, we take all of the guests, work out
of it for you and make it so simple. All
you do is you come in, you sit down, you talk,
and leave. We record it, edit it, even post it.
For you. Interested in doing your own podcast, visit our
Instagram and send us a DM at Rookery Studios, or
go to our website, The Rookery Studios dot com
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.