First, John told me you might think his job might be to talk up the movie he's selling as loudly as possible, but John says there is a real danger in building up too much buzz.

The roads of Sundance past are littered with the bodies of films that got over-hyped.

The hot film coming into Sundance is never the hot film going out of Sundance.

And so if you have a film that you think can be successful, it may seem counterintuitive, but the best instinct there is to downplay it, to create the lowest expectations possible while getting all the necessary people in the theater.

John tells Lee that he thinks the film is beautiful, and that he would like to help him sell it, but he worries the themes of physical and sexual abuse may make it a difficult sell.

A- and I said to Lee Daniels, I said, "I've been involved in a film like this before." We did a film called Slam, which was a big phenomenon at Sundance, and we sold it to Lionsgate, and then we took the film directly to the Magic Johnson theaters around Compton and did a test screening for an African American audience, and the, the film screened abysmally.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you made that film? Because it wasn't at Sorority's.

No, it wasn't.

I made that film.

I got the script.

I read the script.

I knew that Ethan and Rick were working on it and that that's what it was.

And I sent it to one company.

You know, does that seem healthy? What needs to happen there? Are people just still fighting the good fight and making things happen? I mean, it

Okay.

What happened in the pa- pandemic is that you have the rise of the, uh, the streamers, who aren't really interested in the, in the scripted films that Sundance is famous for, and then you had the theatres closing so that the all rights distributors were really struggling, and people weren't going to the theatre.

Uh, so they couldn't really pick up these discovery films.

So the way things have changed a little bit is that the market, uh, for all rights acquisition has come back.

There are all these new distributors now, and they're, they're having some success getting people back into theatres.

And so I would say, for the traditional scripted films that really thrive out of Sundance, the market is better than it was three years ago.

Mm-hmm.

And we decided to sell it to Goldwyn, to Tom Rothman, who was there at the time.