The award-winning dramedy Didi‘s arrival in theaters marks the official Hollywood arrival of the “new-ish” film and TV financing and development company Unapologetic Projects. While their mission statement is not unlike pitches the industry has heard before, they’re already turning their words into actions to fix a broken and, frankly, often exploitative system.
“The model we’re trying to create is one of positive disruption and being mindful of everything we do. We’re asking, ‘Is there a better way? Is this fair to the people we’re working with?’ We must be willing to question things when they’re not,” explained co-CEO Tyler Boehm. “It’s not about judgment on other people but trying to be a good model for how things might work and not just doing it because it’s the right thing. We see an opportunity there. This town has a lot of people who say things.”
“It can get confusing because it’s like, ‘What are we going to disrupt?’ There are so many things,” added co-CEO and former actress Chris Quintos Cathcart, who credits the pair’s “marriage of insider-outsider energy” as a critical difference that gives them a unique perspective. Their mandate, with a focus on underrepresented creatives, sets them off on a solid foot. They started with the idea of paying people fairly for their work.
“For example, we want to pay our writers to pitch with us for TV. I came to that conclusion, having been a writer on the other side. I’ve pitched things, and I know it’s a lot of work. If I could step in anywhere and do whatever I wanted, why wouldn’t we pay people for their work?” she mused. “The system is so broken that at first, writers we are working with are a little bit like, ‘Well, what’s the catch? Are you trying to f**k me somehow? I’m not sure how, but something is going on here. Are you going to own my idea in perpetuity? What’s happening?’ There’s a lot of that energy, and I’m like, ‘No, we’re literally trying to pay for this slice of work.'”
The pair did not know each other but were introduced by a mutual friend they trusted. It later turned out they had both been at that person’s wedding, so they had probably spoken but hadn’t connected the professional dots. Timing is (almost) everything to the duo, and Didi, which lands exclusively in theaters on Friday, July 26, 2024, is also a great example of that.
“It happened to be one of the first projects we had seen,” Cathcart, EP on A24’s The Inspection, recalled. “Tyler was like, ‘This script treats boyhood in a way that I’ve never seen before.’ I resonated with the script as an Asian person growing up in the Bay Area, but I also didn’t have hundreds of scripts under my belt like Tyler did. I thought, ‘If he says this is special, I will go with it.’ There’s a lot of trust there, but it was obviously something so special and proved our point.”
Boehm, the former VP at Sobini Films, added, “Audiences are hungry for more representation, audiences are hungry for new narratives, and the pipeline, especially in the indie space, hasn’t caught up to that. They’re still stuck on old models because that’s how things were done. It is still stuck on the foreign pre-sales model, even though that doesn’t work for 99 percent of movies. We are coming in, imagining how we might positively disrupt the indie finance space. It’s about valuing things that have been disvalued before.”
‘Didi’ Is Inspired By Real Life And Values Authenticity Over Traditional Star Power
Unapologetic Projects “was created with the belief that all audiences should see themselves represented on screen and is changing the traditional financing model by valuing diversity and cultural authenticity over star power and name recognition.” Taking Didi out to potential partners proved their point that disruption is needed.
“We were wondering who we could get to play the mother, and Joan Chen’s name came up,” Cathcart explained. “I said, ‘Well, you don’t have to explain who she is to me. She is a legend.’ This was early on, when we were supposed to get the biggest name we could in these parts, and I couldn’t think of a bigger name. When it came time to sell it, it was like, ‘Well, you guys don’t have names,’ and we were saying, ‘But we do, they’re just not big names to you.’ Again, that was proving our point. In the community I come from, she’s iconic, but that’s not true for every person at the greenlighting table.”
Didi, which Boehm and Cathcart executive produced, was an audience and critical hit at the Sundance Film Festival. The reactions to writer-director Sean Wang’s 2008 set dramedy about a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy learning how to skate, flirt, and love his mom confirmed to them that they were on the right path. It lands in theaters the same weekend as Deadpool and Wolverine but couldn’t be more different.
“I knew that I hadn’t seen a movie like Didi. People from my community show up to things that were subpar at best. I knew what it felt like to crave this representation on this scale and of this level quality, but there’s one thing to have theories, and then there’s another thing to see it all play out in real-time,” she mused.
He continued, “It was just so satisfying to be on the street in Park City, wearing our Didi beanies, and have person after person come up to us and tell us how meaningful the movie was to them. So many of them were Asian American people, and I hadn’t ever had a response like that on any movie I made as much as people might have enjoyed them. It struck a profound chord with the audience. That reaction and the feedback was so instantaneous, it was incredibly gratifying.”
“As a white, straight person, you’re in a perpetual state of being unaware of what you don’t know and trying to become more aware all the time,” Boehm continued. “You’ve seen so much representation of yourself, your culture, your values, which have been the norm in what you’ve seen in media your whole life, so to approach this work, you have to start from a place of like, ‘I don’t know, and I’m going to listen to the people around me who do know.’ I don’t know if I’m successful, but that’s what I am trying to start from.”
Unapologetic Projects Is An Industry Cinderella Story With A Difference
While most things at Unapologetic Projects are decided by the duo together, the company’s name was a different case.
“Tyler gave me full naming rights, which was nice,” financier Cathcart revealed. “For me, Unapologetic is aspirational. I think it butts up against a career’s worth of having to go out for a diminutive role. Of all the words one could use to describe me, diminutive is probably the last one that you would say. It also just felt right. I’m trying to take up more space as a woman of color. As someone successful in what I would consider a white world, I have done a lot of apologizing or trying to get what the room wants from me right, but I now know it’s enough to come from your own experience and intuition.”
Even though Didi is their first feature out of the gate, Cathcart and Boehm have already learned valuable lessons about the financial ballpark they are currently comfortable playing in.
“I knew from my personal portfolio investing background that I did not want to be the one person in on a project,” she explained. “I wasn’t going to fund your entire movie; that isn’t good investing. It’s not wise, so that’s where I came at it from. We used to say we were comfortable in the $3 million to $7 million space, but after having sold Didi, I would say the closer to three, the better. Many of these people will be first-time feature filmmakers, so I don’t know that your first feature should be largely outside of that as an untested filmmaker. It wouldn’t necessarily be wise.”
“When it comes to investing, we’re doing most differently in evaluating projects,” Boehm added. “As investors, we don’t treat it as a zero-sum game. We’re not trying to have any special privileges or advantaged position of our fellow investors. We’re trying to be good partners to the filmmakers we work with so that in the success of the movie, and every movie we invest in, we’re doing it because we believe in the upside of it and not about being scared about the downside. We’re also just trying to be responsible to make sure the movie is successful and keeping in mind what the market can bear right now. As we all know, it’s a challenging acquisitions market.”
Moving forward, the Unapologetic team, which is already expanding and has many film and TV projects in the works, has clear critical objectives for the next phase or disruption. One of those is setting others up for success far beyond their operation.
“We want to grow; we want to make three or four movies a year, and we started a TV department in January, so we’re going to get some shows on the air,” Boehm said. “We want to build relationships with the writers, directors, and producers we’re working with and help grow their careers. A measure of success would not just be our financial success, but that the people we’ve partnered with are having longer careers or the people who star in our movies and may have been told that they don’t have value in the traditional finance model are now bankable stars in their own right. That’s how we’ll judge the impact that we’ve had on the industry.”
Cathcart concluded, “This has been about sharing access in many ways. I always say I have this wild Cinderella story as my background. I’ve been at the ball for ten years, and I’m just not that into the people there, so I want to get cool people into the ball. I’ve got to the ball; now I have to get to the backdoor, kick it open, get everyone and outfit, and let them in.”
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