Hollywood is a magical mystery land, where some dreams crystallize faster than others. For years, I had been pitching my shows to networks and big names in writing rooms and finding rejection after rejection or promise after promise.
In 2018, my writing partner and I pitched a show to a high-profile network with a high-profile show runner attached. We made it through months of negotiations. We produced multiple copies of the pilot. We got our paychecks from the network only to later be told “they have too much female-centric content already” and were nixing years of work. That was a pretty crushing blow to receive. Just like that, the pilot was dead because some women had created it.
I finally got sick of the entire system and decided it was time to take charge. I printed the rejection email and put it in a gold frame on my desk trying to figure out what to do next. I wanted to make my work with the same quality, but not deal with the bureaucracy of the entertainment business. I wanted to create a safe space for minority creatives to submit their work and hope for it to be made or seen. In August of 2018, my business partner and I filed the paperwork to start our own production company, Moonscar Productions, and we haven’t looked back since.
Building a production company from the ground up was a huge undertaking that took a lot of time, money, and paperwork. It was a learning curve for a year to figure out how to bring money in, as well as put it out for our creators. I’m not ashamed to say we were dead broke for a while and unable to really fathom how to start. How do we get funding? How do we enlist creators? How do we function as a company?
We decided to start with television since that was where my partner and I had made our careers thus far. We took on writers and producers (friends looking for their big breaks) to bring us their work and find them representation. We knew that our company wouldn’t get a foot off the ground if we didn’t partner up with reliable companies and people willing to share and merge their vision with ours. So, we partnered with a boutique management company, Beverly Road Management and its CEO Mereb Gebremariam, to help on the management and representation front.
We hired a grant writer and got our affairs in order submitting to grants for funding on projects. We partnered with organizations like Women in Film and TV for opportunities to meet new creators and speak with the creative community on our mission. We talked to a talent management and PR firm, Cominded Talent Agency, out of Atlanta to best understand the PR side of talent. We asked around to friends at networks to get the best trends and upcoming wants in the industry to lead our production slate. Lastly, we based all our deals on no ownership policies. We wanted the creators to have full right to take their IP elsewhere if they got a better deal or visions didn’t align with ours, no matter where we were in the production process. We based our company on complete transparency. Eventually, we figured out how to run the company…with lots of help.
Our big break came when friends of ours in the band, The Foxies, asked us to write, produce, and film their music video for a song called “Anti Socialite.” We found an investor to help produce the video and got underway asking all of our talented friends for help. We hired celebrity cameos and reached out to talent agency, Tribe Talent in Nashville, for 15 teenage actors to be on a 12-hour set being pelted with dodgeballs.
Working with the band was liberating and easy. Their PR team worked with us to release the video, and we were then national news in Alternative Press, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and American Songwriter. From there, we received nearly a hundred creators reaching out to us to help make their pilots, films, web series, and music videos.
Having this company and taking on the endeavor to break free of the traditional Hollywood system was scary and the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. It taught me more about the business being behind the scenes and that creating a safe space for creative people really isn’t that hard. It just takes the will and willingness to do so.
If I have any advice for anyone frustrated with the way things are and you’re looking to jump into the production company side of things, I can’t explain how rewarding it is to help friends and creatives alike watch their visions come to life. And yes, sometimes things just won’t work out and the opportunities will disappear right when you’re close to the finish line. Sometimes the money will fall through and you must shelf projects until the right moment. Sometimes the production teams won’t be available. Sometimes there’s a global pandemic that will completely halt your industry and you need to take an extra year to reevaluate how to run the company.
Things happen, and that’s just life and business. It shouldn’t deter you from being able to create the outcome you want. It’s all about taking the wins with the loses. The rewards will be great if you just align yourself with partners you trust with your vision. After all, success is better when shared with friends.
To see what we're working on currently and to keep in touch, you can visit and follow us on our Instagram. We’re always trying to help creators in any way we can.
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Note From Tongal: This blog is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here!
