Abby: Why did you choose to go into distribution?

Caleb: I started in traditional production and then shifted into film festivals. Then when I moved to LA four years ago, I had made a lot of connections through working at film festivals and traveling and working on production. I was looking for the best way to connect directly with filmmakers and be a little more creatively-minded to where I was able to work on multiple projects at once, as opposed to just one thing for like six months. So, it was a natural progression. To be fair, maybe 25% of my job now is distribution as a whole. Half of it is more development—working directly with directors and producers, securing financing, making offers to talent, connecting with production companies. Outside of that, maybe 25% of my job is domestic distribution. So, I kind of have a little bit of a hybrid position, which is not normal. The job that I have is new at this company, Highland Film Group, which is a production sales and finance company.

Abby: What does a production sales and finance company really do?

Caleb: To secure financing, a lot of independent productions, less than $10 million in budgets, will sometimes secure financing from private equity, which is someone who has money and can invest. More typically, a finance company will come in with X amount of dollars for a project. We come in and say that we know we can sell the film internationally and domestically for X amount and that secures the financing.

So a lot of what I do is bring in projects that we know we can sell and work with producers directly and talent to secure it. After that, I can be involved either creatively or very little. We can just sell a title or we can enter a project as executive producers where we give notes and bring in the cast all the way down to the set photographer. 

Part of my job title in particular is also handling domestic distribution. I have to find projects for our domestic releasing label, which is the Avenue, that we started last year along with our Head of Domestic, JJ Carruth. Our first title was called Jiu Jitsu, a fun, dumb action movie with Nicholas Cage, Frank Grillo, Tony Jaa. It didn't get great reviews, but it's done really well for us. We basically have an output deal with Paramount. They handle all of our home entertainment. So like our digital, cable iTunes, etc. So like Netflix, Hulu and stuff like that. 

Abby: I know you like to surf and play drums. Do you still find time for that as a VP?

Caleb: Yeah, I still surf on the weekends. There are varying degrees of how you can handle yourself, you know, being in LA or working in the entertainment industry. I know a lot of people who are working 6:00 AM to midnight every day and then they work on the weekends. That works for them. But I made a very conscious decision that my weekends were going to be my weekends. I still do work on the weekends sometimes. I don’t shut down at five o'clock every day. This industry is very much not a nine to five. It's a lot of nines and fives, you know? 

But I still surf. I don't really play drums anymore. My girlfriend has an electronic drum kit, and she and I will jam because she's learning the drums. I like to play guitar, and so we'll goof around on weekends. I have a life outside of my work, which is one of the really great things about the Highland Film Group. When I joined they were like: “Look, your weekends are your weekends and your nights are your nights.” 

I love movies, and I think they're an important art form. I think it's an important forum for discussion and entertainment. But at the end of the day, it's just a f***** movie. We're not curing cancer. You can't let yourself get too wrapped up. You have to have a life outside of this, or it'll suck you dry. There's way more important things in life.

Abby: Why did you create the Late Night program for Series Fest and what do you do in that position?

Caleb: I’ve been a part of Series Fest since its first year in 2015. I was just a theater manager at the film center in Denver, Colorado, which Series Fest had come in to essentially rent out through a partnership. It was festival organizers based out of New York and LA. Randy Kleiner and Kailey Smith Westbrook were the ones that reached out to me. I thought it was really interesting to have a festival focusing on independently produced pilots as opposed to short films and feature films. I thought it was really cool. I'd never heard of that before. So the following year, I got involved to run their Guest Relations, and I was a programmer for them.

They had a traditional program, which is just like comedy drama, short form, long form.It was very, very basic at first. I saw a lot of comedy pilots coming in that just felt sort of left-of-center, very absurdist. I grew up watching Adult Swim, and I'm still a big fan of that world. So, I pitched them this idea: what if we did a new program that could just be five or six episodes and we could call it “Late Night?” It would be like finding the surrealist absurd sort of strange bowels of the TV world—stuff that would play at like three in the morning. 

It worked really well, and it's just taken off. We had to do the festival virtually last June for obvious reasons, but it was still great. A lot of our pilots have taken our creators to connect with some bigger projects. They've all gotten some semblance of visibility to networks and streamers and things like that. So it's just been a fun outlet. That's a part of my year that’s still entertainment and filmmaking. But you know, it's not a part of my day to day. I get to just have fun and find new and interesting projects to put in the Late Night program. I mean, I do get like a very small stipend to work on it year round, but it's just something I'm passionate about. We always do all kinds of weird stuff when it's in person. Like I dressed up like an alien in 2019 and came out to Limp Bizkit’s Nookie. It’s a lot of fun.

Abby: Yeah, I bet. So, do you have any advice for students that are about to graduate?

Caleb: I would say it's probably twofold. Number one would be to utilize every minute that you have. The thing that you're doing right now might not be the thing you're doing in five, six, seven years. You might not even know it exists. The job that I have right now, I didn't know existed when I was an undergrad. Be open to trying new ways of storytelling.

Then the other would be don't be an a******. It's so easy to not do that. There are a lot of folks that get into this industry and they think that putting that vibe out there is how you get things done, and it's really not. There are hundreds of thousands of projects and there are millions of scripts and actors and directors.You don't have to work with someone who's being a dick. There's always another person. 

Abby: Did you know what you wanted to do in school? I don’t and I’m graduating soon. It’s scary!

Caleb: No, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to work in film in some capacity like that. I enjoyed all of it, and I tried a bunch of stuff. But, I think there's this misconception that there's a timetable. Like, you gotta get there immediately, or you got to go to LA right away. There's no ticking clock on getting into anything. It shifts. It's easy to say don't stress. That's like telling someone to calm down. It's always easy to say it, but don't fret over it if you don’t know what you want to do. It takes time to get into a writer's room. It takes time to get a script in front of somebody, for sure. But the idea that you shouldn’t try something because you might go down the wrong path is horse****. If anyone tells you that, they haven’t worked in the film industry in a long time.