You've mentioned that when it comes to film production, you got off to a slower start than expected.
Oh, no, come on! I'm not playing the 'woe is me' card.

No, no, I'm not asking you to.
[Laughs] You kind of are, though.

Well, it's true, isn't it?
We were kind of out in the wilderness for a few years. I guess, yeah. You have to understand that not a lot of veterans on this side of the business were chomping at the bit to partner with me, especially when they realized that I wasn't interested in just producing starring vehicles for myself. But it's not a big deal, I understand the hesitation from a business perspective, and we came out of it all right.

You started out doing distribution first, which is a somewhat risky preposition.
Well, we just focused on distribution more at first, though we did production as well. It was either look backwards toward production or look forwards toward distribution, basically flipping a coin to decide.

Really?
I wish. [Laughs] It was more just stumbling through and learning as we went along, for better or for worse. We actually started out producing, doing more genre projects, horror, which teaches you a lot about maintaining a lean production. And then I got to talking to Howard Cohen [co-founder of Roadside Attractions] one day, and he'd known me since I was like 20, and he said: 'We have a rule, which is that $5 million is our budget unless we have a partner. I know you, I know you have a good head on your shoulders, would you like to partner with us' -- so this project we'd done with HBO, Chris Rock's Good Hair, Roadside ended up distributing that. And I learned a lot from them in watching them do the work, and then we started partnering up on suitable projects.

How many partnerships have you had since then?
Ben is Back is going to be our eighth. We're super excited to be bringing this movie to audiences everywhere.

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