Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Jessie Creel: A Heroine's Journey
What if storytelling could be your greatest tool for cultural impact and personal transformation? Jessie Creel, a dynamic producer with a rich background ranging from policy work in Washington, D.C. to filmmaking in the West, joins us to discuss her journey. Drawing inspiration from iconic films and crucial work in education and criminal justice reform, Jessie reveals how storytelling has the power to bridge divides and inspire change.
Through personal anecdotes, Jessie candidly shares her philosophy of maintaining integrity in her projects, while navigating industry biases and embracing movements like Me Too that have redefined storytelling.
Jessie’s ventures, Joyful Participation Pictures and Old Mill Ventures, exemplify her commitment to heart-led projects that balance passion with fiscal responsibility. From her ambitious adaptation of Karl Deisseroth's "Projections" to the community-driven impact of initiatives like Find Your Anchor, Jesse’s stories underscore the profound ability of storytelling to forge meaningful connections and inspire positive change.
www.slightlyprod.com
you know, space is the final frontier. I think that there's a lot of people who would argue that actually the mind is Finding ways to tell those stories that are compelling, empathetic, empowering and just educational is a really exciting feat.
Jennifer Coronado:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So, whether you are an artist or a cook or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say, on with the show, on with the show. I met producer Jesse Creel roughly 10 years ago at the Sundance Labs, when I was there as a mentor, and she was part of their class of young filmmakers who were there for feedback on their projects. We connected again at the Sundance Film Festival, which was so crowded, and we wanted to find a place to sit down and have a discussion, but we couldn't find anywhere that wasn't busy, so we sat down in the lounge of the men's room, and that's when I knew that we were friends. So welcome to.
Jessie Creel:Everyone Is Thank you. I'm so excited that you're doing this. I think that it was the natural evolution of your fantastic interviews in your day job, so I'm excited that you're launching this out into the world.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, no it's been a fun process. I want to start with my favorite place to start. Where'd you grow up?
Jessie Creel:I grew up half in Texas and half in Potomac, maryland, outside of DC, and then I made my way west to make movies, like a lot of people do. But you have a BA in religious studies, right, I do, and that, I think, is my passion ultimately is religion, the study of religion and the monomyth, and how you can make a we story into a me story pretty easily and connect yourself to Kairos time, the spiritual time, instead of just the day-to-day Kronos time. And so, after studying religion and also political science, I went to work in policy in DC for a few years and realized there that I wasn't enjoying the policy part of the work as much as I was enjoying the stories of the people I was meeting, and I thought that the real power and change was in relatability to others. And so the best way to do that, I think again going back to the monomyth and the stories was visual storytelling. But I didn't know anything about it.
Jessie Creel:I was, you know, raised in a home that revered film and television. I learned very early on who John Ford was and, you know, one of the most special memories was watching the Searchers with my family and finally understanding what it was about. You know it had always been on. My parents, you know, stopped on whatever channel that had been on Turner Movie Classics, and I would pick it up. But I remember I think it was in middle school watching it with them and going, oh my gosh, there's so much beauty here in the storytelling, so much beauty here in the storytelling. Obviously, there are issues now going back. There's not, you know, flawless art, but I think that it really made me understand how to bring the outside world in through visual storytelling, and so I had always had it kind of dangling in the back of my mind. I just didn't know what that would mean later on in life. But, like you can always pause and look back and go, oh, that was a seminal moment.
Jessie Creel:You know, watching it's a Wonderful Life, you know, every Christmas and just knowing that what Frank Capra did in that movie transcended holidays, religion, you know everything, and is a universal theme, and I think that you know this tiny keyhole into this little town and all of a sudden you're going, wow, this is a global message Totally, and I think he does a really good job of that with Clarence and you know the universe and things like that. But it was really important, I think, for me to see growing up. You know I couldn't relate just in the characteristics or the characters. Excuse me, but I could relate to that. What if question? So yeah, those were two very seminal films for me. And then in my time in DC, what made me really go? Oh my gosh. And and then in my time in DC, what made me really go oh my gosh. And this was in my time in public policy in DC, what made me go oh my gosh, I think Storytellings for me was the Lives of Others.
Jennifer Coronado:That movie, oh yeah, beautiful film, beautiful film, but I want to ask you, from a policy standpoint, what was your focus in DC? Where were your areas of policy?
Jessie Creel:I worked in education policy kind of a waiting for Superman, you know, empowerment of basically working to divorce real estate from your school and then I really took an interest in criminal justice reform.
Jessie Creel:I became close with a man who's now a friend, radley Balco, who's written two very important books the Rise of the Warrior Cop, which talked about police brutality, you know a decade before it made it to social media, and then also the Cadaver King and the Country Dentist about two corrupt medical examiners in the South, and John Grisham wrote the foreword to that book and I think a lot of Radley's work is why the Innocence Project got really going in the South. I think that he co-wrote it with a man named Tucker Carrington who's also an incredible lawyer and journalist and who was the protege of Brian Stevens. But I really saw in that was, you know, watching Radley write about these cases and the people in these cases and then being lucky enough to meet, you know, the mother of someone who was on death row and watching what that did to their family and really having kind of a courtside seat to that. Criminal justice reform and what that took and continues to take was really an important part of me moving west also.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, and you went to Chapman University. You got your master's, and sometimes people dismiss it, as the philosophical part of college can actually be helpful with the practical things that you need to execute on in life. So tell me about that.
Jessie Creel:Yeah, so that's interesting. So, obviously, going to a liberal arts college on the East Coast and studying religion with a focus in Eastern religions, I didn't really have the conservatory. It was pretty esoteric and open inquiry, and I really love that I do. But what I needed was a school that could kind of indulge me in that, but not to a point where I wasn't actually making things, and so it was the conservatory model and the most amazing part of that was that you own the films you made, and that's not true of a lot of film schools, of a lot of film schools. And so I had done my research and had chosen Chapman because it was new-ish in the film schools. I think there was a hunger there. They had an amazing facility and they had the most amount of Fulbright scholars from around the world. And as Hollywood was, I mean, hopping and happening, there were other places around the world where there were, you know, other Hollywoods Bollywood, nollywood and I got to meet people who were active in those communities, who came to further their study at Chapman. So it became a very global place very quickly. It wasn't a lot of industry kids. That was also important to me. It was a lot of people who had stories to tell and wanted to tell them, or who wanted to work in the industry and take a really creative and important part of making other people's stories. So it was a relatively humble group of people.
Jessie Creel:My thesis film that I made with a bunch of very dear friends, my thesis film that I made with a bunch of very dear friends we did it in Hawaii and that had never been done before. But because we owned the film, we were able to do pre-sales, sell it so that we could get money to go to Hawaii. We were able to enter it into a lot of festivals. It went to Sundance, there was a screening of it at the Sydney Opera House, it ended up on the Criterion Channel and the Criterion Collection and it just, you know, sky's the limit. It was the little film that could and I think that, from the standpoint of ownership, ty Senga, who is a brilliant writer and director, whose film vision it really was, was able to understand that the distribution and impact was just important as the film itself. I mean that wasn't something that we invented, but I think that was pretty mature for a bunch of late 20-somethings to think of at that time.
Jennifer Coronado:For most young people. What does pre-sale even mean? How do you go? You go about doing that. What? Where do you go?
Jessie Creel:Like who do you call? I think one of the keys was my partner, matt, who's now my husband. He has always been a nonprofit ninja, you know, he's just one of those really good souls. And so he cuts to the chase very quickly and he said I think you need a fiscal sponsor. I think that, and that is when you borrow someone's 501c3 status so that tax deductible contributions can be made for your project, but through their kind of organization. Because he said it was a double bottom line mission, and that's often what I've been drawn to.
Jessie Creel:And the double bottom line of this was that it was going to be the first Native Hawaiian short film that you know we were aiming to take to the festivals during a time where the Native Hawaiian language was being brought back into schools and culture in Hawaii because it had been so brutally oppressed for so long and censored. And so, because Thai is Native Hawaiian and I had done work with Native Hawaiians in DC, I had a bunch of contacts there and I said, hey, we're going to do this. It's going to be a little bit longer than a short film, because it was 19 minutes and I think it's going to help bring first off. It was a Hawaiian legend, the legend of the Mu people, which was when legend. The legend of the Mu people, which was when you were caught in the sun, you turned to stone and it was a allegory of what it meant to accept newcomers and to hold on to the old ways, etc. But it also was just beautiful in the exploration of the, the land, the hawaiian culture and just the language. And so I was able to parlay that into a mission and and get the film commissioner of the state, donnie dawson, on board and she helped us. The kamehameha schools, which is one of the biggest educational trusts in the world, helped us.
Jessie Creel:We just we had kind of a in true hawaiian, you know, in in the world. Helped us. We just we had kind of a in true Hawaiian, you know, in the true Hawaiian way. We had just an incredible group of people wanting to make this happen. We stayed in the dorms of a private school, you know, even the local rental car company gave us deals. We just we were able to make it happen because from the get go we were thinking how can this project serve more than just us getting IMDb cred?
Jessie Creel:I think that's the only way to make stuff. Now, you know, kind of angry, you know, and all great and important. But I think the thing about Stones that's what the movie's called is that it was simple, you know, and it was hard and sad and I still cry when I see it, which is I don't know if that's indulgent or narcissistic, maybe it's both. I mean, probably my therapist would tell you that it's probably both and that I indulge my narcissism too much. But I really loved how it was received and still to this day, it's one of those movies where people will, you know, reach out to Ty or me and just talk about how it really got them back into their culture or in understanding where they were living. And that was just such a. It wasn't an accident, that was a hope.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, now, ty was the filmmaker that you were working with when you were at the labs, right? Was this the project that you were focusing on or a different one?
Jessie Creel:No, this was. There was another project they were focusing on which I still hope gets made one day, but Ty kind of took a rocket ship into Emmy nomination of PBS food series called Family Ingredients and I was able to be involved a little bit in that. I forget what season they're on, four or five, but they travel the world and talk about the roots of Hawaiian fusion cuisine via a guest and an incredible chef named Ed Kenny. I got to go along on the one with Jack Johnson when we were tracing his dad's fishing excursions from Trinidad, Santa Cruz, all the way to Hawaii and that was a really fun trip understanding just the fabric of what makes a family kind of knit together and then what stands out most about those people once they've passed on. That sounds amazing.
Jennifer Coronado:When you were at the labs. There were types of advice that you got as a female producer and I wonder if you could talk about that experience from some of the mentors who were there.
Jessie Creel:Happily, because I think there's a disjunction between those people handing out that advice and not realizing why we've had such a rollback in the rights of females in this day and age, and I would be remiss to not mention that. I know that the culture has changed since I got into storytelling, and so I'm a little bit more rabid politically and I'm and I noticed those things even more now, but I knew enough in 2012 to know that being told that I should wear a dress to my pitches and speak in the less monotone, lilting way was going to help me get projects through the door. And I'm telling you that it isn't a surprise that I was told this, because I have friends on Wall Street who've been told the same thing, you know. I have friends in Silicon Valley who have to dress so well and they're, you know, sitting across the table from men in jeans and hoodies, and so I see that there's absolutely a complete double standard there and it's insidious and it's everywhere, and so, I think, an awareness of it, and so, to this day, I have not worn a dress to a pitch. I wear a blazer like a man would, or like I'd hope a man would, but I just I won't I speak in my regular voice.
Jessie Creel:Those agents, they were agents, big agents at the big agencies. They probably were not wrong in that. Doing those things would have helped me, but I didn't want to be on that side of history. Now I think that you know the Me Too movement has made people more aware, but they. There's so much more that we have to do there's so much more that we have to do.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, agreed, I want to talk about what your philosophy is as a producer. You know you talk about the monomyth and how that's important to storytelling for you, because there are some producers that are like let's talk about the money, let's talk about, and then they get a little into the creative. There are some that get in deep into the creative and have other people, like a line producer, handle the money portion of it. But I know you are deeply involved in development of projects. So let's talk about your philosophy as a producer.
Jessie Creel:Yes, I appreciate that question. I think that there is an important distinction between those who make the trains run on time and those who are, you know, kind of spotting what train should be riding, and also those who are like, well, I'm going to build something to go and I probably am in the let's build this. I am, you know, I option material and I have a project now that I think is I don't want to sound so, you know pie in the sky, but I do think that this is going to be one of the most important things that I work on and that I am working on, and it's a book called Projections by Karl Deisseroth, who is there, you go, you got it. He is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and bioengineer, but I think, because he's all of those things in one, he's synthesized a philosophy, it's really being stuck in time with Galileo, and I don't think that there's enough people who know what he's saying and what he's thinking, and so taking that book and making it into a scripted series, which is, you know, what we're doing right now, but also taking the book and making it into a Cosmos or Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers interview-esque thing, in the inverse. So, looking into the mind, because I think what is as vast as the multiverse, inversely as such in the brain. And so there is, you know, space is the final frontier. I think that there's a lot of people who would argue that actually the mind is, and so finding ways to tell those stories that are compelling, empathetic, empowering and just educational is a really exciting feat. And having Carl, who is just a wonderful human being, he has five kids, he has an amazing wife who's an MD, phd at Stanford, who's a neuro-oncologist and neuroscientist who does so much for the treatment of children with brain cancer, and they have an amazing perspective on the world. And so I think part of my desire to option this book and to own the rights to this book is so that I can work with them and hope, through osmosis, that I can also get that level of I don't know connection to a greater cause.
Jessie Creel:Because, Lord knows, it was not in the cards for me to become a doctor. I did a semester of pre-med and it was ugly Like, it was just not something that I understood. But you did a semester of pre-med, yes, I did, and I was still going to be a religion major, but I thought I want to become a pediatrician. Like I love kids, I don't want them suffering. What can I do? Well, apparently nothing in that vein, because my pre-med was a joke. It was so dismal that my my GPA when I graduated was brought down quite a bit from that semester.
Jessie Creel:But what I did learn was that, you know, there is a lot of people feel called to healing and the really amazing thing about Carl and his book projections, which everyone should go by, it's just, it's a remarkable feat. I think the most amazing part about Carl is that he is more excited about better questions than actually answers, and I feel like that is where I bring my religion, scholarship in, because the great religions ask questions. You know that's what the meditations are on, and so I feel like his purpose in life is a spiritual quest. I feel like he, you know, looks in a telescope up at the sky just because he can conversely at the brain. And I think that, you know, doing these projects are deeply creative because we're trying to I'm trying to be kind of the messenger between two worlds the writer to helm the scripted series and finding the right partners to do animations for the animated parts of the doc series.
Jessie Creel:I think inherently I'm creative in that, but I am not fluent in greenwriting, it doesn't come naturally. I can say to somebody hey, I think that this should be our opening scene, but it would take me three days to fit that into the format of a script. It's just not in my brain. I feel like screenwriters are bilingual. They just see things in a way that I don't, and I'm just so much more narrative. So that's where I'm creative. But I also think that some of the best genesis of creation is the dialogue between creatives and me, and so I think that making sure that I surround myself with people who are just unbelievable and creative and also normal, also know to go pick up their dry cleaning those things are really important. But I've been very fortunate, present company included, to meet amazing people in this industry, and so now I'm calling on that to really do this project to change the way that mental health is perceived in this country.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, well, you're pretty. You know you're pretty casual about. I mean, when I met you, you were very much hey, my name is Jesse. Now I am actually most people don't believe this I'm pretty introverted as a person, I'm pretty shy in initial meetings, but you have this bombastic way about you where you're just like, hey, I'm here and let's talk about this thing, and you're pretty casual about oh, I met this scientist and I did this and I optioned a book. You know how, when you are processing what your next steps are or how you're going to engage with people, how do you approach that?
Jessie Creel:Creatively. I always send the book because it's a book and in this case, projections is canon to me right now in my life, and so I, when I optioned it, carl's agent sent me 50 copies of the book from Random House, and so I was really good about sending that out to people I thought would have ideas or who I wanted to get involved in the project. Pretty early on I had suspected through mutual friends that I wanted this showrunner and writer. We hit it off right away. We actually went up and visited Carl and it was just kind of written in the stars. It was out of my control a little bit and I think that was just an incredibly lucky thing. I think you know you have to kiss a lot of frogs. In this case it was just somebody who saw the book, saw the magic of Carl and the potential to have this medical procedural work in a way that could serve the narrative that our country has about mental health and shift that thinking in an entertaining way, and that's exactly what I was hoping to do, right.
Jennifer Coronado:You said there was a showrunner writer that I knew, that I wanted. How did you know you wanted them?
Jessie Creel:Because, honestly, because they were really close with Ty, and Ty, you know, my first film partner has the most amazing I'm going to butcher it, but I think they call it puko in Hawaiian, which is like just this the umbilical, like the gut, the hunch and he was very close with her and we had other mutual friends as well.
Jessie Creel:But he just said, if you two work together, you're like I just I really want it to happen and so I give him credit for that too. It's not anything to do with their credits on IMDb, it's a feeling of like, do they understand what I'm talking about, what my vision is? Can they make it better? And am I going to want to be in the foxhole with this person? Because when you make something, even when you develop it, you know it's a lot of obsessive thinking about that. You know, putting yourself in that world, building that world and knowing that person is the right fit and wants to serve the greater good of the story. I don't want to downplay this person's credits because they are at the top of the top, but I think that, more than anything, it has to be a chemistry thing. I agree.
Jennifer Coronado:Because if you're particularly on projects like this that are, for lack of a better term, heart-led projects oh, that's a beautiful way to put it Versus like fiscally-led projects. Well, that's why way to put it Versus like fiscally led projects, well, that's why you have to have those people that are really invested in it from a. This is a story that needs to be told, standpoint Right, and sometimes that energy of those two things coming together, or that the story needs to be told, can actually push you towards that fiscal thing that you need to help get it made, because you have a passion around it.
Jessie Creel:Absolutely. I think that I don't know who said it probably a robber baron knowing my look but there was once somebody who had said that if your idea is just to make money, you're never going to make money, because that's a terrible idea. And I feel like that same thing can apply to filmmaking. I think you know it's not sustainable if it's not commercially viable, and so you you can't, you know, close your eyes to that. And also you need to be responsible with investors money, because we all know how hard it is to earn a dollar. And if you want to not be a flash in the pan in this industry, you really have to steward their investments wisely. And it's not an industry you get into because you're going to hit lightning in a bottle or you know the unicorn. There's going to be slim margins and things, and you know my hope is to keep creatives employed. That's like my. You know I don't need, you know, more than three toilets in a home. I think actually we only have two, so a third would be nirvana for me. I don't need that.
Jessie Creel:What I want is to keep these incredible minds lit up, putting a roof over their heads, and excited about telling the stories that will lead to the next generation of storytellers and inspire them, and so so, yeah, that seems like kind of a bloviating answer, but I don't think that you should get into this, at least in independent filmmaking or doing it outside the traditional studio thing, because that's this project is.
Jessie Creel:I raised money for development and we're doing it and then we're going to take it out instead of reverse and that's so that we can be in constant dialogue with the author about what the vision is, because these are stories of his real patients and so we have to be respectful of that. They are sharing their trauma and their plight and their life story, and so I don't want, you know, 12 men in suits at the conference table telling me things. I want to say here's an amazing script. You can have it or not. You know, like being flexible and adaptive is important in a collaborative art like storytelling and film and TV, but it is not good to do that at the onset.
Jennifer Coronado:No, and you don't want them saying which one of the characters is going to wear a dress, right?
Jessie Creel:And talk a little high pitched. Yeah, flirting, grow your hair a little longer. That was my favorite.
Jennifer Coronado:Oh my God. So you have two companies. You have one that is Joyful Participation Pictures, yeah. And then you have Old Mill Ventures yes. What's the difference between the?
Jessie Creel:two, yeah. So JPP is my shingle me myself and I have an amazing assistant, courtney, who helps keep me honest and on time and target, and she and I are in the trenches of developing projects at the book level and so those are my passion projects and it took me a while but I was able to raise money to do development from people who really believed in what material. I was drawn to that whole notion of joyful participation, that you can't cure the world of its sorrows but you can choose to participate in joy. That's a bastardized version of what Joseph Campbell said, but the notion is that you know, yes, you know bad things are going to happen, but you're still there trying to move the needle every day.
Jessie Creel:And so I'm drawn to those kinds of protagonists like Carl, who sees treatment, resistant depression, but still goes to his lab and tries to uncover the mysteries of mind. Or his wife who you know has yet to not lose a patient. All of her patients have passed. This cancer that she treats is deadly in the most horrible way, and she was drawn to it because she thought how could I not help? You know those kinds of people I'm really drawn to. And then Old Mill Ventures is a company that I started with my friend, anderson Hinch, and he's a really awesome guy who has really good business sense but also is passionate about film and TV, and so we started getting involved in helping projects finish out so investments and executive producing, so when projects were almost done, we would help people find the right money to make the final stretch happen.
Jennifer Coronado:How do you do that? What's your approach in the money gathering of it all?
Jessie Creel:Well, it's funny because the money gathering was kind of built on the notion of the real estate portfolio, which is, if you can invest a lot, you can ameliorate your risk by spreading it out. So it wasn't that we would raise money per project. We raised for a fund and I think that there's hope in the future we're going to do this again. But we, through my Sundance network, which is unbelievable, and Film Independent and Chapman unbelievable, and Film Independent and Chapman, just all of these wonderful do people still use the term Rolodex but just wonderful contacts I was able to find projects and we kind of had a litmus test it has to be socially relevant, commercially viable and going to actually get made. Because that is the biggest hurdle in filmmaking is that so many projects die on the vine and it's just. It's just not going to get you further into this if you don't make bad calls. So we got involved in legacy, which was the Laker series that was on Hulu.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, Then you were a producer on that one.
Jessie Creel:Yes, and that was really exciting and I became a Lakers fan because the women who run the Lakers are unbelievable humans. They, you know, made sure to be inclusive and I was pregnant during the last like stretch of it and of course, as soon as the baby came, a big box of Lakers gear came for him and just really like family oriented. But what Jeannie bus was able to do with that team in the like crux of family drama and everything, was pretty inspirational. And Anderson is a lifelong Lakers fan and to have him, you know, excited about a project like this and the evolution of the project, when we started with it it was just a 90-minute feature and it just grew and grew. So that's really a call for being flexible and that some projects will take on a life of their own and you need to be a little bit of format agnostic because there might, as you're uncovering things, be more room to tell the story, and that's what this ended up being.
Jessie Creel:Kevin Mann, who was the head honcho of it all, brought in his friend, mark Ankner, who had spent his career at WME, and they really saw wait a second. This is pretty incredible and we're able to raise even more capital to make it 10 episodes and then it won the Emmy. So that was a really big, big win. And then we also, anderson and I also got involved in a Lebanese film called 1982 that you know went to Toronto and Cannes and all over and you know New York Times critically acclaimed and NPR. You know New York Times critically acclaimed and NPR. And it was just something that we had to get involved in because the storytelling of the conflict with Israel and Lebanon in 1982, through the eyes of these middle schoolers, was something we hadn't seen before and we knew there might not be a huge American audience for it but surely it would resonate in the world, because the world is full of such conflict and it was more of the same. Unfortunately, that's because humans continue to live here.
Jessie Creel:Humans cause a lot of sorrow.
Jennifer Coronado:Tell me about oh, um, oh, lucy, because I know, like I saw, that Adam McCain, will Ferrell's company was on that as well, and then that was an independent spirit award nominee.
Jessie Creel:Oh, lucy came about through friends of mine who I'd never worked with before but who I had gotten involved with just at Sundance events Jonathan Duffy and Kelly Williams. Just at Sundance events Jonathan Duffy and Kelly Williams and they, you know, they are like they're indie filmmaking powerhouses and they have been on the circuit for two decades and they said, hey, our friends have this movie Anderson, and I read the script and said, oh my gosh, this is amazing. You know, this is dealing with some huge themes that interest us. This is dealing with some huge themes that interest us, but it's also funny and it's also got some of the great actors from Japan in it and I think, you know, it would be worth getting involved in.
Jessie Creel:And I remember we took a bunch of friends to the theater to see that and it really it was an important film because people were people related to it so well and so much more. But I think our friends were kind of shocked by how dark it was, you know, and I think that when I say that we get excited about certain projects, that doesn't mean they're going to be happy, you know. And so I think that helped me kind of change my language around certain things, because I realized I may have led them astray on thinking what it was going to be. But no, oh, lucy was a really special film. I think that it might have been made 10 years too soon, in that, you know, commercially it didn't do as well as we had hoped. But and again here's my poker face, I'm like brutally honest on that. But I think that there's because of the explosion of streaming. I think people are more comfortable with subtitles now and, yeah, I think it would have had a warmer reception in the States.
Jennifer Coronado:What's a project that's gotten away from you? Was there ever a project that you walked away from because you're like? I thought this was right in the beginning, but it's not the one for me, my God.
Jessie Creel:How long do you have? Of course, you know it's so funny because I think there is a project that Ty and I had early on no-transcript, you know, a paycheck and Ty and I were just, you know there was something about it Fast forward, you know, 10 or 15 years and those two people have no longer any footing in the industry because of things that they've done, and so I don't know if we didn't know that we couldn't name it, but it was a, it was an instinct, and so we've tried really hard to listen to those, and so I probably walk away from things a little too easily, because I don't want to spend time and vulnerable hours with people who aren't making good or ethical decisions. On that note, tell me about Find your Anchor. Thank you for asking about that.
Jessie Creel:So Find your Anchor is an incredible organization started by Ali Borosky, who is this rock star of a human being who suffered greatly from depression and it almost claimed her life a few times, but she also is just a maverick and a brilliant graphic designer, and one of the things that she took out of treatment after attempting to end her life was that the paperwork and the language and all of these things, and not just to mention the invoice after you know your life gets saved was incompatible with survival, and so she thought, well, what could I have needed? You know, what would I have needed to really feel better? And so she designed it, and what she ended up doing was taking a small box and putting 52 cards that are photos that she took, that she calls her anchors, which are reasons to stay on the planet, and then also messages of love that you know strangers love you, and I think that, ultimately, is why I got in filmmaking, because it was this intimacy with strangers and this notion that you can see yourself in someone you don't even know. And so I met her through a friend of ours who's a musician His name's Andrew McMahon from Something Corporate and Jack's Mannequin, and he has the Dear Jack Foundation, which is something also near and dear to my heart, which is adolescents and young adults with cancer, and they actually partnered with Find your Anchor to do an anchor box specifically for those who are facing a new cancer diagnosis. But I met Allie through that and I got really interested in it, and then during that time I lost a dear friend to suicide. She had always been interested in Find your Anchor and had posted stuff on her social about Find your Anchor, and so between projections and Find your Anchor, that's kind of my love letter to Michelle and so I, you know, joined the board and we have launched 70,000 boxes around the world.
Jessie Creel:One of the great marriages is between find your anchor and the Lakers that I was able to put together, and so the last two years not this year, but two years prior we did events with the Lakers staff and built boxes and then they launched them into the LA public schools. This year we were able to get them to do that without even building the boxes. The person at the Lakers who I don't know, she's like an angel, she is like of, I feel like she's of this world and the next, her name's Keisha Nix and she's always doing such good deeds, and we had said, hey, there's a 200 box request from LA public schools. Is there any way you can help? And within two days the Lakers had covered that money to build the boxes. And when we said, do you want you know Lakers stickers put on them, they said no, that's not necessary, they don't need to know who they're from.
Jessie Creel:And so that to me is like being involved with people who understand the meaning of community is incredible. Taking you know the find your anchor relationships and mixing them in with the Lakers relationships has been really a beautiful thing, because good has come from that and I feel like that is. You know, somebody called my friend a people alchemist and I said, oh, I could only hope to be like that, but I feel like mixing, sprinkling in people with other people, magic can really happen and there's an example of that that Find your Anchor got really incredible support from the Born this Way Foundation with Lady Gaga and their Please Stay pledge, which is amazing, and I should tell everyone to go find that pledge and sign it, because it's an important thing to do, to commit to being here.
Jennifer Coronado:The thing that I would say to you, jessie, is you're certainly not a lungs-led person because you have walking pneumonia, but you are a heart-led person, and I really appreciate you talking to us today.
Jessie Creel:Oh, I enjoyed this so much and I can't wait to see what this podcast does. There needs to be a lot more of it.
Jennifer Coronado:Thank you for listening to Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson, executive producer is Aaron Dussault, music by Doug Infinite. Our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker and I am Jen Coronado. Everyone Is is a Slightly Disappointed Productions production, dropping every other Thursday. Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review, and maybe even like and subscribe. Thank you for listening.
