The Cult of Finance Execs Moonlighting as Film Producers

AKA The Cult of A24.

Movie critic Erick Weber tweeted that Ari Aster’s new film for A24, Beau is Afraid, is a “career-killing film.” He was met with a deluge of angry comments. Look at the ratio at the time of this posting:

Beau is Afraid, frankly, looks awful. It looks like Joaquin Phoenix wandering around confused for three hours. I’m a fan of Aster’s previous films, Hereditary and Midsommar, with Hereditary having the edge, but I’m afraid of seeing this new film because I’m almost positive I will hate it. I can’t remember a movie by a good director that I dreaded as much as this one. So why are people so excited?

They call it the cult of A24. People are actually fans of a movie studio, one that didn’t even start producing its own movies until Moonlight in 2016.

The collector mentality that I’ve written about is behind the cult-like adoration of A24. People think A24 is like the Criterion Collection and each film release is a necessary addition to their bookshelves. I’ve always just gone by directors. I like certain directors, and I’ll follow them from studio to studio. The reason A24 movies are generally strong is because the studio tends to give the green light to established directors that people care about, or directors that assuredly will deliver quality work. They’re just a more successful version of Annapurna Pictures.

A24’s marketing tactics seem suspect. They’ve taken a page from the Weinstein playbook and have attempted to buy the Oscars. They flood the media with contrived publicity. All we heard about in the months leading up to this year’s Oscars were Brendan Fraser and Ke Huy Quan and notice that we haven’t heard anything about either of those guys now that the Oscars have aired and A24’s publicity campaign has come to an end. It was all astroturf.

Why on earth would you be a fan of Hollywood studio executives? This is like being a huge rap fan and loving Lyor Cohen. This is like you’re a fan of superheroes so you love Kevin Feige. Backward isn’t even the word. Entertainment executives are quite literally evil, and they basically have nothing to do with the art besides signing the checks. They are the biggest liars in the world. Michael Tolkin posited in his 1988 novel The Player which was adapted into a film in 1992 by Robert Altman that your average studio exec is capable of murdering a person and attempting to cover it up.

But how could you not love the executives at A24? How about the company’s CFO, JB Lockhart, former senior vice president of finance and strategy for the NBA? A basketball numbers-cruncher deciding what art films get made - cool! What about Sasha Lloyd, the company’s head of international distribution? Surely she came from indie film, probably worked as a PA on a Jim Jarmusch film or something. No, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Lloyd previously worked at Goldman Sachs and, more recently, was a founding partner of GHL & Company, a boutique investment banking firm specializing in media and entertainment.” What about Matthew Bires, co-founder of A24? He hails from Guggenheim Partners, an investment firm.

They’re all from the world of finance.

VCs pretending to be film distributors? Sounds like my kind of studio! Surely they aren’t implementing dishonest marketing tactics to serve their bottom line.

“I am the world’s biggest JB Lockhart fan!” That’s A24 fans.

Harvey Weinstein used to release all the good movies and look at what a villain he became. The studio execs are all bad news, and that becomes clear once any details of their personal lives become public. This should be common knowledge by now, but the way these companies have dominated the internet has actually improved their status in the minds of audiences. No dissent is tolerated. You’re supposed to root for finance execs masquerading as film producers.

There will always be art films, whether this guy is producing them or that guy is.

There is a common tactic of publicly shaming anyone who doesn’t like a particular film. We saw this on display this year at SXSW when someone yelled “this movie fucking sucks!” at a q & a for Evil Dead Rise and Bruce Campbell shouted back, “Then get the fuck out of here!” The video of this went viral on Twitter and the message was clear: if you don’t like Evil Dead Rise you can get the fuck out of here. This is why Erick Webber was flooded with hate over his Beau is Afraid review.