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Welcome back to One Thing, I'm David Rind. Hollywood and Washington DC haven't always seen eye to eye. Could a new creative partnership change that?

They can turn on CNN to watch or hear about the events of today, but movies and television show can let you know who the people are and, you know, hopefully see them with a little bit more empathy.

Stick around. One of my favorite new shows of the past few years is The Diplomat, it's on Netflix.

Lenkov put together the attack, but the Kremlin did not hire him. I think the prime minister did.

The show stars Carrie Russell as the U.S. Ambassador to the UK, who, through a series of convoluted and increasingly implausible circumstances, finds herself and her husband, played by Rufus Sewell, drawn closer and closer to the American presidency. The series was created by Deborah Kahn, who came up at Hollywood working on classic political shows like Homeland and The West Wing. In fact, fan favorites Alison Janney and Bradley Whitford are in this one too, although their characters are much less idealistic this time around.

I'd like you to be my vice president.

I think part of the reason I like the diplomat is because while the politics are not super grounded in reality, it does bring in real life geopolitical storylines. The war in Ukraine, Middle East spycraft, et cetera, some of the stuff we cover on this podcast. Now, you might be asking, David, you follow all of this serious news for work full time. Why would you want to spend your few hours of relaxation watching more of it? Fair, but I could pose the same question to much of America. Donald Trump's second presidency has reshaped American politics, and his policies have touched nearly every American. This year has been a lot. And yet, if you log on to your favorite streaming service, odds are at least one of the most popular movies or shows on there will probably be about politics in some way.

President James

Death by Lightning, House of Dynamite, Zero Day, Paradise.

My fellow Americans, you're aware of the situation we now face, and I want to tell you the truth.

'These are just some of the titles that broke through this year, not to mention all the stuff that's in the library that people love returning to. 24, House of Cards, Veep, etc. So what is it about these shows that we can't turn away from, no matter who is in the real-life Oval Office? And what happens when Hollywood goes to DC directly to find more of these stories?

You know, my passions are always sort of film and politics. You know. I grew up in Chicago where they filmed the John Hughes movies, and that sort of inspired me.

David Beaubaire is a film and television producer. He's held executive jobs at multiple Hollywood studios. Now he's the founder and CEO of Sunset Lane Media, a production company that aims to speed up the development process. And Sunset lane is setting up shop in the nation's capital in hopes of convincing power players to make movies and TV with them. David knows this town well because he used to work in it.

And I, you know, always cared about the country and what's going on. And I went to work for Governor Clinton when he was running for president and he won, uh, and I had the opportunity to go work at the white house for a number of years following that, but I wanted to try something new. I wanted it to see what this entertainment industry was all about. And if it was a good fit for me and if it worked out right, if not, so be it, but it has proven to be the sort of right calling for me. And I continue to enjoy it and try to have success out here.

The newest thing is that your firm, Sunset Lane Media, is opening production offices in not Hollywood, not Atlanta or Calgary, but Washington, DC. And according to you, this is the first time a Hollywood company has established a dedicated office in the capital of the United States for creative reasons, not for lobbying purposes. Why do you think it's taken this long?

Uh, I don't know, maybe because sort of not the right person or people to know how to access it properly, you know, what we said is that people are in New York looking for books and literary and theater, same with London and in Nashville for music or sort of red state culture stuff, but in reality, more movies and television shows center on or emanate from people and the occupations of what happens in transpires in Washington, DC. Yet no one has been a consistent sort of provider for that.

So just the physical proximity to the people with these stories that are doing these jobs day in and day out, you think that helps you?

I think it helps. Yeah, you know, I'm a producer of a television show called The Night Agent, which is really successful. There's every year there's different movies and TV shows from House of Dynamite to The Diplomat to, you know, the Tom Clancy movies or Argo and Zero Dark 30. And there's no way that we'll be the sole provider for it. But I would love to have been involved in those movies and by establishing a president of DC, we might be the best ones to identify those stories earlier on, you know, I have said that. You know, two things in the world are meant to bring us together, politics and entertainment. And right now, politics is dividing us more than ever.

I was going to say, I haven't encountered much of that in the last 10 plus years. Lately, yeah.

So I think that puts the burden on entertainment all the more because it's the one thing, no matter where you live or what your point of view is, we all turn on the TV or we all go into a movie theater and we're all leaning in rooting for whoever's on the other side of the screen to entertain us and hopefully open our eyes to things we otherwise would never have considered.

That's what I wanted to ask you about, because you listed off a bunch of shows that have been on recently that people have been really enjoying. But obviously our real life politics can feel fraught, depressing, certainly not uniting. And a lot of people are saying they're tuning out the actual news because of how toxic things have gotten. So why do you think they want to engage with this political fiction on their TVs in the meantime?

Well, I think movies are escapism, so yeah, it should be a break from our, you know, challenging reality. That's the thing, we're meant to be nonpartisan or bipartisan. We're not looking to sort of make polemics or attack anyone. We are, this is the thing which is the government is filled with people who are trying to do good. You know, for example, HBO had great success with Chernobyl a couple years ago, which was an amazing mini series. Kerry Washington was on the show, Scandal, that did. Tremendous success West Wing was a terrific thing in the line of fire Dave national treasure I think that you know when I see Capitol Hill or the monument or Congress or the White House and trailer My interest peaks up and that's what IP is I think we're treating DC as sort of IP that you don't when people see it There's an audience that it clicks into but it could be Aaron Brockovich. It could be Philadelphia. It can be quiz show So I I'm not with all respect they can turn on CNN to watch or hear about the events of today, but movies and television show can let you know who the people are and, you know, hopefully see them with a little bit more empathy and have some rooting interest.

DC is IP. That's something I hadn't really quite considered before. That's an interesting thought. I guess I'm wondering if it's healthy to be feeding people a vision of politics that may not necessarily have a connection to what it really is like and the very serious stakes that are at play here when we're talking about real life politics and the decisions that these people in power are making. I think of a show like The West Wing, and I. I admit I was too young to be watching it when it actually aired, but I imagine even that vision of DC politics felt a little antiquated at the time, right?

Yeah, but sometimes you have to show the opposite to appreciate the reality. So I don't necessarily fully agree with that. It's like people are fully aware of the reality we're doing but that's the difference between news versus film and entertainment. Argo was a true story, Zero Dark Thirty, those weren't uplifting stories. September 5th wasn't an uplifting story, but, you know, amazing stories that have real resonance with audiences, but also impacted the world. Oppenheimer. So I don't think it's our job, as we say, to report on what's happening today. Doesn't mean that we won't, but movies are supposed to last over time and not just be of one particular. A moment.

Gotta take a quick break when we come back. How the fight over one of Hollywood's most storied studios could impact David's plans. Stick around. So I wanna ask you about the broader state of development in Hollywood. Cause your team conducted some research recently. You looked at roughly 500 movies, live action, English language released or set to be released in the U.S. By the major studios or streamers from 2022 to 2026. And what you found is that only one 10th were truly original ideas developed from within a studio's internal development process. That is. Not based on IP, not financed somewhere else, not acquired by an output deal. Those are like pretty inside baseball Hollywood terms that I don't expect all of our listeners to know. So can you just explain why those findings were notable to you?

Yeah, the objective of that was to highlight, which is the way people think Hollywood works is not actually how it's working today. You know, the world and the business has changed tremendously. You know when I started in the business, streaming wasn't a business, but today in 2025, Netflix goes about developing projects the same way Warner Brothers did in 2000. Warner Brothers even develops some of the same projects we were developing in 2000. So we change the way we reach the consumer, but not the way that we go about creating content. And some of the creativity gets stifled just by the sheer bureaucracy and distractions and enormous capital being deployed by those studios at any one time. So the goal with Sunset Lane Media is to say, create a different way into the business, to say that we need to approach the business the way it is today, not the it used to be. And the whole point is that we want to unbundle the development process from the financing and production and the marketing and distribution, which is much like biotech and big pharma, we wanna be the best at the thing they need most but have the hardest time with. The thing that costs the least but takes the longest. But partner with the big studios on what they do best, which is their ability to underwrite large scale productions and their ability to market and distribute to reach the biggest audience.

Well, as we sit here on December 11th recording this, there is this unfolding fight over the future of CNN's parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery. As of today, Netflix is still in agreement to purchase the Hollywood side of that company, but Paramount has launched this hostile takeover bid to get the entire company. It seems like this is gonna be a really drawn out process, but seems no matter which way it goes, there's going to be consolidation in this industry. How does that impact what you're trying to do and trying to change how the development of these projects happen.

I think it only highlights more what we're trying to do and the opportunity and need for it. Because for the next year, Warner Brothers is going to be in a little bit of a holding pattern because people aren't going to feel very confident about developing projects there while they don't know who's going to be there when they turn in.

They don't want to bring some project to the company that could end up being killed.

Exactly, exactly. So all the studios are reliant and want someone outside to be able to develop and package and bring them turnkey ready movies. However, no one's in position to do so on a repeatable and consistent way. And that's what we hope to do because the audience's appetite is voracious and endless. And so while they deal with their machinations, the audience is still they are waiting to be delivered. So if we can do take off. Some of that pressure or be of service to those studios, I think that we will be an incredibly valuable.

So you think you could still kind of do that work even as all this corporate drama plays out

Yeah, that's exactly the full intention, which is our business doesn't stop because the thing is, if you sell a project to a studio, they control it and you're at the mercy of everything else that they're dealing with. We hope to sort of give people all the benefit of a studio creatively without the baggage prematurely that comes with it. Like I said, we're not going to control all the stories, but just to be able to approach our work or think about it that way, I think we're gonna be able to identify. Some amazing stories, you know, for one, we're working on the project called The Missing Peace, which was about the Camp David summit in 2000, where they tried to reach a peace between Israel and the Palestinians unsuccessfully.

Have you heard at all from the current administration in terms of like talking about potential projects?

Uh, not in the administration itself, but like I said, we're, we're reaching out to both sides of the aisle and there are people from both sides of who are supporting us. Like I said. The thing is not to look for what divides us, but what we can find in common. Cause I think that's the power of entertainment that, you know, we see the world a different way. Like, I think hotel Rwanda opened people's eyes to things that they never understood or never knew.

Yeah, it's an idealistic way of looking at things, and I think we all hope we can get there at some point, but the journalists and me, skeptical. I'll be watching nonetheless.

But hopefully, yeah, you've watched some of these things and sometimes you need that sort of, you know, one step removed from reality to accept and look at things a little bit freely. I'm certain there's plenty, there's enough in the real world, I don't need to see more of it outside. And I'm not, like I said, I'm trying to keep politics or partisanship out of what we're doing, but more relate on human characters and stories that just sort of are escapist and fun.

Well, David, thanks very much for your time and best of luck.

Thank you, David. I really appreciate it. Happy holidays.

We should say we asked Warner Brothers about the idea David brought up that creatives might be nervous to bring projects to the studio because of the uncertain ownership situation. They did not respond, but when Netflix announced the deal to buy Warner Brothers, it said it would maintain Warner's current operations and honor agreements for theatrical releases. That's all for us today. Thank you so much for listening today and all year long. We are so grateful for all of you. We have much more coming in 2026. So please stay tuned. Quick programming note, no new episode on Wednesday. We will be back with our regular show on Sunday, January 4th. Talk to you then. Happy New Year.