Cinema 101 - Roma Hollywood's debut

Ramping up -

Ciao everybody. Happy Monday. I hope this email finds you well and enjoying life; something that is easier to do these days if you watch as little national news as possible, perhaps.

As you may or may not know from this blog or whatever these are called on Substack, I’m the CEO of a new film studio, Roma Hollywood Cinema Club, a company comprised of shareholders of entertainment executives from the United States, Japan, and Italy. Our stealth-mode entity has only one mission, and that is to finance and produce English-language films and television series that will all (100%) be shot in Italy.

There are two important things to know about the business model.

First, the international aspect — our projects are intended for Hollywood, first and foremost, but the cast and crew are international; the more mixed the better, in fact, and that’s the way we like it. There are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say, it makes for a better experience and a better motion picture or program, in our opinion.

Second, most of our executives and production team have known one another for many years, and we’re all friends. And we have zero tolerance for film industry bullshit — that’s not something I’m saying in a blog to sound cool, it’s literally in the bylaws — called the “no asshole rule,” which was invented in 2016 by my pal, animation showrunner Jay Oliva.

Simply put, Roma Hollywood will not work with anyone who is toxic — regardless of their fame, money, or connections.

Even more simply put - we want to have fun making movies.

Accordingly, this venture has taken a lot longer to get everything and everyone in place, with countless trips to Italy and Japan.

But now, finally, we have a company and investors who are not hovering around one great script, or one actor, or a fantastic director. We have all of those elements and then some, but that is not our focus.

Our #1 focus is a CONCEPT — to work with the super smart, super nice, and produce 1-2 feature films a year in Italy. With investors who want to take part in the cinema experience with us. We’re on a different page, a different outlook, a new experience, and a different plan. And we’re not changing this approach for anyone.

The good news, we’re not a bunch of rookies stirring the soup — our executive in charge of Italian tax credits and the production budget, for example, was a major studio executive in Hollywood for 25 years. I could go on and on — we’re ready to play in the “NFL.”

As CEO of this new venture, I have a mandate to protect Roma Hollywood and its culture. Once upon a time this year, I found a dynamite script that came with a producer, and we developed it for 2 months. Once this new producer realized how much we loved his script, he changed, and suddenly, the project became exactly what we had sworn to avoid. So, I threw the producer and his script in the lake on the same day, and not one of us blinked.

24 hours later, I had another script in place, a film that we had taken the director to Roma to scout already. Somehow, the production to-do list got smaller, and the schedule accelerated. And here we are.

The lawyers will be working through the holiday weekend so we can go into financing with our debut project as soon as possible, which we will announce in the coming weeks. Here we go.

Thanks for reading

Lee Rudnicki, Esq.

Lights! Camera! Action!

Seven!