EP08 – Caught Between Torment and Anguish with John Sloss

06.12.2025 - Season: 1 Episode 8

Taking it back to the indie film boom of the 90s with super-sales-agent John Sloss of Cinetic Media. Walking through the tree-filled Zilker neighborhood in an escape from SXSW, John shares his career journey from a life-changing pickup basketball game with John Sayles to longtime associations with film legends like Richard Linklater, John Pierson and Errol Morris. Ben & Keith eat up the stories of John’s early days, but it’s his unique perspective on the current state of the doc marketplace that makes John Sloss a real ‘get’ for Doc Walks.

00:00 Introduction and Setting the Scene

00:32 Meeting John Sloss

01:12 A Walk Through Zilker

02:15 Career Highlights and Insights

13:54 The State of the Documentary Market

17:25 Wrapping Up and Future Episodes

Keith, who are we about to talk with today?

We've broken free of downtown Austin, which is very nice, and the town has

been invaded by a hundred thousand film fans and mostly interactive tech

nerds and all kinds of other people.

So it's an exciting time in Austin, but it's also a crowded time in Austin.

So I'm excited to break out of the main hubbub into one of my favorite

neighborhoods, Zilker and Barton Hills.

And meet up with one of those 100,000 people that came to town, but one

that, that means a lot to me, has meant a lot to my career, and I

think it will have a lot to say.

And that's super Sales agent John Sloss.

From Cinetic That's right.

And I have been shouting at parties for the last three days to some of

those a hundred thousand people.

So my voice is in tatters still.

So I'm gonna let Keith do a lot of the talking in this episode,

which is great because you and John have a history and our friends.

So it seems apropos.

And knowing John, I'm pretty sure he's gonna do most of the

talking, and that is just right.

He is the salesman after all

on your left.

You're listening to Dock Walks with Ben and Keith.

Alright.

We are over in the beautiful Zilker neighborhood of Austin

where we are surrounded by what has recently described as.

Trees of torment, what did you call them, John?

Um, anguish, possibly.

Anguish laden live oaks.

Yes.

So our guest today is none other than icon Torts.

Good though.

Oh yeah.

Torment.

Torment might be more appropriate.

Okay.

It's like the documentary world.

That's right.

There you go.

Caught between torment and anguish.

Well, that's the name of the episode.

There we go.

So here we are today, walking down the street here in Austin, Texas.

With Icon, living legend, trailblazer, icon of classed.

Proud father, proud dad who's just telling us about his kids, both his

biological and all the many films that he's helped put out into the world.

Please welcome John SLOs.

Hello to Doc Walks.

Hello John.

Thank you so much for doing this.

That is

heat.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, we have a beautiful morning here as Crisp, crisp Spring Morning.

So tell us what you're doing here in town.

You know, I'm very closely aligned with Richard Linkletter and I've

often said that if I could do my job from Austin, I would live here.

And I took the opportunity for the first time in my career last year

to on ground produce two movies.

And they were both Linkletter films.

We shot one in Paris and one in Dublin.

And there's a lot of work to do on those.

So I'm spending time with him.

We're also selling five films.

Here at South by Southwest, I would argue most notable among them is a

film called The Age of Disclosure, which is a controversial film, I

would say that makes the case that we are not alone in the universe.

I. Wow.

Okay, so this is the UFO doc I've been reading about.

Yes.

Well, lets,

we'll come back to that.

Okay.

So you have five films here and I for a long time, Doc Walks listeners,

you're gonna have to go all the way back to episode two to remember our

conversation about what is a sales agent.

And so.

Who was on that?

I hope it wasn't Josh Braun.

Josh.

Josh is a hard get John.

I'm like, is he really?

Oh, I didn't ask.

Oh no, I didn't ask him.

I not yet.

No, don't tell him that.

Yeah, no, don't wait till the end.

Wait till the end for the insult.

I know.

Like a

chump.

We usually have a lightning round of insults at the end of the podcast.

Um, got it.

No, we were, you're explaining it's just me and Ben wandering the streets

of Park City talking about all the different elements of a festival for.

It for people.

And we were talking about what makes a sales agent in the role of a sales agent.

And so for people listening, that great intro of John SLOs is, as far as I can

tell, the primary, the most heralded sales agent in independent film history.

He is the leader of the team at Cinetic Media.

Cinetic, yeah.

Media.

Genetic media.

Cinetic

How would you simply explain what it is that you do?

I would say.

There are people who have a vision and are storytellers and,

you know, create that vision.

I'm a person who facilitates those people.

Um, I've always said until I have sufficient passion to tell a story

myself, the best use for me is to facilitate people who have that passion.

And John has been representing.

Independent filmmakers, including myself, Richard Linklater, Kevin

Smith for many years, and I wanted to go back, if you didn't mind, to

the very beginning, the origin story.

Ah, I'd be happy to talk about that.

How far back do we want to go

at least to John Sayles?

Ha.

Okay, so I went to college at a time before VHS.

When you saw repertory films.

Films from film history in an auditorium on a film society.

I went to the University of Michigan, which had a lot of film societies and

I got turned on to film very quickly.

And I'd say I saw at least one film a day for four years.

Wow.

And that kind of filled in the gaps I had in my filled history.

At the same time, I'm from a family of salespeople and that's

a lot of fun and exciting.

But it's a harrowing existence.

And I thought, huh, I need a skilled trade to fall back on, and

I'm not very good with my hands.

So I decided to go to law school.

So having fallen in love with film, having become a lawyer, I said, okay, I'm

gonna go to New York, not Los Angeles.

And.

Try to figure out how to be an entertainment lawyer that wasn't apparent.

So I took a job on Wall Street and I was a corporate lawyer for three

years, and then got the lay of the land, and then I sent my resume out

and became an entertainment lawyer.

I realized very quickly upon becoming an entertainment lawyer

that you eat what you kill.

Especially in New York, it's not like the Hollywood system where

being an entertainment lawyer is like shooting fish in a barrel.

You really have to scratch and claw.

And at that point I was playing a lot of pickup basketball and I got

in a pickup basketball game with a guy named John Sayles who many

of your viewers may not even know.

That's a shame.

Which is kind of amazing.

Yeah, it's kind of amazing.

'cause he is a very, he's a legend.

He an icon.

He's a legend.

And he was the Paul Thomas Anderson of his day.

He was at the birth of independent film.

He was the icon.

And where in his career does your basketball intersect?

He had just made eight men out, I think.

Okay, awesome.

And brother from another planet?

I wasn't on those.

The first one I was on was Matewan, where you can see me in

the background in West Virginia.

In a, in the church scene yelling, praise Jesus

with Will Oldham, one of my favorite musicians.

There we go.

Chased off the pulpit by John Sales in that scene.

I'm right behind Mary McDonald, I think over her right shoulder,

and then I went to him.

After that film, and I said, I negotiate all day with financiers and

distributors, and I don't see why it isn't better for me to go and try and

raise the money for your films than for you because you don't like doing that.

You'd rather just focus on producing films.

And I had observed this sort of inefficiency that the producers who

were getting films financed were the ones who were good at raising finance.

Not good at necessarily developing material or finding the right

filmmakers to align with.

John Sayles.

And Maggie Renzi, his producer, said, we would love to not have to

go out and raise money for our film.

So feel free to go out and try to do that.

And I did.

And that was the film City of Hope, and we raise the money for that.

Then when it was done, we had to sell it.

And I said, oh, I have a affinity towards sales.

Why don't we take it to a film festival and I'll be the

point person on selling it.

So I started doing stuff like that.

That wasn't strictly the practice of law.

And so that was the birth of Cinetic,

that was the birth of, and what did you like?

Was there a moment in there as you were transitioning?

From entertainment attorney to, were you an executive producer or a producer?

I was an executive producer.

Executive producer.

Yeah.

I said, it's funny because at that point, this is a true story.

At that point, I was a partner in a huge law firm because I'd become

an entertainment lawyer, and then a big San Francisco law firm came

and bought my entertainment law firm to be its New York office.

And so I was a partner in a firm that had Bank of America and Fujitsu

as clients, and I had said to them.

Because I had said to John Sayles and Maggie Renzi I'd like to get

an executive producer credit.

'cause I want to advertise to the industry that I'm willing to do more

than the average entertainment lawyer and maybe attract clients by doing that.

They said, sure, of course.

And I still practice law, but I do have this other area of focus.

We have a law firm at one end, but we also have a finance group.

We have a sales group.

We do whatever we can.

To help movies get made and out into the world.

And now you've gotten into management.

You've always been deeply involved in your clients' careers and it seems like

a natural extension, but I don't think it was legitimized as a vertical for you.

It's a branding thing because I've always felt that I just, by my nature,

was the sort of most significant person in each of my client's

life, which is odd for a lawyer.

Yeah.

So I said, really, I'm a manager.

And so those early days right there, you're in the hustle and bustle of

figuring things out on your own in New York, and you look around at

the landscape and Sayles, like you said, is a godfather of the modern

indie movement, but he wasn't alone.

Who else did you see out there and how did you connect?

Well, the, the most valuable apart, arguably from sales, the most valuable

relationship of my early career was with a current Austinite John Pearson.

Another Titan of the history of independent film who many

people don't know about.

When he was a producer's representative, he isn't trained as a lawyer.

He didn't, he would, might dispute this, but he really

didn't like negotiating deals.

He liked picking filmmakers and taking films to festivals

and getting people interested.

And I became buddies with him and he's the one who introduced me to Linklater.

He's the one who introduced me to Kevin Smith.

And he was an interesting guy who would discover all these filmmakers, Michael

Moore, Spike Lee, people like that.

And he would take their films and start their career and he would

not necessarily clinging onto them, which is very unusual and selfless.

And Errol Morris too, wasn't

he involved in The Thin Blue Line?

I actually, I actually worked with Earl Morris before he did.

I was the lawyer on thin blue Line.

Oddly enough.

And we should stop here and say we are going straight up a very steep hill,

which is why we are all open wheezing.

Coffee wheezing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Gasping for breath here.

Yes.

You,

we all drew my paces.

That's right.

We're getting our steps in moving the blood.

So that's the origin story.

John came up at, at a moment in time where he saw an opportunity and seized it.

I think I was in the right place at the right time.

And so what's, what have you seen?

What, what, what's the big difference between.

The indie boom of the nineties, the turn into the digital age in the two thousands.

Here's what I will say.

I was at a think tank a few years ago and they all went around the room and everyone

talked about their vision for the future and what their new company was gonna do

and all these tech people and Phil people.

And it got to me and I said, of everyone in this room, I think

I'm the closest to the creators.

And more and more I'm liking that position, which is to say.

That the way films are consumed, whoever's financing them, that all changes.

But the people creating the storytelling, as long as they're protected by copyright,

they're really the scarce resource.

So that hasn't really changed.

Obviously the buyers and the landscape on how content is

consumed has changed radically.

And how are you keeping up with that?

How Cinetic

By pivoted.

Yeah, by being agile, which is what we are.

Okay.

I'm excited about.

People who were in the shoes that Ben and I were in 15 years ago, 10 years ago,

at the start of their career, maybe on the working on their first feature or

their third short or something like that.

And people always say, oh, you gotta have a sales agent.

You gotta have a sales agent if you get into a festival or to get into a festival.

How does somebody engage with Cinetic Media?

Well, that they don't have agencies.

They don't have managers.

They're an independent voice.

You don't, you, you haven't heard of them yet, but they've been making.

They're the next Charlie Shackleton or the next Dan Farah, the next Ben Steinbauer

Thank you for that.

Yeah.

I wish the, I wish more of them existed, but the agencies are so good at ferreting

out these people early on and trying to grab them that there aren't that

many of them, to be perfectly honest.

Dan Farah, for instance, the guy.

Who directed the, uh, the Age of Disclosure?

He was talking to one of our management clients, David Gordon Green, and just

talking about his film, and David said, oh, you should talk to Cinetic.

And I get a call from this guy and he, and he says, I've got

this film, David's recommended.

I want to come to New York and show it to you.

And he came to New York.

We screened his film and we talked to him and he hired us to represent her.

It was as simple as that.

It was in a vacuum.

There was no other, no competition.

There was no festival.

And then together we created a festival plan and we thought this is a film that

would be perfect to screen in Austin.

You, you've answered this a little bit already, but what do you think the state

of the modern documentary marketplace

is?

I mean, it's complicated because.

When I press the buyers, I say, this market is tougher

than it was a couple years ago.

Is that because fewer people are consuming documentaries and none of them say yes?

They say no.

It's as great a value in relation to cost as in terms of eyeballs, as

anything we do apart from Netflix and to a certain extent, HBO, it

hasn't been a very active market.

We're trying to understand.

Apple is its own thing and we love Molly, and some of it is that

there's more and more commissions.

The other is that, I don't know, it's just a general reluctance.

It does docs even when they're successful in relation to price.

Don't move the needle at these streamers, and so they don't prioritize them,

but it's so we're doing everything we can to get everybody back in the game.

Yeah.

I mean, even when there's something like a Will and Harper, for example,

that is, does very well commercially.

Yeah.

For something like Netflix that has celebrity, that's

about a hot button issue.

Right.

Gets uh, um, not on the shortlist nomination, but gets it, did

get a shortlist.

Oh, it did.

It didn't get nominated, but it was on the short list.

The other film I sold at Sundance last year, Superman, about Christopher

Reeves did not get on the short list.

Ah, okay.

Gotcha.

But like even a film like that, you, you're saying Netflix doesn't

necessarily look at as being a, a priority or a money maker.

mean, Netflix still does, uh, it's really more the others.

I see.

It's more Amazon, uh, Amazon needs.

There's no reason why Amazon shouldn't be a more active doc buyer.

We're kind of scratching our head about that.

I mean, they did pay $40 million for Melania Trump.

Uh, so I guess that makes 'em an active doc bar, but that's

another matter altogether.

Yeah.

We should maybe stay away from that one.

Right.

So John, what do you have as far as your view of the world?

Again, focus on emerging filmmakers who are developing something,

who are out actively trying to pursue independent equity.

Weighing the option of going straight to a streamer.

Trying to turn a development process into a commission process or staying

kind of the indie route, which will lead them closer to what you're known for.

Do you have thoughts on that to share?

Yeah.

The real imperiled sector is the discovery scripted sector because

however, stress the doc market is the scripted market, the streamers do not

come to Sundance looking for discoveries.

There are the neons and the A24s of the world.

Who still do and need, because those firms need the ethical release in

order to really make a impo impact.

So by comparison, documentaries are in better shape and they're probably

a better equity investment in general.

They're still not up where they used to be or where I think they should be.

But I would not discourage people who are interested in being in the industry

and understand the inherent risks from putting equity in documentaries,

especially if they're sort of.

Political documentaries are challenged at this point.

We have a documentary coming up for sale soon about E Jean Carroll.

Oh yeah.

The woman who got an $84 million judgment against Donald Trump.

I'll be very interested to see.

It's an extremely good film.

I'll be very interested to see what the buyers think of that.

We're getting close here to the end of our walk.

You only have a few hours left in festival.

Land yourself before you.

Jet back that off?

Yeah.

New York.

What are you excited to kind of wrap out the festival with?

Margaret Brown has her yogurt shop murders episodic screening at noon.

I'm excited about that, and Rick's gonna do a talk with her afterwards.

I'm doing a panel this afternoon about production in Ireland of all

things, and we have Carl Lewis film, which premiered earlier in the week.

We have Selena, which we're selling outta Sundance.

There's a Mark Maron dock that premieres tomorrow.

Uh, we're selling that.

And so anyway, I'm ex, I'm excited.

Obviously I love Austin.

I love South by and I love film, so what's not to be excited.

Yeah, that's great.

To wrap up, what would be your advice to a an up and coming,

just starting documentarian?

I think you need, it's a commercial art form.

You can't.

It create stories in a bubble.

You have to pay some attention to what people are willing to consume,

and you have to scale your film accordingly to that audience.

And if you're gonna make something on spec, then you need to probably find a

sales agent and align with them earlier as early in the process as practicable.

Yeah,

that's great.

I love that, John.

This was a treat.

Yep.

Thank you.

Okay,

Ben, we appreciate you.

Yes, Keith as ever, yeah,

we'll be bumping into you at Margaret's screening as well.

Okay, good.

Um, and I can't wait to see age of disclosure and

I can't wait for you to see it.

You've gotta tell me exactly what you think.

Yeah, I'll do it for sure.

Alright, thanks guys.

Thanks guys.

Excellent.

Thanks again.

So that was John Sloss,

that's our friend, John Sloss.

That was a great, um, walk through Zilker and just talking about.

You know, I loved hearing the origin story of how John got started, but

I think maybe even more important is getting his view of the landscape right

now, because he's got a unique view.

That, you know, I think people would pay to get into a room to hear his advice.

Oh, absolutely.

And him coming up with Linklater and, uh, John Pearson and, I mean, those guys

are godfathers of indie cinema, so I feel very lucky that we got to talk to John.

And, uh, let's see, next week we have an episode of just the Two of Us.

Well, that is what's happening next week, but this week.

We put out a bonus episode.

I don't think we've ever done that before.

How could

I forget?

Um, so that's a, uh, another one of these, south by Southwest.

Uh.

Peaks into the community here in Austin.

Uh, join Ben and I at, uh, the episode's called The Watering Hole.

It's at the AFS party during South by, and we talked to basically all our friends.

Yeah.

Austin Film Society showed up and, uh, and we were there.

I. To kind of catch them

wearing headphones and all looking like total dweebs with

our friends, making fun of us.

But we recorded it just for you guys.

We hope you like it.

And, uh,

y'all check out, uh, that bonus episode at the Watering Hole

with the Austin Film Society and next week as Ben was alluding to.

It's just the two of us.

Once again,

like the song, we go on a walk, we talk about spring being in the air,

and I think we get into new formats and the, uh, the overall landscape

that we're seeing for, uh, the documentary film community Right now,

not surprisingly, Ben has different ideas than I have about the future of our

industry, but we chat about what's coming, who we are, and how we're gonna fit in.

Maybe you'll find your way to fit in in, uh, next week's

episode, I think it's called.

Spring is in the air.

Oh, look at that.

It's very poetic.

I'm proud of us.

Thanks for sticking around.

We'll catch you next time On Doc Walks.

Doc Walks is produced, created, hosted, edited by Keith and Ben.

That's Ben Steinbauer of the Bear, and Keith Maitland

of Go Valley.

With help from our, uh, theme music composer, uh, San Billen of Primary Color

Music, and we have a little VFX help

from Go Valley intern Josh Allen and editorial help from Juliana

Rios, who's doing a great job.

Yeah, that's right.

You're doing great, Julie.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Appreciate y'all.

See you next time.