There is a quote from the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi who stuck with Dakota Johnson as she navigated the early years of running her production company: “Far from thoughts of wrong and right, there is room. I’ll meet you there.”
When asked what kinds of movies TeaTime Pictures is looking to make, Romy is who Johnson returns: “There’s no dogma. There’s no mandate. It’s not like we’re only making one kind of movie with one kind of person,” she said in a conversation moderated by Associate Features Editor Jenelle. Riley V diverse The Entertainment Marketing Summit is presented by Deloitte.
Johnson co-founded TeaTime with former Netflix development CEO Ro Donnelly in 2019 and brought in former Boat Rocker vice president Katie O’Connell as a partner in 2021. While discussing TeaTime’s goal of researching the stories it struggles to produce elsewhere, O’Connell shared a story about the business. With Zoe Lister-Jones to prepare Roku’s upcoming comedy series “Slip.”
“I said to Zoe, ‘You should do something fun and cool. The new ‘Sex and the City’ just came out – write something younger! ‘ O’Connell said. ‘Zoe was like, ‘I’ [already] I wrote it. I wrote seven episodes. But I put it everywhere. Nobody wants that. “
The series revolves around a thirty-year-old woman who is concerned about her marriage although it is going well, and she travels through parallel universes as she tries to find herself. O’Connell was forced out on the spot, so TeaTime worked to pitch the show to the remaining distributors who didn’t know about it yet. Now, “Slip” is the first TeaTime series to enter production.
“The people that studios are afraid to make films with because they are too honest, or too bold, or too real, these are the people who [want to work with]Johnson added. “We are very protective of the soul of the artist’s project. I feel like there should be a cemetery shelf where all the great scripts go. It happens all the time – I read scripts and say, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read,’ and then it was never made.”
Johnson says part of the reason she launched TeaTime is that with so many movies she’s starred in, she can’t watch them until others do. As a result, she is still developing her confidence as a producer.
“There is something very broken about it. This is not my whole process as an artist,” she said. “I wanted to be in the editing sessions. I wanted to take part in the result, in the coloring. ”
“A lot of my vision of TeaTime is very emotional. It comes from my heart. I don’t have the relationships that Katie has built throughout her career. I can’t call a studio head and say, ‘You should buy my show,’ but she can!”
“Yes, you can,” O’Connell laughed. “She can 100%, and she should. We will sell more shows.”
“Okay I will! I’ll call Gene Salk today!” Johnson said, referring to the head of Amazon Studios. She is also thinking of getting the director’s chair.
“There’s a text from a writer that is one of those things that we would have taken out and brought up,” O’Connell said. “But she felt the most wonderful way to do it, and the most resonant way, was to just photograph it. We were sitting around this table in her house talking about, ‘You’ve got to direct it!'”
“The idea of someone else directing her, I got so jealous,” Johnson said.
Next, TeaTime’s Sundance 2022 feature ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ in partnership with PictureStart and Endeavor content will premiere on Apple TV+ on June 17. Watch the trailer below.
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