What and who is onscreen is important.
We're all coming to appreciate that more and more,
especially given everything we've witnessed
in the past couple of years.
But what's just as crucial, maybe more crucial
in the long run, is who's behind the camera,
and even more crucial than that, who has the money.
And that's where Charles D. King comes in.
This good business that we're building
is absolutely gonna make the world better.
The stories are being told about a community that are
actually from a community instead of a lens of being told
from someone else.
Though King isn't exactly a household name,
few people in the entertainment industry have more influence
on what gets made, watched and talked about.
Black and other minority artists
have claimed a growing share of mainstream power
and recognition over the past couple of decades.
King has often been there behind the scenes,
making the right deals, empowering fresh talent
and ultimately, starting his own company centered
on creators of color.
Charles is always like a voice
that reminds me to look at things
from a 10,000-foot view,
where do you wanna be in five years, 10 years?
And he automatically has our ear and our trust.
He's been very, very instrumental in my life.
I visited Charles at his home in Beverly Hills.
I wanted to find out how he made his way
from sorting mail at a talent agency
to reshaping the landscape of entertainment.
So let's start at the beginning if we can.
Decatur, Georgia, the childhood,
we're going all the way back.
Look, I was born in Harlem, and then my family moved south
when I was four.
But then we landed in Atlanta in the suburbs, Decatur.
It was a nice, middle-class neighborhood,
and it was great.
I mean, I grew up playing soccer and tennis,
and my father's a pediatrician,
and I saw him build this thriving practice
and have his own own business during that time.
King went to college at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville, lured by a generous scholarship.
The Tennessee capital is, of course, a city of entertainers.
The young King was drawn
to the business side of the industry,
but he was also inspired by a television show
whose casting foreshadowed his own work,
changing who was on the screen.
This show that I used to watch
with my mother back in high school called "LA Law,"
this light bulb went off in my head.
This character played by Blair Underwood, this charismatic,
intelligent African-American man,
and I was like, "Oh, that Blair Underwood character,
that could be really cool when I go to law school."
My life experiences growing up as a young black man
in our country, seeing some challenges and issues
that we're dealing with, there were some experiences I had
during that time that also had an interest for me
in civil rights.
And so I thought, "Lemme go to Howard Law."
And yet, you probably could have,
you could have been Blair Underwood
or the Blair Underwood character in many ways
and gone to work for a big law firm
and sort of taken that path.
It was clear for me too
that that wasn't the path for me.
The summer after my second year,
I got a clerkship at MTV, and one of the lawyers
that I worked with there said, "Hey, Charles,
I think you would make a really good lawyer,
but you'd make a great agent."
And I had no idea about the agency world,
and I learned about all these moguls in the industry,
David Geffen and Barry Diller.
Mike Ovitz had just come out of CAA
and had this incredible gig at Disney that didn't work,
and his one-year payout was 95 million.
So I was like, "Wait a minute, this agency world,"
and I thought that actually could be a good fit for me.
So King headed west, as so many have,
in search of the future in Hollywood
with his then girlfriend and now wife, Stacey.
And also like many before and after him,
fame and fortune were not immediately forthcoming.
So this is where it started.
This is where I started when I came to L.A.
I said, "Lemme start at the oldest entertainment business
in the industry," and at the time,
it's the William Morris agency
and that legendary agent trainee program,
and they were located right here in this building.
I mean, you are at that point,
incredibly well-credentialed academically,
and the way that the world worked
and it probably still works to some extent
is you gotta go work in the mail room.
Yes.
I mean, what does that feel like at that moment?
It was tough.
It was very challenging financially,
90 hours a week for very little pay.
I had $100,000 in student loans.
I had to defer them.
There's a big reason why, particularly at that time,
there were not many people
from diverse backgrounds in there.
One, it's hard to get in,
but two, financially, it's challenging to afford it.
There were no African-American trainees when I started.
There were a few assistants throughout the building.
Let's say if there were two or 300 assistants,
maybe there were two.
Wow.
But it was no different at any of the other agencies.
That was just what the shape of the town was.
The analogy I used to use
of what it was like coming up through the ranks,
it's like working on the floor of the stock exchange,
ticker tape and people yelling and screaming,
rolling phone calls, and you got four or five lines going,
working with and representing at times,
I mean, up to maybe like 100 artists.
So frankly, the threshold
of pain of literally constantly putting out fires
and solving a problem, I can't think
of a better training ground for what I'm doing now.
King didn't stay in the mail room for long,
quickly working his way up to assistant,
then junior agent, just as many had before.
Where he went off-script, as it were,
was with his client list.
Whether it was packaging the hit movie "Barbershop"
or repping Andre 3000 and DMX,
King was becoming a kingmaker for black culture.
I would share all of the statistics and articles
about the shifting demographics and where we're going
and that hip hop culture is youth culture,
and youth culture is pop culture,
and everything is going in that direction,
and these are the demographics that are growing
and that the same thing is gonna happen
in film and television.
That point of view started to look pretty prescient
in 2005 when a couple of Charles's film clients
hit the big time.
After talking about Tyler Perry for years in meetings,
inviting people out to see his plays,
we'd packaged his first movie, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman"
and set up this unprecedented deal for him at Lionsgate
to co-finance and own the movie.
And that small film was a massive hit.
It may like 50 million at box office,
and it sold, I dunno, a ridiculous amount of DVDs,
and it became the cornerstone foundation
of this incredible business that Tyler has built.
And so that happened in 2005.
Craig Brewer was a young filmmaker
that I started representing about a month before Sundance
that year, and he had this movie called "Hustle and Flow."
Feel that.
♪ You know it's hard out here for a pimp ♪
"Hustle and Flow" went to Sundance,
and that film, made for 3 1/2 million,
became the biggest sale at Sundance that year.
And then a few months after that,
we started representing Terrence Howard who got nominated
for an Academy Award later on that year.
And yeah, so I went from regular agent in 2000
to the senior vice president by 2008
who was running our big motion picture meetings.
As you climb the ladder, this is a good business.
It is. Absolutely.
And you're representing some
of the biggest names in the world,
and yet, you say, "Yeah, but I wanna do this other thing."
When I went into the mail room, it was with a vision
of a 10-year plan to one day be at the helm
of my own diversified entertainment and media company.
I definitely knew okay, this vision that I have,
this is now the time for me to begin
to put the pieces in place.
King left his job to start Macro in 2015.
He was determined not only to create
a flourishing entertainment business,
but to fulfill a social mission, as well,
centered around a radically
and historically underserved community
of creators and audiences.
Over time, we created this thing called the Macro Rubric,
and there's six key points that we look for.
At the center of every one of the projects,
people of color must be at the center of it,
either the lead, co-lead, the driving through-line,
and people of color on a broad sense,
African-American, Latinx, Asian,
the wide different demographic that I call the new majority.
And so we choose projects, one, have people of color
at the center of them, projects that have a level
of excellence of storytelling.
And the other thing we of course look for,
I mean, all of the years experience,
is we're looking at what
is the business opportunity for them.
We're gonna take some calculated risk,
but here's where the upside opportunity is for it.
His stature within entertainment, the client list alone,
would seem to make starting Macro
a fairly low risk proposition.
It wasn't.
He and his wife, Stacey, self-funded for six months
while investor after investor passed.
It's not a slam dunk when you go out to pitch it to people.
Not at all.
Were you surprised?
It was harrowing.
When I made the leap,
I knew that there were gonna be some roadblocks
and there might be some challenges,
but that if anyone had the credentials and the background
to do it, that I stood about as strong a shot
as anyone ever would up to that point.
How come you ain't never liked me?
Like you?
Who the hell said I got to like you?
Macro's momentum really picked up
when they co-financed the movie "Fences" in 2016.
Starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis,
the adaptation of the August Wilson play helped define
what Macro would be at its core,
combining star power, artistic seriousness,
and commercial potential.
And the Oscar goes to Viola Davis.
But Macro's projects,
with their largely Black-centric stories and creators,
would continue to run into challenges in the marketplace.
One striking example would be their highly acclaimed
gothic Southern drama, "Mudbound" in 2017.
If we could look at the laptop.
Yes.
I want you to watch what one of your pals said
about a very specific movie.
Let's check it out.
The pal in question:
Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix. Nice friend to have.
Our first deal really we did together was "Mudbound."
I was in Park City the last couple of days of Sundance.
"Mudbound" had not sold yet.
My team I think had taken a pass on it early,
and Charles called me up and said,
"Ted, I know that you would get it.
Would you please do me a favor and see the movie?"
And I said, "Look, there's not even a screening, Charles.
I can't even screen in anymore."
And he goes, "No, I'll get it to you,"
and brought over a screener for "Mudbound."
I was able to watch it, and the next morning,
I was at the breakfast table with Dee Rees
making the deal for "Mudbound,"
and it did very well for us.
We were very, very proud of that work.
And you think about that little act
of Charles knowing to call me and him being right about it,
which he always is,
and "Mudbound" became the first Netflix original movie
to be nominated for an Academy Award.
So that's a pretty good endorsement.
Tell me that story from your perspective.
It's a very, very real story.
We knew we had a great film,
and where we were with the offers
from the other distributors was crickets.
Things weren't looking good.
And Ted, I just called them up and said, "Hey, Ted, look,
I don't reach out to you on a lotta things,
but I think this is one that will resonate with you."
And then the rest was history.
But the other thing that that movies showed
when they did share the data with us,
that movie was seen all around the world.
At one point, I know it was 25 million hours
of the film were viewed on their platform,
and they showed us a quick map of it.
It was global.
That notion that certain content does not travel,
this is a story about a friendship
between a young African-American and a young white guy,
shared connectivity, two veterans coming back from war,
two families, black and white,
just trying to live their lives, right?
Just basic universal themes,
and wanting better for their families,
and this notion that these stories can't travel,
it was shown on that platform,
on that global platform, it's just not true.
Macro stayed true to the principle
of having people of color
at the center of the creative process,
and the work varies widely in subject and tone.
Soon after "Mudbound" came "Sorry to Bother You,"
a darkly comedic, at times fantastical movie
set in an alternative present day Oakland.
King was also setting in motion series like "Gentified."
That's about a trio of Latinx cousins
who save their grandfather's taco shop,
and it's currently in its second season on Netflix.
All of that success set up
what would become Macro's defining project to date,
"Judas and the Black Messiah."
"Black Panther" director, Ryan Coogler identified "Judas"
as the project he wanted to produce after that blockbuster,
and teamed up with director Shaka King
to tell the true story of a radical leader
who was brought down by the FBI.
Without even thinking about it,
it was one of the easiest decisions that I had ever made.
It was just like, "Yo, we gotta take this to Charles."
It's gotta be a MACRO project
so that we can walk into studios,
once we have a solid script, we can walk into studios
with half the funding,
You know what I'm saying?
And just take some of the pressure off
'cause we know that the pressure's gonna be there
when we say, "Look, we making a period of film
about the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party.
It's gonna be a predominantly Black cast."
We wanted to come in a position of power.
You know what I mean?
And Charles was the only person we could go to for that.
This is history that people need to know,
and the only way that we can really heal as a country
is by recognizing past issues and things that have happened,
and it was something that we felt compelled to get behind.
And yes, there was a level of risk to it,
but then we also saw the upside opportunity.
And the Oscar goes to Daniel Kaluuya,
"Judas and the Black Messiah."
I'd like to thank my team, incredible support,
Charles King, man, everyone at Macro.
And how much does the Oscar nominations
and all of that sort of award buzz do
for not just the film, but candidly, for the company?
I mean, this feels like an inflection,
sort of catalytic moment for Macro.
Yes, business-wise it's absolutely, clearly
is opening up more doors.
We were already doing well.
I mean, we've had 15 Academy Award nominations
for movies we've either financed or produced,
but I'd say now, it's really gonna be about continuing
that work, but also we're gonna expand.
We're building a company that I believe,
within five to seven years from now,
will be a billion-plus, diversified entertainment
and media company.
It's safe to say something is changing in Hollywood,
from a more diverse slate of Oscar nominees
to NBC ditching the Golden Globes,
to the commercial and critical success
of movies like "Judas" and "One Night in Miami,"
not to mention the fierce anticipation
for "Black Panther" sequel, "Wakanda Forever."
People of color finally seem to be getting a seat
at the table in show business,
not just creatively, but on the business side as well.
I'd say we're getting to the place
where we're within the system.
I still don't look at myself like we're one
of the establishment or anything like that,
but I do think that by our success,
it absolutely inspired and pushed the others
who have now taken the entrepreneurial path.
And the thing about it is it's clear
that the content in this space is resonating commercially.
So many successes that we can point to over the course
of the last few years from "Hidden Figures, "Black Panther,"
"Crazy Rich Asians," everything The Rock's in
because The Rock is a brother.
He's black and Samoan, period.
Right.
So we know the value of our culture,
and now, we just need to be a part
of that value chain of ownership.
Right.
We're coming to the table to be partners
as opposed to saying please, can you make this movie?
There's a difference in that,
and that absolutely creates more opportunity
for those coming after us and, in my opinion,
creates more opportunity for everyone.