1Community CEO Scott Budnick Says the Future of the ‘Issue’ Film Is About Redefining What That Is

Scott Budnick was riding what could easily have been the height of any other producer’s career when he took a step back from Hollywood. 

As EVP of Todd Phillips’ Green Hat Films over 14 years, Budnick produced comedy juggernauts like “Old School,” “Due Date” and the record-breaking “The Hangover” trilogy, which grossed more than $1.4 billion. But he bowed out to pursue activist aspirations in judicial system and social justice reform full-time, founding the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC) in 2014 in an effort to provide assistance and stability to formerly incarcerated men and women. 

Budnick returned to Hollywood in 2018 as founder and CEO of 1Community, a mission-oriented producing and cofinancing company for film and TV that embraces the power of storytelling to drive the same reform he’s advocated for for the better part of 20 years. The idea to marry the two passions and create “entertainment with impact,” he told TheWrap, came in part thanks to Tobey Maguire. 

“I had a lunch with Tobey Maguire, and he has a philanthropic advisor named Greg Propper. We all had lunch, and Tobey said something to me, like, ‘I love what you’re doing starting ARC … I’m really inspired by it, but don’t you think the biggest tool you have in your toolbox was your ability to tell stories in film and television and market them out to millions, if not tens of millions of people?’” Budnick recalled, speaking with TheWrap for our Office With a View Q&A series. “That got my mind turning.”

Then, reflecting on the way projects like “Will & Grace,” “Glee,” “Modern Family,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Milk” paved the path for widespread acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community and moved the needle on marriage equality in the U.S., he realized that there was room for him to pursue societal change and entertainment together. 

“That, to me was, ‘OK, we have the power and the responsibility in this business to tell stories that can create a lot of empathy in someone’s heart where it didn’t exist before,’” Budnick said.

Most prominently, 1Community has put its weight behind “Just Mercy” (2019) and “Respect” (2021), with the heartwarming “Nonnas” and Sundance’s Reality Winner criminal justice dramedy “Winner” later this year. 

Elsewhere, Budnick has helped steer Kim Kardashian’s prison reform efforts and recently appeared on “The Kardashians” Season 5, where they took cameras into Valley State Prison for the first time. 

“In terms of that platform, I think these issues are talked about a lot on news programs [like] ‘Dateline’ and ’60 Minutes’ – more news-oriented programs that an older, probably more targeted audience watches,” Budnick said of his continued relationship with Kardashian. “To be able to expose these issues to the biggest show on Hulu, whose demographic is much, much younger and much, much more female … It’s a game changer. And she can charge a lot of money to post on her Instagram story, but when it’s righteous, she does it for free. She does it because she cares.”

In his Office With a View interview below, Budnick told TheWrap more about 1Community’s upcoming film slate, the challenges he’s faced amid continued industry upheaval since 2018 and lessons he’s learned from other mission-minded production companies, including Participant Media, which shuttered earlier this year.  

You started fundraising for 1Community in 2015, launched in 2018. In what ways has the mission changed over the years?
COVID happened at the same time as streaming was massively on the rise. Theatrical was extinct for the time being. And soon enough, the buying spree ended and everyone tightened their belt straps. It’s been a very, very quiet two years in terms of buying and in terms of the marketplace, so we’ve doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down on investing in film that was being made independently.

So “Nonnas,” which we just made, that I’m so unbelievably proud of, was financed by us; Fifth Season, which was formerly Endeavor Content; and Gigi Pritzker and Madison Wells. It’s a big, four-quadrant family movie that’s about food and love and family that basically lifts up our mothers and our grandmothers — that everyone on the planet can relate to, thematically.

That really has become our new business model, of financing films with big filmmakers like Stephen Chbosky, and really focusing on genre and entertainment, not getting stuck in heavy dramas and things that feel more academic or medicinal or vegetable-y. I think our definition of what an “impact film” is is going to be much wider than what Participant liked to define what an impact film is. And I think Participant in the end was coming around to understanding like, entertain first and then bury in those messages, right? So I think that’s really our focus now. 

Then you have something like “Winner” that at least at face value feels a little more explicitly aligned with the prison reform and social justice activism that you’ve done in the past. So are you hoping to kind of pocket those passion projects with a four-quadrant family movie like “Nonnas”?
What interested me about “Winner” was it was a serious issue — which is, you know, threats to our democracy — but told as a coming-of-age comedy. Who would ever think you would have a film that is thematically all about protecting our democracy, but told by Susanna Fogel, the writer of “Booksmart” who had shown herself to have incredible directing chops and who wrote a script that was like, laugh-out-loud, funny and unbelievably smart.

So to me, it wasn’t like doing an “issue” film, straight down the middle as a drama. It’s a very funny movie. That is still something that I think we would finance again. We’re kind of subverting the way of telling that story. 

Those are the films that we want to be financing. More comedies, more horror, more thriller, more coming-of-age. Like, just figuring out how to get to these important issues through ways that are purely entertaining.

The issues are absorbed just through the viewing experience. It’s not an “issue” movie. 
Nailed it. 

You mentioned Participant Media – what lessons do you draw when it comes to similarly minded “mission” companies regarding the bottom line? It sounds like you’re expanding the genres that you’re exploring. But are there takeaways or lessons learned from the successes and failures elsewhere?
I would say this: if you go back, Participant was a huge reason I started 1Community. I was blown away by what they were doing — and I thought Jonathan King, who was running film at that time, Diane Weyermann, who was running docs — I thought they were absolute geniuses at what they did. And I just knew we needed more of that.

Now, as I look at the landscape, Gigi Pritzker and Madison Wells and these sorts of companies that have similar ethos, we need all the partners we can get, right? I feel like this is something we all need to be in together. 

The bottom line is the bottom line, right? My investors invested in this company for two reasons and wanting two things: One is to make a return on their money. The other is to make massive impact.

And let me tell you, the investors that came into my company were not like new money, young kids that wanted their next Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. They were older billionaires that did a deep-dive of diligence on the company and believed that this is a business that if you’re disciplined on your budgeting, if you’re disciplined on your producing, that you could actually make money.

So Fifth Season; Steve Ballmer, who owns the Clippers; Wes Edens, who owns the Milwaukee Bucks; Barry Sternlicht, who started Starwood; Stewart Butterfield, who started Slack and has now sold it to Salesforce; Michael Rubin, who owned the 76ers – the bottom line is the bottom line, they want to make money. But so many of them have signed the Giving Pledge. So many of them see themselves and see their wealth as wanting to make an impact in the world. Making a massive impact through these films is equally important. Not more important, not less important. Both are equally important. 

So that’s my job as CEO: I have to create a return for them. And I have to green-light the films that can do financially well and also make the most impact around all the different issues that we care about as a company.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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