Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Finnegan.
Jordan, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
It was August 2001 in New York City and the heat was starting to get to me as I sat on my makeshift fire escape balcony perch smoking a Parliament and gazing at the city I love above West 4th Street and 6th Avenue.
I was 24 years old and had just finished a 12-month marathon sprint of work as a set production assistant on seven movies, including “Serendipity” and “Vanilla Sky.” I remember staring out at the city I was raised in, thinking that the “barrier” had been breached. I had figured out a way to start my career in entertainment through a fusion of blind ambition, encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, and a bone-marrow hunger to build my resume. I learned right away that working in production in New York City is not like having an entry-level job elsewhere in the private sector… yes, all young people who want to accomplish anything are expected and prepared to work their posteriors off and I was no different.
And there was not a single veteran New York crew member that I did not politely interrogate about their experiences working in New York cinema. Amongst the shooting crews, there were artists and technicians that had worked on some of the seminal films of the previous 40 years, including “The Godfather,” “The French Connection,” and “Big,” films that happened to use New York City as their sound stage. The times felt magical and I sensed deeply that the great journey of my life had begun.
Back to my perch on the fire escape, I had worked 254 days within that 12 month period and I knew there was a long road ahead of me. I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to take a month off to recharge my batteries. I was offered a staff position on the Adrian Lyne film “Unfaithful” and made a friend on the crew named Tasha. Tasha had grown up in Hermosa Beach, California and only traveled to the New York area to work on the film. It was a fortuitous time for her to offer me the hospitality of a month in her guest room so I began formulating a plan Westward. Once on the ground in Los Angeles, I felt that I was moving through the landscape drenched in cinema history. I was in a city with a great confluence of artists and I was eager to take a large step closer to the center of our business.
I asked Tasha if I could be her new tenant, leased a car with the money I had stacked up and began job-hunting. On October 6th, 2001, I began work on what would become the final John Frankenheimer film “Path To War” for HBO Films. My first LA picture. I learned quickly that hard work and ambition would only take me so far. If I was going to build a career as a producer, I would need to apprentice under great producers. In the years to come in this unpredictable sector, I had the good fortune to learn from great artists. I have apprenticed under great filmmakers like Jerry Bruckheimer and Malcolm D. Lee. I have watched Steven Spielberg, Tony Scott, Michael Bay and Curtis Hansen paint their canvas. I gave script notes to one of the writers of “Parenthood” and “A League Of Their Own”… and for some reason, he listened.
In 2013, I decided that I was ready to draw my sword and call myself a producer. All of the obstacles and mistakes would never be behind me, but I felt that I had apprenticed for a respectable period of time, worked on 30 films and believed in myself. It was time to step out of my zone of perpetual (dis)comfort and see just how far I could take my career. Eight years later, I am still testing those limits. And I still feel like I am on the great journey of my life.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
“Easy” is not the adjective that comes to mind and there are intrinsic struggles in any competitive field. Every generation believes that the younger generation has it easier than they did. My experience has been slightly different and possibly based on a naïve miscalculation of the trajectory of success from the beginning. At one point, I was reading the trades in college, familiarizing myself with the captains of our industry and constructing a plan to follow in their respected footsteps. I believed that a 360-degree view of the media business, diligence and very healthy consumption of cinema and television compounded by my own personal taste in the art would be the blueprints that I needed to find success in a business that fused creativity with commerce.
I was wrong. One of the great facets of youth is that your ambition and dreams can develop blindly without concern for the practical challenges any career may present. What I have learned (and what I would tell the 22-year old version of myself if we ever met in a Nolan-esque alternative timeline) is that ambition and desire will only get you so far. Success in the entertainment medium requires a strong and boundless knowledge of art in all forms and from all generations, the diplomacy and savoir-faire of a Statesperson, the brazenness of a gambler, a clear picture of what young people are consuming and the incalculable and most elusive component… Exceptional good luck.
The amount of times I have been lucky in my career is directly proportionate to the number of times I have been equipped with information and asked and vigilantly pursued what I wanted (whether that be a job working as a producer’s assistant or a piece of material that I cannot live without acquiring.) There have been struggles at every stage. Too numerous to mention and names would need to be changed to protect the guilty (snark snark). The revelations that accompany experience have been the most challenging.
Most notably, the discovery that crossing the fence over to the producer lawn would somehow lead to a career path with fewer obstacles. Once again, I could not have been more mistaken. I discovered that this patch of grass is more competitive, more challenging and more unjust than any previous plateau. I also quickly learned that I would not be smoking a Cohiba in my solid-gold Teton trailer while an army of skilled technicians executed my brilliant creation – the real work began when I became a producer and that there would be no ability to rest on any of the laurels I had collected thus far.
I have never experienced the pulse of adrenaline that I get when a deal closes on a new piece of material. Or the moment that a new project gets set up at a studio. The greatest exhilaration is the first time you see a piece of your work on screen and it fits together. In this moment, all the hard work and anxiety and “complex personalities” that stood in your way completely dissipate for a short period of time. Collaborations have been the highlight of the process and softened the blow of the tougher days.
Visceral Media – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
My vision for Visceral Media was to create an umbrella entity that encompassed all of the different formats of media I produce and would like to continue producing in the scripted, unscripted and short-form content worlds. The music video medium had a substantial influence on my visual adolescence and I have been a passionate music video producer for eight years and worked on 30 music videos as an assistant director ten years earlier. Music videos are literally the most free-form creativity that you can practice. To make any piece of content as quickly as music videos are constructed, find a way to make a short-form piece visually compelling and fusing those images with a great piece of music is thrilling and serves as my tangential connection to the music business.
Documentaries and docuseries content have also been a component of my business with three documentaries under my belt and a docuseries in the works. The film and television slate are constantly evolving and progress in stages. Those projects traditionally take longer to develop and package, so I am constantly advancing the slate to move projects forward while concurrently finding new material, IP and concepts from a myriad of different sources. Television is and has continued to be a booming sector and the volume of buyers is considerably higher than that of the feature film business, so scripted television has become a substantial priority for me.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Three-way Tie: Being accepted into the Directors Guild of America, being accepted into the Producers Guild of America and winning the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest for my 2018 feature documentary “When The Beat Drops.” All three events were the culmination of exceptionally hard work, a high concentration of hours and the execution of strategic goals that took years to bring into fruition.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.visceralmedia.net
- Instagram: @jordanfinnegan
Image Credit:
JBF
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