Community Highlights: Meet Dylan Brody of Active Voice Productions

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dylan Brody.

Hi Dylan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1986 shortly before my 22nd birthday. I had been an IMPROV regular in New York for five years so I figured I was an regular at the IMPROV out here as well and that would be a good foot in the door. Also, a guy at Paramount really dug my first screenplay and wanted to meet me about buying it for amounts that sounded astronomical to me at the time. Fifteen, sixteen thousand dollars. Enough to properly set myself up.

It turned out the two IMPROVs were owned by a divorced couple and had no reciprocal agreement about comics. I came into the comedy world of L.A. cold.

The guy at Paramount asked for a rewrite on spec and when I returned to him with the changes made, I found a custodial worker scraping the name off his office door. He had been fired for buying scripts under the table from young writers and then selling them on to his own bosses for significantly more.

There’s a happy ending on that story though! That guy went on to produce some very successful films and now lives in a huge mansion in Beverly Hills.

I lived on the roof of the Comedy Store for a while, hid inside on night’s that looked like rain until the place was locked up. Slept on a booth bench in the Belly Room — the small developmental room upstairs where I could most often steal stage time. I had so thoroughly internalized the club’s internal status structure that even as a vagabond I didn’t feel I was ready for the Main Room.

I worked road gigs, and locally produced comedy shows and theatrical engagements at the same time that I wrote spec scripts and produced non-dependent pilots and shorts. I wrote for dozens, maybe hundreds of comics. A $50 joke sale here, a bit for $500 there. Picked up freelance work on local TV series, The Byron Allen Show, Itz Fritz. What a Week!

Small publications in Dragon Magazine and the Annals of Improbable Research allowed me to maintain some faith in my talent and efforts as my terrible personality prevented me from finding strong, lasting representation.

I’ve since learned that I fall on the autism spectrum. At the time, though, not knowing my terrible personality to be neurological, I cycled in and out of depression, thinking myself tragically flawed as an individual and therefore wholly deserving of the treatment I received.

Books for gifted kids, A Tale of a Hero and the Song of Her Sword, and The Warm Hello and the ensuing letters and then e-mails from grade school children sustained my ego when my work did not entirely support my existence.

For about ten years I backed away from performance to study martial arts and focus on my literary work. An opportunity to record for radio led me to new performance approaches and renewed interest. David Sedaris invited me to open for him, putting me in front of larger audiences than I had worked outside of a few early, awful gigs opening for David Johansen in the early 80s

A shift from political stand-up comedy to long-form story-telling changed my audience and my writing. My first adult book (for grown-ups. Not porn), Laughs Last gave me a little heat, a TV hit on a morning show in Seattle, sold a small pile of copies every year for a while to a guy in NY who taught comedy and saw the novel as a how-to guide, which was my intention as I wrote it.

A play won the Stanley Drama Award in 2005 which was particularly important because it was for a play my father hadn’t liked much and it finally sunk in that my father can dislike a work and it can still have a public life. That play, Mother, May I went on to become the most profitable production ever put up by The Strand in Baltimore.

In 2014 I produced and performed three specials in one night at the David Henry Hwang Theater. After the production of smaller ‘specials’ (full cohesive story-telling solo shows) had failed to gain traction for lack of a big theater and a jib, I had a plan. One of those specials found initial licensing almost immediately ( Dylan Brody’s Driving Hollywood can now be streamed via comedy dynamic and Amazon Prime and stuff ) and having made my money back, I offered another, an anti-homophobia 37 minute hilarious diatribe to the then-burgeoning REVRY.TV ‘queerated TV’ for niche audience.

I created my company, Active Voice Productions in 2017, having realized at last that the things I create and put into the world only occasionally make sense to the mind of the profit-driven entertainment industry. My purpose lies in the intentional delivery of big ideas wrapped in elegant artistry. Art and entertainment rarely cross paths and when they do, not so much to the benefit of the artist.

Our non-dependent productions of the past few years can be found online. YOU ARE HERE: A Dylan Brody Project (now streaming at Circuitcinema.com a platform for independent film) and LockDown 2o2o ( activevoiceproductions.com/corona-film ) as well as the 32 episode web series Corona Dialogues ( corona-dialogues.com ) from which the latter film developed have all racked up awards on the indie festival-and-awards circuit.

Also, winning awards around the globe, a short documentary project that fell into our hands, Albuquerque Mosaic opened a rich new vein of story-telling possibility and has led to our current project, Convicted and Confused, a social justice documentary about the inappropriate sentencing of LeVar Sinks by a Missouri Judge. That piece may well serve as a back-door pilot for a strip show and more importantly, draws back the curtain on systemic imbalance in our justice system. It should hit the festival/awards circuit early in 2027

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The path to where I am has not been smooth, nor is it smooth now. I do not expect it to get smoother.

My company, like my individual writings and productions, grows from a desire to use my natural talents to serve humanity in an organic way. In youth I mistakenly believed that the vast platforms of the entertainment industry would allow this. For me, however, so much of the entertainment industry willingly abandons its own morals in the quest for the most eyeballs.

I do not believe we serve anyone by feeding the hypnotic sales machines more lowest-common-denominator material aimed at offending the fewest people possible and challenging nobody. I believe the arts must take risk and — for now at least — that means it must be non-dependently funded. It must take place in dark rooms and private ZOOM calls. It must appear on YouTube and in pop-up galleries and flash mobs. Remember flash mobs? That was fun.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Active Voice Productions?
Active Voice Productions follows three paths simultaneously. We produce film, video and audio suitable for mass-media distribution on a wholly independent basis. That means that our projects, generally developed internally, sometimes on a for-hire basis, fall within our guidelines for artistic merit and ethical acceptability.

We create scripts and projects for sale and production. With a library of award-winning page turners ready for purchase or license we have smart, production ready scripts in multiple genres available and take commissions from those who come to us with projects that meet our standards and pique our interest.

Finally, we support outside writers and other literary creatives in their endeavors with weekly workshops in writing and humor, weekly free-writing sessions and private coaching for the serious writer who is ready to get down to work on the difficult project or the beginner who wants to get ideas to the page.

Active Voice Productions | Liberal. Arts. Entertainments.

The most profitable participants in the Entertainment Industry love to tell a huge lie, to say that what we put on screen does not affect behavior. This allows them to justify the creation and platforming of heroes who kill indiscriminately, villains who, by virtue of appearance, may be easily identified for remorseless elimination. Sexual objectification, ethnic dehumanization, cynical glorification of the rule-breaking cop who’s vigilante justice rights the wrongs of a problematic legal system, the use of casual violence to solve interpersonal disputes all these horrible ideas and more come through in mainstream film and TV projects as their creators insist “It’s only entertainment,” and “nobody is going to take action based on what they see in a movie.” We know this is a lie. Those selfsame profiteers quote statistics on the influence their programming has on viewers when it comes time to sell product placement. We produce and support the production of materials with intentionally structured underpinnings and ethically sound messaging.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Check out https://activevoiceproductions.com and if you want to work with us, reach out! We’re not heavily gate-kept.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://activevoiceproductions.com
• Instagram: @activevoiceproductions
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ActiveVoiceProductions/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@activevoiceproductions