Conversations with Jonathan Pezza

Jonathan Pezza

I’ve been an LA-based independent filmmaker since 2002. Over the years, I’ve worked in many different areas of the industry, including scripted and unscripted. Most of my past work experience was as a video editor in feature film and television marketing, while I also wrote and directed my own indie projects.

I was born in Los Angeles and grew up mainly in the west San Fernando Valley until I was 15. I then moved to Rhode Island and later Boston for college before returning to LA to start working in the film industry in 2002.

I love to read, and as a fan of science fiction and world history, I sort of do research projects on the side as a hobby. In 2019, I was researching the influences that inspired my favorite directors: people like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron.

I think I read an article about how James Cameron was influenced by the Avon Newstand sci-fi paperbacks of the 1950s-1970s. Those novels were mostly reprints of serialized novels that had been released in magazines earlier, and they led me down a rabbit hole into a world of fiction I had never really known existed—the Pulps. There was this massive fiction industry that has been largely forgotten, but it was the publishing system that brought up most of the household names in science fiction. Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, and Philip K. Dick. However, these were only the authors who found success in the mainstream literary world. Thousands of largely forgotten authors contributed to the 80-plus-year lineage of pulp magazines.

As I followed the rabbit, as it were, I discovered that as much as 75% of all literary material written before 1964 was in the public domain due to the copyright laws at the time.

So that started this spark of an idea. I thought, well, if there were all these groundbreaking writers who were big influences on my favorite directors, what if I went back and started looking at this material with the goal of finding culturally resonant stories that I could adapt my own way?

At the same time, I had fallen in love with the resurgence of radio drama starting to take place in the podcast space. Shows like Limetown, Homecoming, and Blackout were really inspiring. Podcasting is a democratized, zero-barrier-of-entry form of media. If you make it and put it up, you have as much chance of finding an audience as any big studio release.

And so, Curious Matter Anthology was born. It started with me alone in the basement doing all the voices, trying to see if I could ultimately do this and make it feel cinematic. There are many podcast audio dramas out there, and most of them still feel a lot like old-school radio theater.

Coming from film and television, I thought, well, what if we could make these sound like movies? I had never worked solely in audio before but had always been a quick study with software tools, so I decided to write, direct, sound design, mix, and master the project entirely by myself. Because, well, I’m a glutton for punishment and apparently don’t like to sleep much.

The first few episodes were proof of concepts that were ultimately pretty simple. I was learning what was possible and how to get my ideas to come out of the speakers in an entertaining way. As I worked my way through the 12-episode first season, each new story became more immersive and more compelling until, by the end of season one, I had figured it out, and the episodes we were putting out sounded as epic as any studio tentpole, by utilizing emerging technologies in audio such as 3d emulated binaural sound engines. That sounds unbelievable, but the tools are just out there, and only a handful of people were using them to tell stories this way.

We adapted Philip K Dick’s Second Variety, a story believed to have been a partial inspiration for The Terminator. Then we adapted Kurt Vonnegut’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and a few other stories. The show started building a following in the podcast space because we were doing something new.

In the second season, we were picked up by a podcast network, and word started to spread through friends in the LA acting community that we were doing something kind of cool. Colin Ferguson came on board along with Tiffany Smith, and Sandeep Parikh’s company, EffinFunny, became a producing partner.

The five-part miniseries they starred in, Star Hunter, went on to festival- around the world. It’s been in 20 festivals to date and has won a slew of festival awards. In 2023, we took home the Gold Award for Best Independent Podcast in the Signal Awards, one of the larger awards organizations for podcasting.

Now, in 2024, we are about to launch our most ambitious season, season 3. It is my goal to push the boundaries of what is possible in audio storytelling.

So we are dedicating the entire season to a single story for the first time told in 16 parts (8 main episodes and eight short minisodes that go deeper into the world’s backstory.)

The Exile is a Police Thriller set on the fledgling colony of Mars 150 years in humanity’s future.

It is based on a 1953 novel called Police Your Planet by Lester del Rey, which asks if it’s possible to leave behind Earth’s legacies of oppression and corruption as we move outwards into the stars.

Tiffany Smith is back producing and starring in this season. Last summer, we ran a Kickstarter to fund the project, and we have put together one of the most amazing casts ever assembled in audio fiction. The season features Phil Lamarr, Kevin Smith, Tricia Helfer, Colin Ferguson, Todd Stashwick, Tracy Thoms, Malcolm Barrett, Eugene Byrd, Caitlin Bassett, Raymond Lee, Anjali Bhimani, Milana Vayntrub, and many more.

The Exile will begin releasing on all the podcast platforms on June 18th. It’s been a crazy journey so far that shows what can accomplished in a home studio with an idea and a ton of sweat equity.

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?

There have been a lot of obstacles. I had a pretty traumatic childhood dealing with familial mental health challenges and abuse, culminating in the loss of my mother to a violent crime in 1991 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

But it all began turning around for me when I discovered performing and media arts in High School on the East Coast. Ever since, I have been using storytelling to cope with and express myself.

It’s hard to say there were more significant obstacles than those early ones, but I think anyone who enters the entertainment industry (especially right now) will tell you it isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to do it because you can’t imagine doing anything else. If you can, that’s the thing you should probably pursue.

To that end, I have been banging on Hollywood’s door for 20-plus years. However, I have been lucky enough to support myself and my family as a video editor in the industry as I continue the marathon that is writing and filmmaking.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

Well, the bullet points are that I am a filmmaker and audio fiction podcaster with 20 years of experience in the entertainment industry. Since 2019, I have owned and operated the audio fiction label/production company Knightsville Workshop.

In addition, I have been a producer/writer/video editor on hundreds of pieces of marketing content for major studio film and TV releases, including Wednesday, Strange World, Hellboy, How to Train Your Dragon 3, Into the Spiderverse, Bumblebee, Frozen, and Frozen 2, Aladdin, Dumbo, Jojo Rabbit and many more.

My main focus, however, has been my podcast. I am the creator of Curious Matter Anthology, a multi-award-winning audio drama that adapts stories from the world’s best Sci-fi and Horror writers into fully immersive audio movies. Curious Matter Anthology was a recipient of the 2023 Signal Awards—Best Indie Podcast.

Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ has been a life saver as well an amazing resource for public domain literature. I also can’t say enough good things about the Fable and Folly podcast network, which supports independent fiction podcast creators and is a completely unique supportive community that nurtures creators.

I would also like to give a shoutout to Epidemic Sound, which has been a wonderful supporter and provider of music and sound effects for us on this journey making fiction podcasts.