Kelly Lynn Ryder - (actress/producer, Deadlock, Complex Texas, The Leader) sits down with James and BJ for a wide-ranging conversation about building a career entirely on her own terms — no reps, no fallback plan, no safety net, and apparently no Die Hard. Kelly and James have worked elbow-to-elbow producing Complex Texas and The Leader (a Heaven's Gate biopic that just got into Tribeca), and this episode is part industry masterclass, part warm roast of someone who sprinted to South Georgia at 5:36 p.m. for a last-minute Bruce Willis recast.

Key Topics

• From quantity to quality: why Kelly went from saying yes to 95% of jobs to producing her own projects — and how cultivating financing relationships became her leverage
• The Deadlock call: getting phoned by director Jared Cohon at 5:36 p.m. and driving to South Georgia overnight for a three-and-a-half-week lead role opposite Bruce Willis — while her mom read the script to her on Bluetooth
• Bruce Willis from Friends: Kelly's now-legendary confession that she knew Willis primarily as a recurring guest on Friends, not from Die Hard
• Slotherhouse: the killer-sloth Tubi movie where an American sorority house doubled for the Serbian royal palace
• The first Deadline mention: sitting at Grumpy Grizzly coffee shop in upstate New York with her grandmother when the notification hit — and sobbing into her cup
• Producing Complex Texas: first full producing credit alongside James, including James knocking himself out cold taking a baseball bat to the head (one take, one piece of sugar glass, one dented car)
• Kevin Dillon on set: powering through illness for every take, running lines with the full cast, staying for everyone's coverage — and Kelly not knowing who Johnny Drama was until halfway through filming
• The crab bucket theory: why success creates enemies and why you have to build your own table
• The Leader at Tribeca: the Heaven's Gate biopic Kelly co-financed and acts in, with Joel David Moore's Balcony Nine and director Michael Gallagher
• Wes Craven's advice: the people who make it aren't the most talented — they're the ones who don't quit
• James's knuckle tattoo: deliberately making himself unemployable in restaurants to remove every possible exit from filmmaking
• The go bag: always packed by the door since Deadlock, ready to drive to Georgia at any moment
• Advice for aspiring actors: outlast everyone, say yes to the rooms the universe opens, and remove every escape route

David Lawrence — Cancer, Cannes, and a Fake Australian Accent

David Josh Lawrence (actor, writer, producer, acquisitions at Studio Dome / Bloodstream TV) pulls up a chair in the most eventful tracksuit session yet. What starts as a conversation about his self-produced passion project *Lincoln Must Die* quickly spirals into a deeply honest — and deeply funny — account of how he actually got here: surviving non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at 16, becoming a firefighter in San Bernardino, finding acting through exposure therapy, and learning to write scripts because the 2007 WGA strike shut everything else down.

Topics & highlights:

• Lincoln Must Die — how David pitched the story from nothing at Cannes, waited five years, and finally got it made in a month with indie collaborators Leanne Bauer, David Mitchell Park, and Mario Garcia Duenas
• Cancer at 16 — non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the Make-A-Wish negotiation (Jackie Chan was busy, Jet Li was busy, Britney Spears was apparently doable), and why surviving it made everyone else's excuses hard to tolerate
• Firefighting & exposure therapy — how anxiety attacks on medical calls in San Bernardino led him to a therapist who told him he was actually just an actor
• The Australian accent arc — faking a full Aussie identity to book a role, accidentally getting signed by an agent, booking Bundaberg rum and Outback Steakhouse commercials, and the moment it all unraveled at a client mixer
• Breaking into distribution — filling in for a no-show at the American Film Market and getting offered an acquisitions job by the end of the day; working with mentor Tom Malloy
• Why you shouldn't put your indie film on IMDb too early — a genuinely useful breakdown of how festival dating kills your international sales window
• Complex Texas, I Have Proof, and the buddy-cop-with-a-monkey movie — the ongoing collaborations between David, James, and BJ
• Weed brownies, alien theories, and the case for just going out and making your movie already

Jessica Russo — Sales Agent, Producer, Hat Assassin Jessica Russo (VMI Worldwide / Vantage Media) joins the tracksuit table for a genuinely rare perspective: the sales and distribution side of indie filmmaking.

She and James have collaborated on a string of films — including Darkness of Man (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, currently on Hulu) — and BJ just wrapped The Night Driver with her. So the war stories are real, the industry takes are sharp, and yes, the dolphin kidnapping story is discussed at length.

### Key Topics

• How the indie market has shifted — quality over quantity, the death of easy pre-sales, and why the financial model for indie films has fundamentally changed post-strikes
• The Van Damme hat story — how Jess saved the *Darkness of Man* poster on day one of filming by killing James's fedora
• Library acquisitions & consolidation — Netflix/Paramount, Gravitas/Shout, Chicken Soup for the Soul/Redbox/Screen Media, and what it all means for indie filmmakers
• AVOD vs. SVOD — why ads came full circle and what Tubi's rise means for the market
• What actually gets greenlit — script, team, name, and financials that make sense in today's landscape
• Delivery schedules — the unglamorous paperwork mountain that filmmakers are never taught about in film school
• Film school vs. real-world training — why internships and networking beat most curricula
• The Sex Pistols documentary — Billy Idol cameos, Glenn Matlock, and a Netflix sale
• Jess's first producing credit — Awake (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Francesca Eastwood), shot in Oklahoma during tornado season
• Crystals, tarot, D&D, and Harry Potter — the full nerd profile of the most organized person at VMI
• Aliens, Mayan temples, elongated heads, and one architect allegedly kidnapped by dolphins (James later discovers it was an April Fools story — BJ chooses to believe it anyway)
• Advice for aspiring filmmakers — read a delivery schedule, do an internship, go to networking events, be a good person

> Want a delivery schedule? Reach out to Jess and tell her you're coming from the Tracksuit Pod.