EXCLUSIVE: For those awards strategists wondering whether stars from indie U.S. films can promote at the fall film festival troika, SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland says “We’re looking at that issue.”

“There might be a form of an interim agreement that we can make available for that purpose,” Crabtree-Ireland told us today at San Diego Comic-Con.

SAG-AFTRA Strike rules underscore that members “can participate in a film festival that has no known connection, such as sponsorship, to an AMPTP company, however you cannot promote work you did for a struck company at any film festival.” 

After the guild cleared several starry indie movies and TV series to shoot during the actors strike, as they’re made by non-AMPTP companies, hope prevails among film festival organizers and personal publicists that exceptions will be made for those indie movies making their premieres at TIFF, Telluride and the Venice Film Festival.

Toronto International Film Festival CEO Cameron Bailey told Deadline that this year’s 48th edition of the fest, which will clear 200+ features, has “a bumper crop of sales titles…independent films with A-list actors on screen,” a subset total that’s up from last year. Bailey remains hopeful that a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement for completed indie films will be approved by the guild so that talent would have the opportunity to venture to the Great White North. Awards publicists have told Deadline that “it just takes one star to show up, to make everyone else feel comfortable.” Again, it’s not the companies behind indie films that SAG-AFTRA has a beef with.

“Every member of SAG-AFTRA will make their own decisions on this even if an interim agreement is in place,” Bailey added earlier this week, “We’re just working that through with all the filmmakers and directors of the films, and the actors.”

Regarding an interim agreement for indie films headed to fall film festivals, Crabtree-Ireland specified, “If we were to do that, those companies –assuming they are free and complete of AMPTP fingerprints– those companies would have to agree to the terms of our last offer to AMPTP just like any company doing an interim right now.”

When TIFF announces the first phase of its lineup next week, it is set to include at least a third coming from both U.S. indies and Hollywood films. Some awards season contenders, such as A24’s Problemista and Lionsgate’s White Bird, shifted off their August release dates to TBD this year as they await the strikes to end, and talent available to promote. As Deadline told you earlier today, MGM’s Challengers starring Zendaya is skipping its Venice Film Festival opening night premiere, and the studio has pushed the Luca Guadagnino feature to April 26, 2024. It’s crucial for that movie that Zendaya, who can transmit a message to her 200M social media followers, be available to promote the film.

Crabtree-Ireland explained the complexities today on how some AMPTP-looking projects were getting waivers to shoot, i.e. Apple TV+’s Tehran. He was here at San Diego Comic Con this afternoon with members of the National Association of Voiceover Actors to talk about how AI was impacting their lives, and how their rights and livelihoods are great need of being protected.

In America today, no one has a lock on conspiracy theory. It has become the air we breathe, the Kool-Aid we drink, the rabbit-hole ideology that defines too many of us. Yet conspiracy theories come in different shapes and sizes. Many are false, some are true. Many are bat-house crazy, some are more than plausible. All, in one way or another, work as metaphors: for the forces (within government, corporations, whatever) that collude in hiding things from us, for the sinister tantalizing truth that we aren’t allowed to see.

“They Cloned Tyrone” is a slow-burn inner-city sci-fi nightmare thriller, one that plays off the spirit of conspiracy theory that has often thrived — with justification — within Black culture. The Tuskegee experiment was a conspiracy that happened; its horrific impact on the hearts and minds of African-Americans is beyond measure. And in the 1970s, the belief that the CIA, linked by the war in Vietnam to the Golden Triangle (the source of most of the world’s heroin), was dumping drugs into America’s inner cities was a notion that gained currency, culminating a decade later in the theory that the CIA was the hidden force behind the crack epidemic.

Those theories, and the palpable sense of just-because-it’s-extreme-doesn’t-mean-it’s-not-true that underlies them, are the paranoid deep background of “They Cloned Tyrone,” a movie that pushes things to an extreme but still wants to touch a nerve of reality.

It begins as the grounded drama of three vivid bottom-rung criminals. There’s John Boyega as Fontaine, a drug dealer who one character says has never laughed, and we look at Boyega, sullenly impassive in his gold grillz (he gives a quietly implosive performance unlike anything he’s done before), and can believe that’s true. There’s Jamie Foxx as Slick Charles, a pimp in a sculpted ‘fro and paisley bathrobe who has seen better days (“I was a 1995 International Players Ball pimp of the year!”), and who rules his roost with a cold-as-ice bravura that, as the wily Foxx plays it, is as entertaining as it is convincing in its small-time megalomania. And there’s Teyonah Parris as Yo-Yo, a sex worker who earns her keep under Charles, and who stands up to him in as hostile and rococo obscene a fashion as he does to her.

The filmmaker, Jule Taylor, has never directed a feature before (he was a co-writer on “Creed II”), but he stages scenes with a visually impressive mood of funky gloom. The dialogue, which he wrote with Tony Rettenmaier, is fast and vivacious in its salty-dog rage. And the actors are so good that I would have been happy if the movie had simply followed the day-to-day fates of these three characters.

For a while, it immerses us in the dailiness of life in a district called The Glen, as Fontaine goes through his morning ritual of buying a 40 and a scratch-off card and pouring a shot of the beer into the cup of a homeless old man, Frog (Leon Lamar), who offers him a daily aphorism (“It’s in the water, young blood,” he says — talk about conspiracy!). David Alan Grier shows up as a gospel preacher in full cry, and he’s so mesmerizing that for about five minutes he hijacks the movie.

But the very title of “They Cloned Tyrone,” an allusion to Erykah Badu’s 1997 live-concert track “Tyrone,” lets you know that this is not just going to be some slice of hood life. There are lethal scuffles over cash, and a key character winds up dead, shot several times through the torso.

One scene later, he’s alive and well.

Dark doings are in the offing. But who’s doing what to whom? Let’s just say that there’s a conspiracy at hand that makes the one in “Get Out” look like an amateur parlor trick. At one point, the three characters enter a deserted trap house, only to discover a gleaming elevator that whisks them to a laboratory below. There, they find a white powder that resembles cocaine (but isn’t), as well as a white geek in a lab coat and hair that looks like he stole it off Roberta Flack. This produces a giant collective “Say what?,” a feeling that’s only enhanced when our trio visit the local fried-chicken joint and discover that the chicken isn’t just tasty, it’s making everyone in the place collapse into giggles. The white powder is in the chicken!

So if fried chicken is part of the conspiracy, what else about their lives is? Answer: everything. The drugs. The violence. The gospel church. The hip-hop strip club. “They Cloned Tyrone” is “Get Out” meets “The Truman Show,” with a bit of the “John Wick” series’ the-top-level-rules-it-all world-building. By the time Fontaine busts down the bedroom door that his mama is always talking to him from the other side of, only to discover that “mama” is a speaker box, we’re not in Kansas — or The Glen — anymore.

On paper it all sounds sinister and intriguing. Yet just as our eyes should be widening at the cosmic paranoia of it all, we’re thinking, “Wait, how does this conspiracy actually work?” What it involves is clones, a shell game of illusion, a vast underground network of sinister but innocuous white men in control of everything…and more clones. It should all feel threatening, but instead it feels half-baked in its grandiosity. Simply put, “They Cloned Tyrone” has a good set-up, but the film is too sketchy and conceptual to work as a bad-dream thriller. Yet it establishes Jule Taylor as a director of craft and a certain audacious nerve. Next time I hope he trades conspiracy for reality.

Our ongoing Member Lens feature spotlights current Film Independent Members to see how they got started, where they are now and what being part of Film Independent means to them. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Film Independent’s Artist Development department, our summer 2023 series focuses on our incredible roster of Film Independent Fellows.

Film Independent is currently in the middle of a Matching Campaign to raise support for the next 30 years of filmmaker support. All donations make before or on September 15 will be doubled—dollar-for-dollar up to $100,000.

Growing up in New York’s historic Harlem neighborhood, filmmaker Thembi Banks considers herself fortunate to have been immersed in such an eclectic cultural environment during her formative years. With the support of family and an abundance of creative mentorship afforded to her by the Big Apple’s best and brightest, she chased her creative passions onto the stage as a dancer and actor before finally landing in the film world, with ambitions on both sides of the camera. Film school brought her to the West Coast and Film Independent, which selected Banks to be part of the 2017 Project Involve directing track.

Now repped by Hollywood power players UTA, Banks has padded her CV with additional fellowships, awards and other distinctions, earning the attention of industry figures including Paul Feig, Ryan Murphy and HBO.

We recently caught up with Banks to talk about her journey through the creative arts, earliest inspirations and role models and—of course!—how being a Member and Fellow continues to inform her work and career. Here’s the conversation:

THEMBI BANKS

To start out, could you tell us where you’re from?

Banks: Yeah, where I grew up is a huge part of my story. Being from Harlem, New York, there’s just so much greatness attached to that particular historically Black neighborhood. Being raised there during the ‘80s and ‘90s, you of course have the backdrop of New York City right there. And even though I grew up poor, my mom worked really hard to make sure I still had the ability to take advantage of everything New York had to offer. When I was coming up, there were so many free programs—if you wanted to dance or sing or act, there was so much in the city that underprivileged youth could participate in at a high level. You could hone your skills with professionals who could really take you places.

What would you consider your first real entrée into show business?

Banks: [When I was a kid] I joined a professional dance company, which took me around the world; I toured France, it was an amazing experience. By high school, that shifted to acting. I had a teacher in Jr. High and she told us, If you’re really serious about pursuing this, your next step from here would be to get into the LaGuardia Performing Arts High School. And I got in! LaGuardia is probably one of the most prestigious performing arts schools in the world, so I was getting an amazing education. From there, I chose to have a more traditional college experience. But after college I came back to the city and was shooting things on the weekend and the evenings with my friends and writing [scripts] on Microsoft Word—not even Final Draft! [laughs]

Was there a particular film or filmmaker who really sparked your interest in cinema?

Banks: I’d say Spike Lee. He’s someone I grew up watching and subconsciously modeling an approach after. I always credit Spike Lee with being someone who instilled my love of Blackness. As a Black person you’re taught that who you are and your stories aren’t worthy of being celebrated or shown on a big screen, or any screen… But I just loved how the depiction of Blackness [in Spike Lee’s films] felt so beautiful and rich and something you could be proud to be a part of. I watched all his films and was amazed at how he was able to show us in such nuanced and honest ways, while also making pictures of us that were presented in such a beautiful way.

Did you start working in film right away after college?

Banks: Not right away. I began working in marketing and I was being creative, but that wasn’t enough for me. I still had this bug to get back to performance, to the stage, the way that I had been immersed in it as a kid. I thought about it and said, “Well, how can I truly take that leap?” And film school became something that seemed like a great idea at the time. So I got into this mindset that I was going to give myself three years just to invest in me. I got into USC for the MFA program for TV and film production. That got me out to LA and got me started.

Why was film the thing you were specifically interested in pursuing?

Banks: You know, when I first came up with the idea of filmmaking it was truly so that I could write parts for myself to act. [laughs] People still ask me, Oh, are you going to get back into acting? And I’m like, “Yeah, I just need to write myself into the right role!” That was always the plan. But I knew I wanted to have a bigger understanding of the scope of work and more control, right down to the business aspect of it. And at the time I was very aware that roles for Black actresses were limited. So I just wanted to come into Hollywood with a stronger footing and I felt like if I understood the filmmaking process that would put me ahead and give me the tools I thought I needed to have a better experience.

And within that, when did you first learn about Film Independent?

Banks: I moved out to LA and I had a few friends where like, Talk to this person, talk to that person. One of the people who I met through a mutual friend was working at Film Independent—that was the first introduction. She would invite me to a lot of Film Independent short film showcases, parties, get-togethers. So that’s how I truly first became aware.

And shortly thereafter you were in Project Involve as part of the directing track. What led you to that opportunity?

Banks: I was aware of Project Involve because I’d been invited to a screening of some Project Involve shorts, where I was introduced to Angel Kristi Williams and Mel Jones, who had both been in Project Involve previously and were my contemporaries. So I 100% knew and understood what [the program] was and the benefit of it—how it can help you as a filmmaker, how much fun you get to have being in this program and meeting all these new people. I hadd graduated and had a directing sample, a short that had made the film festival circuit, and I decided to submit it to Project Involve. That’s how I got into the Directing track.

And you’ve remained a Member ever since. What do you feel like you get out of being a Film Independent Member?

Banks: I’m blessed in that I’ve been able to keep going and grow my career. But things get busy. A big part of being a filmmaker, I think, is still living life and getting to experience projects and people that are inspiring you. So what I love about Film Independent is that there’s just the instant ability to immerse yourself in the independent film community. If I wasn’t paying attention to Film Independent I’d lose touch and wouldn’t even begin to know what films and filmmakers are out there. And that’s so important to me. It basically helps me stay grounded to the kind of work that I enjoy engaging with.

Film Independent promotes unique independent voices by helping filmmakers create and advance new work. To become a Member of Film Independent, just click here. To support us with a donation, click here.

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