John Sloss And Apple Non-Fiction Chief Molly Thompson Discuss Documentary Business & The Time HBO Killed Todd Phillips’ ‘Frat House’ — Sands
deadline.comIn the late 1990s Joker writer-director Todd Phillips, then applying his trade as an underground documentary filmmaker shot a non-fiction project titled Frat House, which nabbed the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance before being promptly acquired by HBO Films. “The premise of the documentary is that he pledged fraternities at colleges,” John Sloss, producer, founder and CEO of Cinetic Media, told an audience at the Sands Film Festival in St.
Andrews, Scotland. He was discussing the pic as part of an onstage Q&A about the current state of documentary filmmaking alongside Molly Thompson, Head of Documentaries and Non-Fiction at Apple TV+, and Oscar-winning producer Melanie Miller (Navalny, Maestra).
Sloss had been representing Phillips at the time. Despite the early buzz surrounding the pic, it was never officially released.
HBO shelved the project. “What happened was that a separate chapter of the fraternity he [Phillips] pledged and made look like a bunch of idiots in his film, was the same fraternity that the head of Time Warner’s son belonged to at another college,” Sloss said.
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