Project Greenlight review: The new generation fails to live up to its promise

Max’s latest iteration of Project Greenlight focuses on director Meko Winbush, chosen from thousands of submissions and 10 finalists by Insecure’s Issa Rae, her team at production company HOORAE, the executives at Catchlight Studios, and mentors Kumail Najiani and Gina Prince-Bythewood. The 10-episode reboot chronicles Winbush’s journey to make her sci-fi film, Gray Matter, as she gets studio resources and connections. If the concept sounds familiar, it’s because Ben Affleck and Matt Damon put their names on this project in 2001 and revived it in 2015 for a brief time (until Matt Damon said some weird stuff about diversity). With people of color now at the helm, Project Greenlight: A New Generation highlights a promising female filmmaker for the first time. Cool, right? Sadly, despite said resources and the charm of its flashy mentors, it’s rife with contradictions and impossible standards.

The show raises many questions: What is its actual aim, to show effective Hollywood mentorship or make a “great film” to enhance the brands involved? Is it to shepherd new, marginalized folks into a career path or make this look impossible for ordinary humans to achieve? Is it to mystify the process of filmmaking further and drive away people with class, social, physical, ethnic, racial, and neurological barriers? It’s hard to imagine anyone from underrepresented backgrounds or with significant life responsibilities rising to the standards and live-to-grind ethic shown in PG: A New Generation. Even those with abundant privilege don’t seem like they’d do well here.

The show insists Winbush’s communication style is a problem throughout because she’s quiet and, at times, terse. It’s then fair to wonder how someone might fare if English isn’t their first language or if they depend on a device to express themselves. This isn’t whataboutism; these are genuine questions about the potential to truly make space for diversity in this industry. If the PG team can’t seem to effectively help a first-time woman director to learn the communication skills essential to filmmakers—on a show that professes to be about helping people, no less—what hope is left for others with bigger hurdles? Perhaps, behind the scenes, the production team was more direct, but the audience isn’t privy to it. We get examples of people talking about “getting to the finish line” but not explaining the tangible risks of not taking their advice.

Love & Basketball director Prince-Bythewood shares that directors should work “24/7,” which sounds like a remarkable flex, but there’s no prudent insight into her schedule. The team goes hard to remind Winbush of the stakes if she fails or doesn’t make the most progressive choice from the candidates they gave her. At one point, Montrel McKay (HOORAE president of development) digs into her for choosing to staff too many white men on Gray Matter, citing Rae’s track record of supporting artists of color and being a “walking economy.” They push Winbush to aspire to the same thing. However, a white dude named Phil Gelatt wrote the script, which they repeatedly claim is not ready weeks into production. The HOORAE team commissioned it from him, but Gelatt is off in Rhode Island, and we never really learn what his deal is.

It’s also impossible to review the show without addressing its labor implications. In the summer of 2023, the WGA is still on strike, with a SAG-AFTRA one looming around the corner. Everyone on PG addresses the challenges of the 21-day production/18-day filming schedule for a project of this scale, especially with two crews involved: the one making the movie and the one filming the show. Maybe don’t give a first-time director that kind of obstacle. Or do, and just let their movie be bad. Let them fail! McKay insists that Rae often does it with new talent to help them learn.

It’s initially exciting that Winbush is selected for her dual writing and director skills, but it quickly appears to be a cost-cutting measure. They didn’t like the script, so PG picked a first-time director who could write—someone to exploit instead of paying more writers. (It’s telling that Max recently made headlines for trying to collapse writers and directors into one “creator” title). Sure, they bring in a consulting team for one roundtable when Winbush asks for help, but that’s asking for a different rate compared to the cost of hiring another writer or two to work on it. That still foists the problem onto someone who has never done a feature before. So this pressure falls on Winbush, who is supposedly there to direct. Is it common for directors, let alone first-timers, to completely retool a script? And, the more important question is, should they even have to do this when better scripts are out there, probably about the same topic? (Heard of The Blacklist, people? It’s not hard.) The vibe is that they want everything done cheap and actively make labor cuts first.

Once filming begins, the team forces people to go from overnights straight into day shoots to meet the demands of a tight schedule (To be fair, there doesn’t seem to be another choice). We’re told that hardly anyone agrees they can get what they need within this unusually short 18-day filming schedule. During filming at a farm, everyone’s lunch is pushed by several hours to catch the sunlight and stay on schedule. But this studio-imposed time crunch isn’t where production directs its ire. Project Greenlight edits things to make it look like Winbush is the unreasonable factor for wanting to take her time talking to actors and getting the shots she wants on her first-ever feature. The first-time director is the problem, not the system itself.

At its core, PG makes her the villain most of the time. Part of an episode focuses on Winbush spending a weekend in Las Vegas for a bachelor party when the others might be working. It’s a passive-aggressive move to film her at a hotel and use drone footage of the strip. Later, they add her social media posts about a different weekend excursion. It’s designed to depict her as someone squandering a special opportunity and access to cool mentors. Rae, Nanjiani, and Prince-Bythewood swoop in periodically, though they are all off on their pursuits (Barbie, Welcome To Chippendales, The Woman King) for almost the entire production. The line everyone loves to use here is “Feel free to call me if you need anything,” a cop-out placing the onus on the person who needs a hand to be the one to reach out—an extremely difficult thing for people to do if a system has ever failed them. Meanwhile, the person offering this platitude can get away with thinking they’ve done something. Yay them.

Project Greenlight is meant to show how the sausage is made. Well, that’s what they did. Impressive graphics illustrate the film’s concepts and show what the script looks like lined up with its corresponding scene. HOORAE’s Jax Clark is a standout with her explanations of the roles and terminology. But for better or worse, with toxicity in full view, this show reflects how things are currently functioning in the industry. It’s reminiscent of the conditions in these “mini rooms” we’ve heard so much about during the writer’s strike. What’s that Paul McCartney quote, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we would all be vegetarians”? Yeah, Project Greenlight: A New Generation feels like that.

Project Greenlight: A New Generation premieres on July 13 on Max