The Garden Harvest: Legacy Expertise in a Creator Ecosystem
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Legacy Expertise in a Creator Ecosystem
Underscore Talent, one of the more prominent creator-focused management companies, has hired Lital Spitzer and formally launched a theatrical division. Spitzer brings serious legacy credentials, with tenures at Miramax, The Weinstein Company, and A+E before spending over a decade at 3 Arts Entertainment representing actors, producers, and filmmakers.
The instinct might be to read this as just another legacy media exec moving over to a creator company to help them institutionalize, or as a creator company trying to diversify, but that’s not quite what’s happening here.
The theatrical division they’re building isn’t being built to operate separately from Underscore’s creator business. It’s being built to work through it, using the company’s ecosystem of creator-led talent to open up opportunities that wouldn’t exist through traditional channels alone. The phrase in the announcement worth holding onto is “use Underscore’s ecosystem of creator-led talent to meaningfully enhance opportunities,” which points toward the ecosystem logic I wrote about a few weeks ago rather than a conventional film and TV play.
This is part of a broader pattern worth tracking. A few months back, Underscore also hired Sachi Ezura, previously VP of Adult Animation at Paramount. Legacy executives are being brought in to build infrastructure around a creator-first business, importing their film & TV expertise but in service of an ecosystem that already has the audience relationships and the cultural fluency.
That’s the bet Underscore is making, and it’s a coherent one.
The Filmmaker's Creator Playbook
Not every filmmaker is going to be represented by a firm like Underscore, with a theatrical division built on top of a creator ecosystem. But the underlying logic doesn’t require institutional backing to put into practice.
Documentary producer Adam Neuhaus made waves last week when he argued that filmmakers should be generating roughly 60 pieces of content beyond the film itself, building their audience from the very beginning of the production process rather than showing up at distribution with nothing but a finished cut. The fact that documentarians routinely make a film, move on to the next project, and bring no audience with them, he said, is wild.
The response from filmmakers was predictable. Sixty pieces of content sounds like a second job on top of an already impossible one. So he clarified, and the clarification is worth reading carefully because it reframes the whole thing.
He’s not talking about marketing. He’s talking about community building. Production diaries, introductions to collaborators, photo portraits, crew skills, inside jokes about the process, etc. Formats that are real, honest, and artful rather than optimized for any particular algorithm. The point isn’t to hack the feed, but to build a world around the work so that when the film arrives, it arrives inside a community rather than in front of strangers.
The podcasting analogy he uses is useful here. Podcasters spend enormous effort crafting full audio episodes and discover that most of their audience finds them through 60-second clips. That’s not what they imagined, but those people are still in the universe, and the next time something comes out, they’re already there.
That’s the mindset shift the creator economy demands of anyone making long-form work, whether they’re a YouTuber building toward a feature or a documentary filmmaker building toward their next project. The audience isn’t something you find at the end. It’s something you build the whole way through.
A lot of companies are starting to formalize that logic, but the logic itself is available to anyone willing to adopt it.
Late Night Finds Its YouTube Home
Good Night with Ben Gleib launches May 28 as the first late-night talk show built exclusively for YouTube, and the timing is not incidental. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is winding down. CBS has already shuttered After Midnight and The Late Late Show. The Tonight Show pulled back to four episodes a week.
The traditional late-night format is contracting in real time, and the economics of expensive linear productions for fragmenting audiences no longer make sense for the networks carrying them.
What Gleib is building looks different by design. The show tapes a day ahead of air, premieres weekly on his existing YouTube channel of 2.9 million subscribers, and features a live studio audience alongside what the team is calling “the first global virtual studio audience” in late night, pulling in real-time reactions from viewers around the world. There’s also a post-show after-party episode each week.
The key here is that the production credibility is real. Stewart Bailey, a four-time Emmy and two-time Peabody winner who showran The Daily Show under Jon Stewart, is showrunning. Keith Harris, the Grammy-winning drummer of the Black Eyed Peas, is musical director. Early guests include Bob Odenkirk, Tiffany Haddish, and Scott Galloway, who is also a backer.
The guest list is also worth noting. Alongside traditional celebrity bookings, the show is deliberately widening the late-night aperture to include creators, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts. That broadening of scope is less a creative choice than a recognition of where cultural conversation actually lives in 2026, which is no longer exclusively in Hollywood.
Now, late night on YouTube isn’t a new idea, but a show of this production ambition launching exclusively on the platform, with legacy television infrastructure behind it, is a new data point. A serious late-night bet on YouTube suggests the format isn’t dying, but moving.
GARDEN VIEW
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There's a stark difference between celebrities and creators, and by now most people in the industry have felt it even if they haven't named it.
Historical fame no longer guarantees engagement.
In this video, brand strategist Eugene Healey breaks down exactly why the most successful celebrities today are the ones who have adopted a creator mindset.
It’s a must watch for anyone in legacy media trying to understand where talent strategy is actually heading.
HARVEST QUOTE
“The holding company structure is the first thing that makes a creator business financeable at an institutional level.”
— Josh Stein, Founder & CEO, Attention Capital
The argument for a creator diversification isn’t news, but Josh Stein’s argument from the lens of financing might be the clearest I’ve seen.
A single creator with a single content operation lives and dies by whether they posted this week. A holding company with multiple businesses underneath it, each with its own revenue stream and platform exposure, looks fundamentally different to institutional capital.
The cash flows are diversified, the credit profile is real, and the business no longer depends entirely on one person's output at any given moment. That's what makes it financeable, which is becoming increasingly important as the space matures.
And it's why creators like Jesser who are building holding companies right now are playing a different game.
Have a great weekend…
Food for thought.
I’d like to discuss further Underscore management… ☺️
Couldn't agree more with Adam Neuhaus. Especially for documentary filmmakers it's important to build up an audience from the beginning.