Highlights - Karina Manashil - Pres. of Mad Solar - Exec. Producer of “Entergalactic”, “Pearl”, “X”

Highlights - Karina Manashil - Pres. of Mad Solar - Exec. Producer of “Entergalactic”, “Pearl”, “X”

Interviewed by Mia Funk & Mira Patla

Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas.

In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed by BRON Studios. Manashil then went on to Executive Produce SXSW fan-favorite X and its sequel, Pearl, directed by Ti West. Manashil is an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated series Entergalactic directed by Fletcher Moules. Entergalactic was created by Kid Cudi and features voiceover from Jessica Williams and Timothée Chalamet. It was released alongside its album of the same name from Kid Cudi on September 30th.

Manashil is a native of Los Angeles and graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production.

KARINA MANASHIL

Scott is the most beautiful, kind, goodhearted man, but also he's brilliant. He's a generator of ideas. I feel like by being next to him, your role is to take all of these concepts that he's crafting and ideating and bring them to fruition, so it's a really beautiful gift where you feel like you're paired with an artist who is the source of so much. Scott was also really important to me in a lot of ways from our very beginning.

So the animated series Entergalactic tells the story of a black modern love story in New York City. It's simple in its core. Jabari, the character Scott plays, is a graffiti artist, and Cosmic Comics has decided to option his character and turn it into a comic book. So he's at this point in his life where he is moving into the loft apartment of his dreams, everything seems to be working for him when he meets Meadow, who's his neighbor. And she is this amazing woman, photographer, coolest cat on the planet. And essentially this show follows their meet-cute and their love story and the will they-won’t they of if they'll end up together. So there's something very warm in its aesthetic. But what's so interesting is that the love story is very nostalgic. It's, it just hearkens back to what a romance feels like.

*

Scott sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to finish, and essentially the two parts exist simultaneously. So you've got the album on its own, and then you've got the event, which allows you to hear beats of each piece of music in all of these key beats of Jabari (Scott's character) and Meadow’s (Jessica Williams' character) love story. Scott had tweeted out that Entergalactic was the greatest piece he's ever created. This is the thing he's most proud of. Scott feels that this was an opportunity to create that new moment for his audience where they're going to get to experience something that they'd never had the opportunity to before because it feels so new.

*

Scott lives in between the notes. So the things that you would expect, he lives right in the center, which is why his music is so interesting. The nuance and creativity of his choices is so indicative of the way that he hears sound.

Entergalactic was such a beautiful process. Throughout it, it felt like we were doing something new and different. And then what really hit home is that there was something so new about the colors, the fashion, the music, the sounds, the visuals, the thinks and purples, even Fletcher Moules in the way that he animated, it harkened back to hand-drawn animation, where instead of, you know, traditional 3D animation of today where you've got your arm up and then you draw the arm down and the computer generates a smooth move from top to bottom, so everything looks perfect. With Entergalactic, it was really important to him to make sure each frame was hand drawn. So every move was a deliberate choice by an artist and a team of artists around the world.

So there's something very warm in its aesthetic, but what's so interesting is that the love story is very nostalgic. It's, it just hearkens back to what a good romance feels like. And what was interesting watching it for the first time was I didn't realize how much I missed seeing that from the US. It just felt like the joy that we've been missing in programming.

*

And what was so moving was when we went into Netflix to the theater to screen the finished product for the first time. You're sitting there and at the end of it, Scott was crying, and I looked over - it made me cry low-key - but Scott was crying and he said – This completely blows my mind because this is the first time I had a vision up here in my head and tried to express it, and then had to trust all 300 plus people, all around the world, working in different time zones, in different places, and each of them putting a hand to it and seeing exactly that vision. And then watching the product, and it is the best version of anything I could have ever possibly had in my head.

So, to us, that's the purest, most beautiful... Again, how fortunate that every hand was moving in tandem and moving in lockstep, and all of it. But that was the beauty of collaboration, this opportunity for a small vision to touch so many hands and become the big vision.

*

In terms of things that Scott is developing - I kid you not - he called me one day and said, "Hey, let's write a pilot," and within a week... The process of how he writes now is we literally sit on the phone, and he tells me, top of his head, everything that happens in pages, scenes, and dialogue – all of it. And I quickly type it in notes, convert it to script, send him the pages. We look it over, and then move over to the next. So within a week, he wrote this pilot that now we're in negotiations on that would be an opportunity for him to star in a comedy. So this is just a typical Scott à la Ti West, who does things that sound absurd. Scott also pulls off the absurd as well. And there's a plethora of other projects and other arenas. As I mentioned, we're working on a video game, we're working on a comic book, there's a few different movies that Scott has ideated and created that we're getting into negotiations on and starting to set up.

*

Also, in terms of another artist that we brought into the fold, there's this incredibly, incredibly talented artist, Jeron Braxton, who is 27 years old, from Indiana, and basically started making music when he was young, wanted to create cool music videos, and self-taught himself animation. His animation erupted, and he created a very distinct style that pulled from 2000's video game aesthetics, very cubism, abstract like hype, cool. And his career took off. He was on Sundance with his first film and continued on the kind of film trajectory, but also started working in the culture space, and he worked on Virgil Abloh's show. His artwork was featured in Christie's first NFT auction with Takashi Murakami, and he's become talked about in this space. And he had an idea for his directorial debut, which now we're putting together alongside Ron and our partner Alex Lebovici.

So the kind of next wave is very wide – a lot of different projects, and a lot of different spheres, and a lot of it à la Entergalactic, bringing Scott into the fold. So we have a project with Jaden Smith, we're talking to Sam Levinson about more projects.

*

So I'm Iraqi-Iranian-Jewish. So I remember growing up where the movie that felt most reflective of our family was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which, it's Greek. They're not the same, but it was so close, talking about the lamb, and we have Nick, Nick, Nick, Nikki, and in my family, Shuly, Shuly, Shuly, Sol, and there was just... It felt like, Oh my God, this feels like my family seeing that. And the second thing like that was seeing Ramy Youssef, who's Egyptian, New York. I'm Iraqi-Iranian-L.A.-Jewish.

He's Muslim. It's not a like for like, but there was so much. I was like, that feels like us. So I feel my guidance would be, go for it! Because I feel like I've had these moments within the business, but seeing Ramy, it felt like content is renewed. All of a sudden, there's a whole new world that's open simply because he was willing to tell his story. And I would love to see a million more opportunities of that. And I would love to be involved in fostering opportunities like that. And I found it to be so inspiring to see content like that. So that, and maybe it's simplistic just to say, Yes, go all in. But my pride would be, and my appreciation would be, to see more opportunities for creators that move me in the same way that those two experiences felt reflective of who I am.


This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Mira Patla with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Mira Patla. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

 
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Interviews - FEATURED
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Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
Author of Cliff Ecology · The Urban Cliff Revolution · The Dogma At My Homework

I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.

THOMAS CROWTHER
THOMAS CROWTHER

Ecologist · Founder of Restor
Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives. 

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

PETER D. DITLEVSEN
PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ
DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO
KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression
The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA
BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA
MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

 
 

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