How Pam Carbonero Built The Directors Community of Her Dreams
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Release Date: 03/10/2026
Is Horror the Most Divisive Genre? Behavioral Scientist Coltan Scrivner on the Science of Fear
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Horror is the least liked genre, and also the most loved. Behavioral scientist and horror producer Coltan Scrivner explains why there’s almost no one in the middle. Coltan Scrivner is a psychologist at Arizona State University, a researcher with the Recreational Fear Lab in Denmark, creator of the Morbid Curiosity Scale, and author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. He also founded the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and runs the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl. In Part 2 of our Unpacking Horror series, Coltan gives us his definition of horror (it...
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Jacob Chase (writer/director) on Insidious, Fear, and Why It Never Gets Easier
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Jacob Chase made his first short film with friends and no money. Nine years later, he was handed the keys to one of horror’s biggest franchises. Jacob also directed Come Play, four episodes of Peacock’s The Girl in the Woods, and is now in prep for Sleepover with Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster. And while he's done a ton of great press for Insidious: Out of the Further, he hasn’t talked about much the decade before it, which is the part you know I love. The TV pilot that collapsed days before shooting, the student loan debt that shaped every creative choice he made in his...
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The Latina Executives Building Hollywood's Next Generation (Blumhouse, FX, MACRO & Sage Works)
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Today we're serving you a special episode in collaboration with Latina Squad, the community of Latina executives launched by Christine Davila reshaping Hollywood. Carolina sat down with three of her fellow squad members: Julia Balleza (VP of Development and Programming, Blumhouse Television) Greta Fuentes (MACRO, where she started as Charles King's assistant the day he left WME to build the company), and Adriana Martínez Barrón (former Netflix exec, now running Stacey Abrams's production company Sage Works). We're also honored to feature Chika Igwilo, SVP of Development at FX, as our guest...
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Hollywood fashion stylist Adrien Rabago on how to be red-carpet ready for real life
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Adrien Rabago has spent 25 years dressing people in Los Angeles, from actresses on red carpets to brides finding "the dress" to two very famous soccer players who needed twelve jerseys instead of two, two days before the shoot. She founded Adrien's Closet in 2009 to make elevated dressing accessible beyond celebrity circles, and in this conversation she pulls back the curtain on what styling actually looks like behind the glamour: the steaming, the pinning, the returns, the paperwork, and the constant last-minute fires that come with production work. Carolina and Adrien actually go way back,...
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Casting Director Sherry Thomas (Breaking Bad, Handmaid's Tale, Pluribus) On How to Make it in Hollywood
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Sherry Thomas is one half of Bialy/Thomas & Associates, the casting powerhouse behind Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Walking Dead, The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, Barry, The Righteous Gemstones, Dead to Me, Apple TV+'s Sugar, and Broadway's Jersey Boys. She and Sharon have earned multiple Emmy nominations together across their 25-plus year partnership. Their most recent Emmy nom is for Apple TV+'s Pluribus, which is Vince Gilligan's follow-up to Breaking Bad. It's a full-circle moment: Sherry and her partner Sharon Bialy are the team who first brought Bryan Cranston to...
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Writer Dana Ledoux Miller Comes Full Circle with Live Action "Moana"
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Dana Ledoux Miller is a shape shifting scribe. She was PA'ing on Lost and The Descendants when she first said out loud that she wanted to be a writer. A decade later, she's co-written and co-directed Moana 2 and written Disney's live-action Moana, in theaters July 10 — becoming one of the few Pacific Islander writers steering a major Disney IP. In this episode, we trace her full arc: from set life in Hawaii, to landing in Aaron Sorkin's writers' room on The Newsroom, to the surreal call that brought her onto Moana. We talk about what it actually feels like to carry...
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Comedy Legends Bob Odenkirk and David Cross Climb Machu Picchu
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
What does it take to hike 26 miles at 14,000 feet with no signal, no Uber, and two of the funniest people alive? We're about to find out. Join me as I sit down with comedy legends Bob Odenkirk and David Cross at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival to discuss their documentary Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu — a film about friendship, mortality, and what happens when Hollywood strips away and the mountain shows you who you actually are. Plus: Why David chose Bob for this — and why Bob almost said no How Bob's heart attack during Better Call Saul gave the whole journey a different...
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Colby Day On How Screenwriting is A Career For Maniacs
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Colby Day is a breath of fresh air who refuses to be performative. In an industry that runs on heat and carefully curated perception, he just gives it to you straight. Day is an Emmy-nominated writer whose credits include the Netflix film "Spaceman" starring Adam Sandler and "In the Blink of an Eye," which premiered at Sundance this past year. He also served as a writer and story editor on Apple TV’s For All Mankind season five. He is also the creator of Hollyweird, a Substack where he documents the unglamorous reality of being a working writer in Hollywood with more honesty than almost...
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How Bill AB 2319 Could Keep Hollywood Home with Marielle Abaunza
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
Post is where a movie becomes a movie. Where a TV show gets it's bells and whistles. The edit, the VFX, the color, the sound mix, the sound design, and everything in between. It's where everything comes together. And yet for years, California has had no standalone incentive to keep that work here. In this episode I sit down with Marielle Abaunza, President of the California Post Alliance and EVP of Business Development at Signature Post, to talk about AB 2319, the proposed standalone post-production tax incentive that could be game changer in helping keep jobs in LA. We get into: How we...
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How to Start a Bidding War with Verve Agent and Partner David Boxerbaum
Angle on Producers with Carolina Groppa
built his career the hard way, with no connections, no shortcuts, and a relentless belief that great stories still change everything. He first fell in love with making movies as a young kid growing up in the Bay Area, camera in hand, directing his friends before he even knew what an agent was. After attending , he realized the there was real power in understanding the business behind making movies. So he mailed his resume across town, worked his way through some of the most iconic agencies in the business, and quietly became one of the most prolific spec script sellers in Hollywood. By...
info_outlinePam Carbonero is a seasoned Latina director, producer, writer, and first AD with 15-plus short films, a 12-episode mini-series, and a one-and-a-half hour vertical series under her belt.
When she's not directing, she's working full-time as a first AD across features, commercials, music videos, you name it. And she is a proud anti-gatekeeper.
But the thing I really wanted to bring her on to talk about is what she built from scratch out of pure necessity: the LA Director's Lab. In 2021, she had an idea for a space where directors could simply practice their craft. She started small: six directors, eight actors, a friend's bar, iPhones, zero professional gear. That was all she needed.
Today, LADL has grown into full two-day workshops with DPs, professional crews, screening days — and most recently, she executive produced five horror short films in three and a half weeks with her community of artists.
Tune in as we discuss mental health, doing the reps, and what makes an exceptional 1st AD.