Smartphone content platform Quibi launched with a bang last week, resulting in more than 1.7 million downloads of its bite-sized programming.
Included alongside the 50 shows launched by Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Teigen, Reese Witherspoon and others — all available in mobile-only, 10-minute episodes — is a series executive-produced by Mark Wahlberg and directed by Victoria-raised Brent Hodge.
“It’s so outrageous, you almost can’t believe it’s real,” Hodge, 34, said of Run This Town, which follows the rise and fall of Jasiel Correia, the controversial mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts. “There were FBI following him, tapping into his phone. It got a little crazy.”
Hodge spent a year making the docu-series, which is split into 10 seven-minute episodes co-produced by Hodge’s Hodgee Films and Wahlberg’s Unrealistic Ideas.
Both Hodge and Wahlberg are represented by the William Morris Endeavor agency, so the project came together quickly at a time when Quibi was hunting for content. The Mt. Doug high school grad found himself in the right place at the right time, working for a high-profile company co-founded by former DreamWorks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg.
It quickly became one of Hodge’s favourite projects.
Run This Town differs from hugely popular documentaries such as Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened in that his story was not being told after the fact.
Hodge, who had unprecedented access to his subject, began shooting scenes with Correia in 2019, when he was fighting for his job amid reams of negative pressduring a recall election. His hours of in-person interviews with Correia form the backbone of the series.
“This was in the moment, as this was all happening,” Hodge said. “We got really lucky with that. He was trending on Twitter at the time and I reached out to him. I’m telling you, in six months of filming with this kid, I’ve never seen somebody crash and burn so bad.”
Correia was elected mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, in 2015, when he was just 23. He was viewed as a saviour of sorts, but soon became a divisive personality for the town of 90,000, despite his initial success.
In 2017, during his second term as mayor, Correia was arrested on fraud and extortion charges. In 2019, while still mayor, he was charged with extortion, conspiracy and bribery. He remained mayor until Jan. 6, 2020 and is awaiting trial.
Hodge and his U.S.-Canadian team — which includes another Victoria product, producer Aly Kelly — put the show together during editing sessions in Vancouver and Toronto.
Though he lives in New York, editing in Canada has always worked well, Hodge said, so he saw no reason to break from tradition, despite the elevated platform his new Quibi project provided.
He has been at the helm of several high-profile pop-culture documentaries in recent years, including I Am Chris Farley, A Brony Tale and Freaks and Geeks: The Documentary.
Run This Town gave him a chance to try his hand at storytelling with a hard-news, journalistic bent. “We’ve been doing all these quirky docs and funny docs, and then you realize politics is just as funny as anything,” Hodge said with a laugh. “It’s a wild American story about a great town with great people and the backstabbing, ups-and-downs of politics.”
Hodge has partnered with Hulu, Netflix, CBC and A&E, among many others, for past productions. He will step into an even bigger spotlight with some of his upcoming projects, including one for Blumhouse Productions (Get Out, BlacKkKlansman, The Hunt) about former hedge-fund manager and pharmaceutical enfant terrible Martin Shkreli.
Hodge is also working on a documentary — one of 15 projects he has in various stages of pre-production — that will feature some of the biggest names in the comedy business.
When he left Manhattan for Whistler on March 9, Hodge was working on an eight-part series for NBC, produced by Lorne Michaels, about the history of writers on Saturday Night Live.
It will be the network’s first streaming, non-scripted series, and just one of what Hodge expects will be many interesting adventures in the documentary world.
“The world of docs has completely changed. Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Quibi, Disney+ — there’s more places where docs have been recognized than ever. But that doesn’t change how long they take to make. Tiger King took five years.
“The way to do it for us is to have a lot of films on the go. We are never waiting for anything. Never waiting for an event. We always have something moving.”
