There's a documentary in progress called "The Grind." It's about an Asian male porn star. It has a great sizzle, a charismatic subject, and about a year of filming left to go. By conventional logic, it's a project that waits — for festivals, for buyers, for the machinery of the nonfiction industry to decide whether it matters.
Producer Adam Neuhaus had different advice for filmmaker Dan Chen: White-label a sex toy.
No, really. Co-own it with your subject (who already markets his own sex toy). Let it live alongside the film for the next two years. Put it in the film as its own product placement. Make the toy the marketing, and the film the brand.
"Tell me what news place isn't going to pick that up," Neuhaus said when we spoke recently. He was laughing, but he was also completely serious. "Even if it just broke even, it would do everything else you needed to do."
While there's plenty to lament about the crisis in documentary right now, Neuhaus is busy engineering.
He spent years in development, including a stint overseeing ESPN's 30 for 30, before launching Neuhaus Ideas. Since then he's produced the award-winning Hello Puzzlers podcast and produced an upcoming Roku doc about women and pro basketball. He knows how the system is supposed to work, which is probably what made him impatient enough to build something outside it.
About 18 months ago, he posted on LinkedIn that the nonfiction world needed its version of The Blacklist — a public, curated list of works-in-progress modeled on Franklin Leonard's industry-changing document for fiction features. The post went viral. And then, as Neuhaus tells it, someone had to actually do it.
So he created the Nonfiction Hot List. Across 100 days he gathered 25 volunteers across the nonfiction space, stood up a submission portal, ran a film-festival-style review process, and published a public deck of 23 projects — shorts, features, podcasts, series.
The first round received 640 submissions, from early-career filmmakers to Oscar and Emmy winners. The curation, he said, was elite.
The results bore that out. Projects on the Hot List have since landed at SXSW ("Manhood") while podcast "When We All Get to Heaven” was picked up by Slate and is now a Peabody nominee. A short, "Thank You For Listening," was acquired by Texas Monthly.
That's cool, but even better was what happened after.
The Radical Act of Getting Back to People
Neuhaus and his team emailed everyone who didn't get selected and offered them free strategy and feedback sessions. When was the last time you were offered something for free after your application was turned down?
Neuhaus and his team spent three months in conversations with the 125 projects that signed up — or as he described it, executive producing without being executive producers. "That was mind-blowing because there were so many great projects outside the 23 that we're doing," he said.
Along the way, Neuhaus started to see a real-time map of where the nonfiction industry was breaking down across distribution, marketing, and social. Filmmakers who carried projects for years alone were suddenly in a room with someone who looked at their work clearly and say, I don't like your title, this should be a short, are you ready to say the completion date out loud?
That intelligence became the foundation for a business. Neuhaus is now curating 20 documentary shorts for Yahoo x NFH; a call for entries saw 1,000 submissions in six weeks. (There's 40 reviewers on the case.)
Hot List v2 is coming this fall. Submissions open in July, with a target of 30 selected projects. Neuhaus expects toreceive somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 submissions, potentially outpacing Tribeca and SXSW in the documentary space.
"I don't know if we'll be able to do strategy and feedback sessions for free, but maybe we create a way where it's a $20 session and we guarantee it," he said.
The Hot List is impressive, but it's almost beside the point. What Neuhaus is really building is an argument — an alternative theory of how documentaries should exist in the world.
The core premise: Filmmakers can no longer believe that a completed film with a sizzle is enough. That model is finished.
The Finish Line Is Not a Finish Line
"They need like 60 pieces of content, and they need to be making it from the very beginning of the process," he said. "And they need to be building their own audience, obviously, along the way. The fact that documentarians make a film and then move on to the next thing without bringing any audience with them is wild and crazy."
If there's a film about equine therapy, he said, you need to make a list of every equine therapy program in the country and screen the rough cut. You can probably charge for it.
"Work-in-progress screenings with other directors, they're going to tell you about pacing, edits, and that's super valuable," Neuhaus said. "[But] If it's about insect scientists, then do things with insect scientists. They're not going to look at it the same way. They're going to open up all kinds of partnership ideas, organization ideas.
"These are not film people," he said. "They're going to open up possibilities that other directors and industry people simply won't."
He also advocates for putting your best scene online now — yes, before the festival run, before the premiere, before all the machinery of gatekeeping demands that you hold everything back. "You're not ruining it," Neuhaus said. "You're drawing people into your circle."
Emily Best has mapped this territory for years through Seed&Spark — the audience-ownership model, the direct-distribution infrastructure, the argument that a filmmaker's relationship with their audience is their most durable asset. If Best built the rails, Neuhaus is trying to convince filmmakers to actually get on the train.
Neuhaus also makes a structural argument that will probably chafe a few: He believes the current documentary ecosystem is broken in ways that damage the entire category.
Festivals, he said, are optimized for their own solvency, not for filmmakers' audiences, with all marketing activity concentrated in impossibly narrow windows.
"You're all putting all your time to this two-week thing," he said. "Spread that money out way earlier. Start building way earlier. Try even in the smallest way to market and build an audience. Even if it's a couple hundred people, it's still totally worth it."
He also believes that too many relentlessly dark documentaries hurt the business. (Or, as 2026 Oscars host Conan O’Brien described the documentary short category, “The little sads.”)
With the Yahoo partnership, Neuhaus put his thumb on the scale for heartwarming and crowd-pleasing stories — not because tragedy doesn't matter, but because if this is the first documentary a viewer sees on the platform, he wants them to become a lifetime customer.
When Identity Is Liability
I've seen this argument developing from a few angles. The white paper that IPR.VC published — it's the firm with long partnerships with MUBI and A24 — frames the whole investment landscape in terms that rhyme with what Neuhaus is doing.
Every bet is now based on whether something has legs, whether it can build another life, whether a single discrete entity can become a world. The math has shifted. The audience has to come with you or there's nothing to sell.
What's interesting about Neuhaus is he's making this argument not as a platform company or a tech-adjacent enterprise.
He's a development person who now has top-of-funnel access to thousands of projects every year, from the ground up, outside the agencies, directly from the artists. He can look at six films and see a shared marketing opportunity, a brand wrapper, a way to bring something cohesive to a company that's been stymied by the one-project-to-one-brand pitch.
"We're not carrying a scarcity mindset into this," he told me. "We want to be part of the soil."
I think the more provocative version of what he's saying is this: The documentary industry built its identity around a certain kind of importance, a certain relationship to gatekeeping and discovery, a certain model of what it means to be taken seriously. That identity is now a liability.
The filmmakers who will survive, even thrive, in whatever comes next are the ones willing to build a sex toy, build a spreadsheet, build a relationship with equine therapists in every state, and stop waiting for someone to tell them their work is real.
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