‘Murdaugh Murders’ Producer The Cinemart Adapting ‘The Competition’ Podcast Into Docuseries & Working With Charlize Theron On True-Crime Doc

EXCLUSIVE: The founders of documentary production company The Cinemart are looking to build out their company after scoring big with series such as Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal and American Murder: Gabby Petito and scoring investment from a Banijay-owned business.

Last year, the company, which is also behind Hulu’s Guys fraud and Amazon’s LulaRichstruck an overall deal with Truly Original, the Banijay-backed producer behind The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Summer House.

Michael Gasparro, who runs The Cinemart alongside Julia Willougby Nason, told Deadline, “That partnership is about building out the company. Julie and myself can only do so much on the docs and series. We put a lot of time and effort into them and you have to focus on them so the idea is to bring in more resources and then have the ability to partner with companies like Charlize Theron’s company and Wondery and others and also bring in amazing filmmakers to work within The Cinemart brand.”

With Amazon-owned Wondery, The Cinemart is developing a docuseries based on The Competition podcast. The audio series, which launched last year, was created and hosted by Shima Oliaee, the creator of hit podcasts including Dolly Parton’s America and Pink Card.

It tells the story of girlhood in Americaa and explores the Distinguished Young Women program. Every summer for the past seven decades, 50 high school seniors—one from every state—descend on Mobile, Alabama to take part in one of the country’s most lucrative scholarship competitions for teen girls.

The podcast, which was a co-production between Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, followed seven girls as they experience the highs and lows of competing for two weeks, away from home and under the most high-stress circumstances. Some girls enter for the money, some for prestige. All of them are used to being the best and the brightest, but only one will walk away with the top prize. The series asks, what can two weeks with 50 of the country’s most ambitious teens tell us about girlhood in America?

“We’re going to be turning that into a series and we’re going out to market with it soon, we’re really excited about that,” said Gasparro.

As well as a number of projects in development with Netflix, the company has also partnered with Charlize Theron’s Secret Menu, the company she founded with Dawn Olmstead, and Anonymous Content on a doc in the true-crime adjacent space. “We’re going to be going out to market shortly with that one,” he added.

The Cinemart is keen to work with rising filmmakers on their own projects.

“It’s about finding directors, or even sometimes another company, that has gained trust of certain people that have a story, and it could be from a LulaRich-style story to a cult story to a true crime story, and they want to partner with a company like Cinemart that is established and has the relationship with the buyers,” Gasparro said.

Willougby Nason said that she would encourage younger filmmakers to work with people they trust. “They should just make work and continue to do one thing after another and move forward and don’t worry about if it was a success. In the beginning, I had things that wouldn’t even get into film festivals multiple times, and I just kept going. It was because I made those things that maybe didn’t get recognized in a mainstream way at the time in my 20s, those were the things that essentially were my aesthetic, my calling card and my ethos to what other people could see later and connect the dots and triangulate with me and my team, because filmmaking is a team sport,” she said.

“Of course, the stories are a huge piece to that in terms of what to focus on and what to make. It takes time to just get into a rhythm of getting to know myself as an artist and in this medium. I started out in fine art, portrait, black and white photography, and worked in the dark room alone for many years, so this was like a really amazing transition to work on set, as a cinematographer, then producer/director. I would just say to young filmmakers ‘Keep going, don’t get discouraged’,” she added.

The Cinemart launched in 2011 and some of its early projects included Time: The Kalief Browder Storya six-part series that aired on Paramount’s Spike TV and was exec produced by Jay-Z, and Rest In Power: The Taryvon Martin Storywhich aired on Paramount Network.

“We started working on documentaries that were centered in social justice and examining conflicts within our systemic structures of social control. It grew from there, to organically create this formula of being on the precipice of the golden age of documentary, where we could really entertain and grab a huge audience but also live in really hard-hitting, authentic, truthful, vulnerable subject matter. I feel like we really homed in on this balance between art and entertainment,” Willougby Nason said.

The pair noticed that these series, whether it was Guys fraud, the story of the chaotic music festival or Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, which covered the story of the death of Mallory Beach and the events surrounding the trial of Alex Murdaugh, hit big with viewers. The first season of Murdaugh Murders debuted at number two in Netflix’s top ten in its week of release with 40M views and a further 33.4M views in its second week. It second season debuted at number two with 13.6M views in its first week.

American Murder: Gabby Petito premiered last month and explored what happened in the final days of Gabby Petito’s life. Van lifer Petito went missing in 2021 with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, and the three-part series explores Laundrie’s role in the disappearance as well as the story from Petito’s family and friends.

It debuted at the top of Netflix’s charts with 67.3M views in its first week, beating Robert De Niro’s Zero Dayand added another 24.2M views in its second week.

“All of our projects have a similar spirit and thread, which is focusing on the American zeitgeist with a true-crime backdrop. The Murdaugh Murders and Petito Gabbythose a very topical. They were very recent, especially Murdaugh Murderswhich was unfolding as we were making it. All of our docs really zoom way out and look at the big picture of all the systems at play that go into these extremely vulnerable, intimate stories of human beings. We don’t sensationalize these stories, because we spend a lot of time working with the people that have experienced this. We try to speak with people that have lived it, and not just people that are armchair experts,” Willougby Nason said.

She added that the company wants to gravitate towards stories about abuse of power and power structures. “We come from a verité, fly on the wall documentary approach, but we also are very direct in terms of communicating and unpacking a very complex story,” she said.

The deal with Truly Original will only help The Cinemart do more of these.

Truly Original Co-President and CEO Steven Weinstock told Deadline, “First and foremost, Julia and Mike are great filmmakers who produce at the highest levels of documentary. They tell riveting stories that resonate across the broad spectrum of content. And as we got to know them, we could see their total commitment to their process, and how they work so thoughtfully and organically to gain the trust of their subjects, whose stories are often quite difficult. We felt they would be great partners in whose business we could invest and help grow.”

Co-President and CEO Glenda Hersh added, “We really believe in Mike and Julia and the way they bring agency to the people whose stories they tell. And, as intense as some of those stories are, they manage to craft them in a beautiful, cinematic and compelling way, always with a narrative that brings even the toughest things to life with sensitivity and respect. We see our role as partners who can leverage for The Cinemart both the larger creative resources we have at Truly Original, as well as our international capabilities with Banijay. They’ve had a lot of critical and commercial success, and we are all in on helping them scale.”

True-crime isn’t going anywhere soon – it remains one of the most popular genres on television.

“There is a wealth of riches with true crime stories, because this is the human condition. We all deal with some sort of true-crime in our life at some point, so it’s relatable. For us, stories that have a lot of layers to them… the way we look at true-crime is through the back door, a back door lens. We’re looking more at the human psychology, people’s experience, how and if they can open up to tell a story that’s unimaginable, that maybe is completely insane, and to bring sanity to it through the telling or the retelling,” concluded Willougby Nason.