Authors — Max Cea
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Hooray for…Jerseywood?
In 2006, when Cameron Zonfrilli and John Welsh shifted their film production business, Parlay, to a full-fledged multistage Jersey City studio, their clients mainly consisted of small reality-based cable shows, multicams, and commercial work. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of film production in New Jersey. “A lot of little independent commercials and agency work,” Zonfrilli says. Twenty years later, the film landscape in the Garden State is experiencing a boom. Big state-of-the-art studios are being built, renovated, and expanded all over the state. And top Hollywood players like Lionsgate, Netflix, and Paramount are coming to town, teaming with […]
by Max Cea on Apr 23, 2026 -
Learning By Doing: Producing My First Feature
At nearly 6:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in late March, the sun began to rise in Tampa, Florida, and Stephen Musumeci called cut on The Big Game’s martini shot. The crew clapped and hugged, and Musumeci, who wrote and directed the feature, gave a short, dizzy speech that was interrupted by a producer pouring a large bucket of water (for lack of Gatorade) on his head. When I joined the film as a producer 14 months earlier, I firmly envisioned reaching this point, even though I had never produced a feature before. After reading the script, I’d immediately fallen in […]
by Max Cea on Jun 18, 2025 -
The Editor’s Signature
Alex Saks remembers the process of producing Thoroughbreds, the dark suburban teen thriller written and directed by Cory Finley, as a whirlwind. At the time, Finley was a hot up-and-coming playwright making his first foray into filmmaking, and he didn’t have an established team of collaborators. With a limited window of actor availability, production launched shortly after Finley delivered a script, which meant there was a tight window to hire key crew. Among the most important decisions the team had to make was who would edit the movie. “[An editor] really is the department head on the movie, other than […]
by Max Cea on Sep 18, 2024
