The Netflix Fewer Dream

I'm standing in a supermarket on a cold, grey November evening when I get a call from my producer Patrick.

“If you're ready to fly to Budapest tomorrow, come into my office now.”

As you do in this industry, I said yes.

Thirty minutes later, I'm sitting in an office that resembles a storage facility more than a company handling six-figure budgets every week. They had just moved in, to be fair. But I digress.

We jump on a call and there, on my screen, is a charming face with an American accent sitting in front of a very large Netflix logo.

This is where the fever dream of a weekend started getting properly feverish.

They were having trouble getting marketable material — or really any usable visuals — from the set of an ongoing production. And because we were in Europe, we — or, more accurately, me and my camera — would become their feet on the ground.

I was basically being asked to document what, in another era, would have been DVD extras.

So I packed a suitcase and the next day found myself in roughly the same climate, only further east and somehow even greyer, standing on the biggest production lot I had ever seen.

It must have looked slightly comical: one guy with a small rolling suitcase on a stretch of tarmac the size of an airstrip, surrounded by soundstages big enough to host a space shuttle.

Production was expecting a woman called Jen.

I'm Jens.

Close enough.

And then I started documenting stunt rehearsals, 3D scans of actors' faces for CGI, and 300 extras queuing to be fitted into their otherworldly costumes. I chatted with cast members and the set photographer and, to be honest, it was fun. Exciting, even.

People were speculating that this might become the next Star Wars.

I uploaded my footage. People in Los Angeles were extremely pleased.

And then: nothing.

Years pass and you occasionally wonder what exactly it was you witnessed. For a long time, the only tangible evidence that any of it had actually happened was a fairly generous sum of money in my bank account.

And then, years later, I found out what had happened. In The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/carl-rinsch-netflix-conquest.html