As president and chief distribution officer of Hartbeat Productions, Jeff Clanagan runs Kevin Hart’s LOL! Network — which includes radio programs and podcasts on SiriusXM, as well as short-form content, TV shows and movies with partners such as Peacock, Roku, Tubi, and PlutoTV. He’s also a producer on projects such as Die Hart, Hart to Heart, Olympic Highlights, So Dumb It’s Criminal, and tours such as Nick Cannon’s Wild ’N Out Tour and Kevin Hart’s most recent Reality Check tour. Clanagan was previously CEO of Codeblack Films and Codeblack Digital, which is where he first began working with Hart as he transitioned from Comedy Central specials to concert films Laugh At My Pain and Let Me Explain, the latter of which earned more than $32 million at the box office. He sat down with me following Hartbeat Weekend in Las Vegas, where they hosted live recordings of Laugh Out Loud Radio shows and filmed tapings for the revival of BET’s ComicView stand-up showcase series.
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This transcript has been edited and condensed only slightly for your convenience.
You just got back from Hartbeat Weekend in Las Vegas. How does Resorts World compared to the other resorts on the Strip these days?
The thing is, Resorts World is the newest property on the Strip. I mean it has ony been like a year and a half. So everything's brand new. It's definitely a destination. There's three different hotels on the premises, you have the Hilton Hotel, the Conrad and Crockfords — Crockfords is high-end luxury suites. Then you have a food row, you have a mall, you have a theater, nightclub, day club. So it's very self-contained. Which is one reason we picked the venue because over four days you really didn't have to leave the property because everything you have is right there.
Even though the world of Hartbeat Productions keeps getting bigger and bigger. I know you guys filmed Reality Check, the new Peacock special there as well as the revived version of ComicView. How does it feel to be bringing that back?
Coming out of the weekend, that's what I'm most excited about, because the response we received from the comedy community was overwhelming. One of the challenges right now, there's really no platform for comedians for stand-up, whether it be emerging comedians or even established communities, outside of you know, a few specials on Netflix, but there's no platform to really help build and give exposure. So we're really, really, really excited about the relaunch of ComicView and the fact that we were able to do it during our weekend — it had a double impact because we did it amidst this big event that we had 1000s of people at.
You just mentioned how there's a lack of opportunities for up-and-coming comedians to be showcased. And it just shows how much has changed in just a few short years because you guys had Hart of the City not that long ago on Comedy Central, which of course is a different brand, has a different pedigree, different reputation from ComicView. What did you learn from doing that series that you're bringing to this new version of ComicView?
One of the things we learned in doing Hart of the City is that a lot of talented comedians out there just don't get the opportunity to be showcased on television. So the thing about stand-up comedians, where they make their bread-and-butter is touring — so being able to provide a platform to a much broader audience, like a BET ComicView or even Hart of the City also helps these comedians in their careers in terms of getting them out there and getting them more work. So we just saw from Hart of the City, there was a lot of talent out there and we've been trying to figure out what can we do now to relaunch a platform to give opportunity for up-and-coming comedians that are out there that are not getting the media exposure that they should be getting.
Right. We're talking in the middle of 2023, and now, especially the pandemic heightening everything when clubs closed down for a year, year and a half. It seems as though comedians are more focused on screens than on being on stage. You know, they're focused on building a platform on TikTok or Instagram or whatever the next thing is. How do you nurture the talent so it's not just focused on how many how many views you can get on TikTok?
OK, so that's a good question.
I know we're both older so we remember what it was like.
Here's the thing: If you're going to develop into a true stand-up comedian, you’re not going to do that on social media, TikTik and stuff like that because that's almost like a cheat. And it doesn't give you the platform to develop your stand-up. Now, that said, though, TikTok and social are great marketing platforms, right. So you’ve got to thread the line in terms of your reliance on social, it's got to be for marketing, building your brand, but you still have to get out in the clubs in work. There is a generation of comedians with an overdependence on social that are not necessarily putting in the work at the clubs to really develop the stand-up. What happens is what they do on TikTok, that doesn't translate when you get to the stage, like the gags and the physical stuff like that. When you get onstage and you got a live audience, a lot of that stuff doesn't translate to stand-up. So you have to understand and be able to work both but understanding what you're doing on TikTok isn’t going to necessarily work on a stage in front of an audience.
You go back with with Kev for at least a decade, almost decade and a half right? Was Laugh At My Pain the first project that you worked with him on?
No, it was Seriously Funny.
I still think of Laugh At My Pain as Kevin’s peak — what made it also such a great peak was the fact that, you were at Codeblack at the time, not Hartbeat. You were able to convince him to break not just from Comedy Central, but to put it in theaters. What was that conversation like that you had with Kevin back then?
Kevin started as a true stand-up. So then social media was just starting to come around. So we started working in social media to build from our brand, but the conversations that when we filmed Laugh At My Pain we looked at it, and said, oh wow, this seems big. It was just a hunch that it could be bigger than just putting it on like, say Comedy Central. So what we did is we took it around to the studios, and we shopped it around, and remember Kevin hadn’t had a big movie yet, so he wasn't Kevin Hart, the movie star yet, right?
No, he’d only led a film in Soul Plane at that point.
Exactly. So we took it around to the studios, shopped it. Everybody said no, actually, except for Lionsgate. Lionsgate came back and said we’ll test it in three markets. We felt it was bigger than that. So what we did then, is I went to AMC theaters when they had just launched AMCi, which is an AMC independent program. And I talked to Kev and said let's just do this ourselves. Let's just take it to the theaters. Let's bypass studios, agencies, etc. We’re just goona do it grassroots like we're promoting the show and do this ourselves. And that was really the thing that catapulted everything, because we were so successful with that theatrical release. But the thing is, we were successful without any studio environment. We did it. It was purely independent. And we were able to go nook this into theaters, and we had a $2 million opening weekend — $20,000 per screen average on 100 screens. That was the thing and nobody could believe that we actually pulled that off, but it was just because we took our grassroots marketing to the consumer versus a lot of time with studios, when they think about marketing they go wide and not understanding how to hit their target audience, but we went to our target audience and we hit it and they showed up.
Here’s Hart talking to AMC about taking his film straight to cinemas in 2011:
Now was that the catalyst for sparking a deeper conversation between you and Kevin in terms of not just doing the other stuff you were doing with Codelack but then like, bringing it all together and making Hartbeat Productions?
It was kind of organic, not like we had a conversation, we just kept doing stuff and there was other stuff even outside comedy we were doing. We just kept doing stuff together. I was still under Codeblack but we were still doing stuff because after that release, I actually went in and struck a deal with Lionsgate and Codeblack. So I was still doing the Codeblack but I was still doing Kevin's next release for theatrical release for his stand-up. It wasn't necessarily like there was a sit-down strategy until we launched LOL! is when we made a deliberate — look, I’m going to park Codeblack and launch LOL! streaming. That was a point where we kind of made a conscious decision to really ramp it up.
As a comedy journalist, I have to admit I was slightly skeptical of LOL! when the announcements first came out in 2017. And that comes largely in part because I had remembered Marlon Wayans just a few years earlier when he tried to do something similar with WhatTheFunny and that didn’t go anywhere.
I remember that.
What did you learn from watching that from your perspective that helped make sure that LOL! really didn't fall into the same fate?
We actually could have, almost did, just to be honest with you. We launched, and this is what happened: Lionsgate had what they called a skinny bundle channel they had LOL!, Tribeca Shortlist(Tribeca Film Festival) had a channel, ComicCon had a channel, so there were like four or five channels within Lionsgate, but they were kind of leaning towards being a tech company. And what we found out was when we launched, we had a million downloads on our app in about 30 or 40 days, right? We didn’t have no content. To really keep them, right? So, oh, we don't have enough content now for a subscription model. At the same time, while this is happening, we saw the what I call the rise of Pluto and Xumo into the FAST market. So we pivoted our strategy, scrapped the app, and went to a FAST model, and got into a FAST model right in the beginning. That was a key point from a business standpoint where we says when we changed our model to be FAST versus us trying to be the platform. Let's take the LOL! brand and go where consumers are, whether that’s Pluto, Xumo, Tubi, all these places like that, Roku, let's go to where they're at, Samsung and that's where we kind of started. That's where we saw the success and growth for the platform.
Sounds like Lionsgate has been in your corner for quite a while. I mean, they were the only ones nibbling at Laugh At My Pain but then you said you had a separate deal with them for Codeblack and
Exactly. They were very very supportive in the process.
After that, I know you started filming showcases at Just For Laughs in Montreal. And then a certain point, Kevin got on SiriusXM and then now you've added additional series whether it's Punkie Johnson or Diallo Riddle. What was the most — is it possible to say what was the most pivotal partnership in allowing things to grow as they have?
I would say the most pivotal partnership has been since we separated from Lionsgate because what we did, it was a joint venture we went back out and Kevin we bought a percentage so we could have full control, I would say really to be honest, the most pivotal relationship is that Comcast, NBCUniversal came in and gave us a seed investment and became a minority owner company. That kind of just really helped at that point, because we were operating totally independently so Comcast coming in as a partner and investor was kind of a pivotal point in the growth of the company.
Hearing that it really makes total sense that not only his newest special Reality Check would be on Peacock but Hart to Heart, the talk show and him doing these, whether it's Olympics recaps or Year In Reviews with Snoop Dogg or Kenan Thompson, and there's an LOL! channel on Peacock’s own FAST, too.
So that's the reason. They're a partner of ours.
A lot of people in my business who talk about entertainment right now. If they're not talking about the strikes, whether it's the writer strike or as we're talking now (July 11) the actors might go on strike (they since have). If they're not talking about that, they're talking about the state of the comedy movie. And I wonder what you think of it. Since you've had successes with Kevin and I wonder how much success of comedy movies at the cinema is really just tied to having a movie star?
You could make that argument but if you think about OK, for example, on a smaller scale, but it's financially successful. So The Blackening came out three, four weeks ago. Five million dollar budget, it’s at $17 million. It's a comedy horror movie, but there's no movie stars. So for that investment, that level of talent, that IP is very successful on the theatrical level, especially in an environment right now where it feels like only the big movies are working on a theatrical level. So that was great counter-programming and based on on the financials on it, you have to consider that as a success.
Cocaine Bear also was a big success this year.
When you look at Cocaine Bear, you look at The Blackening, it’s the IP, it’s not necessarily the comedian per se, but there's a theme, there's an IP that to everybody's grabbing on to the theme is what's holding it together with the great concepts. So I don't necessarily think that you have to have a movie star for a successful comedy, theatrically released movie, but you have to have a concept and you have to deliver on the promise that this is gonna be funny and really be able to market it to the consumers to get them to come to the theaters. Because I think what happens now is that the theaters have to feel like an experience because the consumer has so many choices already, so if they feel like they can sit at home and watch it on Netflix or Disney or HBO or something like that, there has to be some reason for them to be like OK, I need to go to the theater to see this for this experience.
I wonder sometimes if my fellow journalists are having the wrong conversation even, because they're worried about whether movies can succeed at the box office, but they're neglecting all of these movies that are doing really well online. We don't know what the numbers are for Die Hart on Roku. We don't know how much money that made you or made them. That new movie on Netflix, The Out Laws? Netflix might make a ton off of that. I don't know.
That's the other challenge for media, because the streamers don't share their numbers, per se. And they might say this is a success, but you don't know what the numbers are like, whether 50 million people watched it or not. They don't report those numbers.
Right. Do they keep them from you also? Or do you have a way of knowing those numbers?
Some stuff we can, but it's not in an official capacity. They'll give us some metrics, but they're not giving us actual numbers. They're not gonna tell us 50 million people watched it. I mean, that, you know, to be honest with you, not to switch gears, but that's one of the gripes of why the WGA is on strike. And it has to with those kinds of things.
Because the numbers are important for your residuals.
Exactly.
I also brushed up on the Netflix docuseries from Kevin Hart, Don’t F— This Up. I was surprised you only make the briefest of cameos in that.
I've been with Kevin over a decade but I try to stay off camera as much as possible.
There's a couple different subplots: One is is Kevin making mistakes, but the other is Kevin just being so busy. That falls a lot on you in terms of being the president of Hartbeat to make sure that all of these projects flourish or can flourish as best they can. And I wonder if in the last few years you've been able to figure out a way to tell Kevin “No”?
Actually, that's not really…Part of it is us also as a company, it’s kind of lessening our reliance on him from a project standpoint. So it's not just Kevin, I think all of us collectively know that in order to build the company, there's only one Kevin Hart so you can’t do 20 things. So it's more of a collective on us and Kevin to create, like, you know, like Dave (on FX/Hulu) — perfect example, we're producers on that, Kevin’s an exec (EP) but he doesn’t do anything. We have to do more of those kinds of things.
Or on ComicView, where he's an EP, but it's Mike Epps who’s hosting.
There you go. Tat’s 100% right.
How many tapings did you have for ComicView?
We did four, we’ll have a limited four-episode series.
Are there going to be more tapings for this revived season?
Nothings scheduled right now, but I’m sure if it does well, we’ll do more.
Jeff, it’s great to catch up with you. I really appreciate it.