EXCLUSIVE: Former Endeavor Content partner Christine D’Souza Gelb has teamed with Killer Films production exec David Hinojosa and manager Kevin Rowe to launch 2AM, a new production and management venture that gets off the ground with backing from A24.
The company launches with designs on managing filmmaker clients, and producing projects primarily in the film and television space. For prestige distribution company A24, that marks its first foray in investing in a management concern. Sources said there will be an arms length relationship between the two companies with no first look deal.
The catalyst for the new company is D’Souza Gelb, who spent 15 years at a top agent in film financing and sales as a partner at Endeavor Content, before surprising colleagues last May with an internal note that she would stop being an agent. She wanted to take some time and plot a course change, and early this fall she began putting together 2AM. She drafted Hinojosa and Rowe to be founding partners. In addition to running the venture, D’Souza Gelb will manage some of her longtime filmmaker clients. That will include Radha Blank, who wrote, starred in and directed the breakout film The Forth-Year Old Version.
Hinojosa will be Head of Production, after spending a decade at Killer Films working alongside Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler. Films he has produced include Oscar-nominated First Reformed, Still Alice and Carol, as well as Vox Lux, Shirley and the upcoming Zola.
Rowe ran the boutique management company Elia, and he will bring his full roster of clients to the management side, where he will continue developing and producing with them. Those clients include Ari Aster, the Hereditary helmer who most recently directed Midsommar for A24, Janicza Bravo (Zola, Lemon), and playwright Jeremy O’Harris (Slave Play).
Among other key hires coming aboard are Zach Nutman, who’ll be on the Production team and who worked in acquisitions at Neon before joining Animal Kingdom as the Director of Development across film & TV. Cameron Washington also joins as a manager, coming from Donald Glover and Hiro Murai’s Guava Island, and before that a manager at Management 360. Amelia Shugrue was recently promoted to Manager after working with Rowe for a number of years supporting his clients, this after starting her career at A24 in publicity.
Among the other clients 2AM starts with are A.V. Rockwell (the upcoming A Thousand And One at Focus), Christopher Makoto Yogi (who directed the just wrapped Sundance competition feature I Was A Simple Man), Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Meryam Joobeur (Oscar-nominated short Brotherhood), and Keisha Rae Witherspoon & Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, whose short film T won the Golden Bear at the last Berlinale.