Defining History Through Indie Film with Chris Everett

Chris Everett is a creative entrepreneur who has done it all in the vein of production and creativity and running it as a business. Join the conversation with me and the founder of Speller St Films, Producer and Director of Wilmington on Fire.

Q. Give us the backstory of your journey from where you were to where you are today producing and directing movies.

I started off doing modeling and acting and got some pretty good gigs in New York and the south. I started to feel like I needed to move to Atlanta and this was before it became the huge entertainment mecca it is today. 

When I moved down there, I stepped away from acting and started paying attention to what the directors and producers were doing and how they put projects together. And I realized that I wanted to tell my own stories that Hollywood wasn’t telling. I actually messed up my first production because I didn’t know what I was doing. It just didn’t work out and I went back to the drawing board until I found the story about the Wilmington massacre of 1898. I did my research and I built a full team of people with experience and then I moved back to North Carolina.

Q. A lot of the audience doesn’t know about what happened in Wilmington 1898. Can you give us some more context about what happened there and what drew you into that story?

Wilmington on Fire is about the Wilmington massacre of 1898 and it changed the course of North Carolina because it ushered in the Jim Crow movement. It was a bloody massacre and an overthrow of the Black government in Wilmington, NC by a white supremacist movement. Following that, they took control of the entire North Carolina legislature and introduced the Jim Crow laws that really hindered African Americans and our rights up until the civil rights movement in North Carolina. These groups set the precedent for racial massacres in other southern cities and states. 

The story was rarely talked about and there was nothing mainstream, so I knew I wanted to tell the story, but during my research I saw that there were several people who started to tell the story, but never followed through. 

Q. Tell me about the journey of making that film, practically.

So initially, I put off the project for a year and then I got laid off in Georgia. It forced me to move back to my hometown in North Carolina, about an hour from where the massacre took place. My camera guy and I spent a good two or three years filming all over the state and Georgia, knocking out interviews and I was also able to connect with some folks like my executive producer Pete Chapman and the director Tariq Nasheed.

I was building a community around me and we were hitting social media hard. We were building and building, but by the end of it, I had no money for post-production. I never let people know that though. I told them, “I got a new trailer, the film’s coming out in the fall, we’re just building up some promotion”. I just kept building anticipation and in doing that, I caught the attention of David Westbrook the now retired NBA star, who was interested in getting the DVD of Wilmington on Fire. After chopping it up with his business manager for a few months, we finally met up after his game in Charlotte. He told me he wanted to get behind this and partner with me and my company to get this done and we did it. We premiered in 2015 and submitted to the Cucalorus film festival in North Carolina, which occurs during the week of the anniversary of the massacre.

Q. This was initially a project and you turned it into a business, can you tell us about that transition and the mindset shifts?

It was interesting because 1) I really wasn’t working anywhere so I had to figure out how to generate an income for myself, but generating income while doing the screenings really gave me some confidence. I said, You know what? Let me go ahead and start a film company, let me research how to do this. I did all my paperwork and registration and made sure everything was in order. Soon after the release of the DVD and streaming, people wanted me to come and speak, so that’s another revenue stream on top of other people wanting me to help them produce or consult on their projects. I was starting to see all these revenue streams this business was creating for myself. I also had to think about what’s next, which is Wilmington 2 and the internet really changed the game. If you have built a following on social media Hollywood will pay attention and I’m a prime example of it.  

Q. What advice would you give to a creative entrepreneur starting out with their passion and want to make a living off of it?

1. Start local. Start where you’re at and build your audience there. That’s what I did for Wilmington. The first four screenings were held there and we made sure everything we promoted concept wise was solid before bringing it to the public. We made a solid minimum viable product (MVP) package. 
2. Get the community involved. Specifically, people who align with the artistic endeavor, like Tariq Nasheed, who did the Hidden Color series. His film was very similar to mine and he had a few of the same people in his project that I had in mine. You have to align yourself with people that are a good fit for your project. 
3. See what you have and figure out the best way to utilize that, whether you write, paint, or film, etc. Utilize locations, equipment, etc. and craft your project around that. You want to make a plan around what you have access to.

Q. What are you working on next?

For starters, people can check out Wilmington on Fire right now on Amazon. There’s also White Beach, Black Beach, on Tubi as well as Amazon, which shows the dichotomy of Harley week and Black Bike week in Myrtle Beach.  We just wrapped Wilmington on Fire Chapter 2, which talks about Wilmington today and the three faces of change going on right now, so we're starting post-production on that in a few weeks. We’re also finishing up a martial arts documentary called, Grand Master, the Vic Moore story of the first professional Black karate champions in the US from the 1960s.  

We also just started a partnership with Preservation North Carolina to do a two-part documentary called, We Built This, which profiles Black builders and architects in North Carolina. I’ve also got the Southern Doc fund, which is my 9-5 that works to really cultivate and promote doc filmmakers in the south and stories about the South. I run the programs there, so if you’re a doc filmmaker or doc artist living in the South, hit me up on LinkedIn and we can chop it up about getting you involved in the Southern Doc fund. 

Q. What’s the common thread for you in terms of stories that you’re drawn to? 

People didn’t understand the connection between the Wilmington story and the martial arts story. What usually draws me in is these Carolina stories about history and culture that’s not really talked about in the mainstream. We’re all connected to the south and those are the stories I will continue to tell.   

Q. Moving onto the funding piece, I would love to hear your thoughts and how your mindset has changed and how you’re funding these projects.

It’s tough. With the first Wilmington film, it was self-funded, meaning I took my last bit of savings and we also did two crowdfunding campaigns. One was for three grand and we barely made the finish line. The second was for fifteen grand to finish post-production, but we only made it to about eight grand. That’s when David West stepped in. Out of that, with making money from the film I was able to shift some of those funds to startup funding for the martial arts film. 

Following the success of Wilmington, people reached out and said I should apply for grants and I got some funding and a fellowship from Firelight Media for the martial arts film, in addition to a bunch of mentorship and access. 

What I’ve built on the grassroots level has really helped show that we have a viable system and products, and we’ve built up an audience all on our own outside of the system and without major funding so a lot of people are interested in seeing what I could do if they gave me some real money. 

Q. How do people connect to you, get in touch and support your work? 

Www.spellerstreet.com and www.wilmingtononfire.com. They have all my social media information there. You can also reach me on LinkedIn at Christopher Everett, I’d love to chop it up over some coffee if you’re in the Durham or Triangle area. 

Check out the full interview below!