PROXIMITY MEDIA: FOR GENERATING BLOCKBUSTER REVENUES FROM INDIE STORYLINES

USUALLY, ALL-NIGHTERS ARE FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS AND PEOPLE WORRIED ABOUT LOSING THEIR JOBS IF THEY DON'T DELIVER.

- BY CARVELL WALLACE

And if there's one thing that Ryan Coogler—writer, director, and coproducer of Sinners—has demonstrated over his career, it's that he delivers.

Yet on this February afternoon—a day before his blood-soaked Southern Gothic blockbuster would become the most Oscar-nominated project in cinema history—he's sitting across from me in a knit monochrome tracksuit and thick-rimmed glasses, looking rather sleepy.

"My bad, bro," he tells me after briefly losing his train of thought in the middle of a sentence. "I just pulled an all-nighter trying to get a draft in."

The script is for an upcoming TV reboot of the hit 1990s series The X Files, which Ryan is coproducing for Disney+ through Proximity Media, the company he founded with his wife, Zinzi Coogler, and producer and screenwriter Sev Ohanian (no relation to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian). I'm meeting with the three of them at a hotel suite in the Bay Area, where Ryan and Zinzi live, amid a punishing awards-season schedule. Ryan could be forgiven by his partners if a draft were a few days late, but Proximity runs on this kind of commitment. As Zinzi says as she sips her decaf coffee, the founders are basically family, and "you treat your family a little bit differently because you're invested in a different way."

Though the three have been working together since Ryan and Ohanian’s student days at the University of Southern California’s School for Cinematic Arts, they didn’t officially found Proximity until 2021, following Ryan’s catalytic success as the writer and director of Fruitvale Station, Creed, and Black Panther. Since then, the company has grown to some 20 people who work across its film, television, audio, music, and unscripted divisions. Proximity has produced a handful of feature films (Judas and the Black Messiah, Creed III), documentaries, and television shows; Sinners is its first feature film written and directed by Ryan himself.