Propagate & Wall Street Journal Team On GameStop Feature Doc From ‘Baby God’ Director Hannah Olson

Peter White
·2 min read

Propagate, the company behind Hulu’s Hillary, and the Wall Street Journal are the latest companies to explore the recent GameStop financial saga.

Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens’ company is working with The Wall Street Journal Studios on feature doc This Is Not Financial Advice, directed by Hannah Olson, director of HBO’s Baby God.

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It is the latest project in the works on the saga with feature docs from XTR and directors Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci and Console Wars director Jonah Tulsi and Submarine as well as feature films from Netflix, Mark Boal and Noah Centineo, MGM and Ben Mezrich, RatPac and HBO, Jason Blum, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Len Amato.

The project will explore the recent stock market chaos that started with GameStop and has revealed a major power shift on Wall Street. It will examine the origins and inner workings of the digital and social investment communities that turned new investors into millionaires and drove a billion-dollar hedge fund and financial services company to seek capital.

It will be told through the stories of those who lived it and will look at the emergence of a new subculture with roots of distrust in traditional financial institutions and their regulators with exclusive access to key figures within online investment communities.

This Is Not Financial Advice will use reporting from the WSJ. The film, which began production last week, is exec produced by Silverman, Owens, and Jonathan Schaerf, Anthony Galloway and Daniel Rosen with Charles Forelle, financial editor of the WSJ, as consulting producer. Propagate will distribute.

“GameStop sprung from the hurly-burly of an internet message board to become the biggest story in the world,” said Forelle. “It has everything: the cheer-em-on drama of David v. Goliath, the clash of Goliath v. Goliath, high stakes, real money, and the wonderment of our basic financial understanding being turned on its head. The story isn’t over, and there are surely more puzzling turns to come.”

“Access to the markets and investing, in the past, has largely been reserved for the privileged few — you have to have money, time, resources, social capital and know-how to invest. I am interested in the possibility — or impossibility — of its democratization. Who has access to the market? Whom does it serve? We’re still only beginning to glimpse what this moment means for the future of Wall Street,” added Olson. “I’ve been following these forums on social media for weeks, and the ordinary traders I’ve embedded with are extraordinary. Their experiences reveal the legacy of the unresolved anger of the 2008 crash, the vast economic disparities exposed by the pandemic, and what happens when increasing income inequality collides with a bull market.”

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