Courtesy of Cue & Coda Films
Audio By Carbonatix
If you want to be a player in the film industry, the first step is simple: make a movie.
The team behind Arlington-based production outfit Cue & Coda Films knew they wanted to get in the game long before they founded the company. Charles “Chuck” Harris, the company’s CEO, studied successful film distributors like Blumhouse, A24 and Neon to build a roadmap for the brand. They started with for-hire production work during the COVID pandemic, then moved into television. Eventually, they decided it was time to make their movie.
“I saw the advantage and power of owning your own IP,” Harris tells the Observer. “[We decided] our next project, we have all this knowledge, we’d do it ourselves. And we knew [there’d] be a lot of gatekeepers out there, but I knew the secret.”
The “secret” was making a film for a reasonable budget, but with as much production value as possible. If it looks and sounds like a million-dollar production, the actual budget doesn’t matter; the end result is everything. They wanted to execute at the highest level while tackling issues that don’t even ping on Hollywood’s radar these days.
Cue & Coda’s goal was to tell stories speaking to the contemporary lives of Black Americans. They wanted to create content that was tied to their faith, but not in an overly simplistic or treacly way. It needed to meet the audience where it was, with depth and complexity, engaging with the actual challenges they saw real people dealing with. The plan was to move forward with essentially no marketing budget, relying on “noise” generated through social media and word of mouth to reach people.
Harris and Curshion “CJ” Jones (a co-founder and producer at Cue & Coda) wanted a script that checked as many boxes as possible: affordable, authentic, impactful. Their in-house writer, Taylor Love, wrote a screenplay called Twisted Hearts about three couples going on a retreat together, where an “unorthodox” therapist has them switch partners to learn deeper truths about their relationships. Like Wife Swap, but scripted and filmed for a modern audience.
Jones brought in Michael “Boogie” Pinckney to serve as director. Pinckney previously worked as an assistant director for American film maestro and Oscar winner Spike Lee (25th Hour, Inside Man), as well as celebrated filmmaker Lee Daniels (Precious), bringing the lessons he learned on those sets with him to his own productions. His skillset made him the right man to execute on Cue & Coda’s “small budget, big production value” approach, and gave Pinckney the opportunity to direct his first rom-com.
They wrapped production at the Lone Star Mansion in Burleson in just eight days. They needed two additional days for some pickup shots, but still: an entire feature (the company’s first) filmed in 10 days.
But while Cue & Coda is local to North Texas, and the film was shot in the area, they did not want to host their premiere here. Harris and Jones say that, in their experience, people only recently started taking the Dallas film scene seriously, despite the strong body of work produced here. They wanted to go further afield and see if they could drum up enthusiasm in another market without home-court advantage. They settled on Atlanta, with the premiere in May 2024.
“We didn’t know how good the product was until we went to Atlanta,” Jones says.
The response to the film was better than they could have hoped, and helped them gear up for the next phase of their release: screenings in Los Angeles, Tampa, Atlanta, New York and Dallas. Those also overperformed — Jones says some venues even chose to program extra screenings because they were selling out. They were able to partner with AMC after that, and Twisted Hearts ultimately played in more than 50 theaters. For a new production company launching its first film, that number is a point of pride. Major companies can blast a film into 2,000 theaters in a weekend; a smaller distributor has to go in stages, generating heat, then executing.
It’s something that Cue & Coda hopes to repeat in the future. They have a number of projects in various stages of development, including an upcoming thriller called Harry Hines (with no relation, Jones says, to Harry Hines’ reputation as a sex-work hotspot). They’re also ready to get more involved with the Dallas film scene; they have a track record now, a reputation, and an opportunity to parley that into creating more opportunities for local filmworkers. They made their movie, they found their audience — all that’s left to do now is grow it.
‘Twisted Hearts’ is available to rent from Amazon and Apple TV.
