GENO MCDERMOTT

PRESIDENT, US UNSCRIPTED TELEVISION - eOne & Hasbro

EMMY AWARD WINNING FILMMAKER - Blackfin

Geno McDermott is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker and executive producer with Television Academy Honors. He is also an angel investor, with a stake in Talkhouse Encore, a ready to drink canned
cocktail and has a growing real estate portfolio.
Geno was selected as Realscreen’s Factual Under 40, he’s built a multi-million dollar independent company to acquisition and has worked as a senior executive of a $10 billion market cap company.
Driven by business, creativity and a relentless pursuit of vision and execution, Geno is US President of Unscripted for Entertainment One, a Hasbro wholly owned subsidiary and founder of Emmy-winning nonfiction production company, Blackfin. Geno’s most notable credits include directing Netflix’s Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and executive producing Netflix’s Tiny Creatures, History’s Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre and CNN’s Jerusalem: City of Faith and Fury.

EONE & HASBRO

eOne’s nonfiction series & documentary film unit based in the US focuses on the development and production of best-in-class premium nonfiction content across all genres and platforms for the domestic and international markets. Geno oversees this group, along with eOne’s extensive slate of Hasbro driven series in which he is Executive Producing Easy Bake Battle (Netflix) and Lincoln Log Project (Roku) along with the definitive 50th Anniversary Dungeons and Dragons documentary which eOne is financing and directed by Joe Manganiello and Kyle Newman.

BLACKFIN

Geno founded Blackfin in 2014 out of a tiny WeWork office. Brick by brick, he bootstrapped the company to a slate of 10 active series in production and over 100 employees with as much as $30m in yearly revenue.

Geno is responsible for premium productions such as the Television Academy Honors recognized documentary film Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre (a History & Hulu co-Production) directed by Peabody and Emmy Award winner Stanley Nelson and Peabody and duPont-Award winner Marco Williams and executive produced by NBA star Russell Westbrook; Emmy winning natural history series Tiny Creatures (Netflix); epic docu-drama series Jerusalem: City of Faith & Fury (CNN) which premiered at number one in cable news.

Other notable series include Blackfin’s first international, dual-language production Mi Vecino El Cartel (Vix+), Executive Produced by Selena Gomez; Discovery+/ID’s franchises The Murder Tapes (70 Episodes) and Disappeared (Season 11), and premium limited series Murdaugh Murders: Deadly Dynasty, Chasing Ghislaine, Unseamly: The Investigation of Peter Nygård, and many more.

FILMMAKER

In 2017, Geno was passionate about directing a feature length documentary and decided to self finance a $375,000 production budget for his directorial debut My Perfect World: The Aaron Hernandez Story. The film was accepted to the acclaimed DOC NYC film festival in 2018 and was acquired by Netflix.

Along with Netflix and partners MakeMake Entertainment, Geno and Blackfin expanded the feature length documentary to a 3-part series entitled Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez which was viewed by over 18 million people in its first 10 days on Netflix and became the streamer’s most watched documentary in 2020, even ousting Tiger King and Last Dance.

MAN IN A VAN

The legend of how McDermott’s eel show came to fruition and his prowess for single handedly producing high sizzle reels made its way across the unscripted industry. After a short stint at Zodiak, where Geno’s sizzle reels led to series he created at National Geographic and Esquire, networks started approaching McDermott for an overall deal.

With offers from National Geographic, Animal Planet and History, Geno took a first-of-its-kind offer from History which challenged him to create 5 separate potential series from across the country for a $100,000 budget. The deal was called Man in a Van because McDermott would load his gear into a Ford F150 and conquer these sizzles on the road for an entire year driving from Vermont to North and South Carolina over to Louisiana and up to Missouri. It was on this journey, Geno started to contemplate opening his own production company.

THE SIZZLE KING

Television series and films were typically sold on paper, until the process was revolutionized by modern technology when Canon released the 5D Mark II DSLR in 2012 which was an affordable consumer camera that shot premium quality footage. Simultaneously, editing software became more beginner friendly and could be operated on small MacBooks for the first time ever.

Geno helped pioneer the movement from selling shows on paper to sizzle reels becoming the industry standard. In the Spring of 2012, McDermott read an article in the NY Times about an elver eel fishery in Maine that became a goldrush where a single fisherman could make upwards of $40,000 in one night. The entrepreneurial spirit inspired Geno to take a risk and max out a credit card purchasing a 5D Mark II package, audio equipment, an iMac edit station and drive to Maine to make a sizzle reel. In just a few days, Geno was able to turn around a full cast of eel fishermen and sales tape of what they do. William Morris Endeavor partnered McDermott with Left/Right productions where they sold the project to Animal Planet announced as Eels of Fortune.

THE EARLY ENTERPRENEUR

McDermott grew up in South Jersey knowing he wanted to be in entertainment but did not have a single connection in the business. And so, Geno took to Craigslist in search of an unpaid internship in New York City which landed him at the sports documentary production company, Red Line Films. For 6 months, Geno would commute 4 hours round trip per day from his grandma's house near Trenton, New Jersey to Soho interning across several projects for a $50 daily stipend. ESPN green lit their 30 for 30 franchise and enlisted Red Line Films to produce the director’s statements for all films, Geno was hired to direct the interviews and manage the graphics package.

Over the course of 3 years, it was by spending countless hours in the edit suite, graphics stations and camera room that Geno built himself into a highly trained television and film production swiss army knife. Whether it was a few hundred dollars for a friend’s wedding video or producing a music video for free to expand his reel, Geno stayed beyond the normal work day and tackled side projects into the early hours of the morning. Because of this, Geno could go into the field by himself, find cast, film with them and return to edit premium content all with his own hands, a rare skill set.

PRESS

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