‘Project Greenlight’ Review: Issa Rae Leads a Max Season That Starts Slow but Eventually Hits Its Stride

I love HBO’s Project Greenlight because it’s one of the few reality shows designed to document inevitable failure.

Sure, that’s not the spoken aspiration of the series, which launched on the names and star presence of producers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Project Greenlight was created to give an opportunity for an unproven filmmaker to direct a low-budget feature with guaranteed distribution, and for viewers to learn about the filmmaking process through their behind-the-scenes misadventures. Those things, as audiences immediately learned, have absolutely nothing to do with making a good movie. Like the bear playing the violin, it’s entertaining enough that he’s doing it at all, and complaining about his bow posture is almost petty.

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As Issa Rae, executive producer on Max’s new Project Greenlight reboot, diplomatically puts it, “The films of Project Greenlight past have… been OK? You know? So we want to make sure that ours is actually a great film.”

The films of Project Greenlight have not, in fact, been “OK.” Stolen Summer and The Battle of Shaker Heights give “generic Sundance indie” a bad name. The Leisure Class is awful, though at least it’s bad in a strangely ambitious way. Only the season three Project Greenlight entry Feast is above-average, mostly because the producers decided that season to do an exploitation splatter film and that’s exactly what director John Gulager delivered. It shouldn’t be surprising that, if you look at subsequent credits for the show’s winners, Gulager has worked steadily and the others… have not.

If Gray Matter, the film produced as part of the fifth Project Greenlight season, is ACTUALLY a great film, the 10-episode season did a dazzling job of obscuring any hints of any element that could make it so. All signs, in fact, point to it probably being a disaster of a very small and low-pressure sort. And that’s OK! Gray Matter only exists because a TV show allowed it to exist, so did it yield a good season of TV?

Not bad — though if one of the lessons of Project Greenlight has always been that filmmakers have to learn to reconcile the difference between vision and practical reality, this is not a season that embodies or reflects that itself.

More than anything, this season of Project Greenlight feels like it was a well-earned direct response to the controversy from the 2015 season — specifically the disagreements between producer Effie Brown and Damon regarding diversity and inclusion in the pre-production process, and then racial stereotyping in the actual storytelling process.

Mentors Rae, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Kumail Nanjiani went into the season determined to cast a female director and, based on the first episode in which 10 finalists are winnowed down to veteran trailer editor Meko Winbush, they also wanted a director of color. At the same time, in the hopes of making this season’s resulting film closer to Feast than The Leisure Class, they handed the winning filmmaker a thoroughly amorphous script about a teenage girl with psychic powers and her relationship with her single mother — a script written by a white man that, based on what we see, has absolutely no distinctive elements at all.

One of the amusing aspects of Project Greenlight has always been that once the cameras start rolling, the show becomes much less interesting.

I don’t blame the producers of Project Greenlight for setting aside nearly six full episodes for selection and pre-production. This is the window that gave us the Damon/Brown fight, a casting showdown between Emile Hirsch and Shia LaBeouf, and whole episodes of arguing over shooting on film.

But you’ve gotta learn to adapt, Project Greenlight has taught me, and there definitely isn’t half-a-season of quality television in the selection and pre-production process on Gray Matter. I know Max — dead-named “HBO Max” throughout the season with a frequency that surely makes David Zaslav’s head spin — ordered 10 episodes, but there’s a great six-episode season of Project Greenlight here.

In the premiere, the 10 finalists have to direct a scene from the lackluster Gray Matter script, and Winbush’s scene is the best. Easy! In her interview with producers, though, Winbush is unable to articulate how she would personalize the bland script or any of the changes she would make. The producers all nod and go, “Sure, she isn’t confident or specific in her vision, but maybe that will come.” What follows is five episodes in which we see, at least a dozen times, the producers and mentors tell Winbush their concerns about the script and nod with growing consternation at her indecisiveness. Those concerns are so completely identical to their concerns while seeing the film in production and then seeing rough cuts of the film that we’re treated to an extended montage of conversations that sound alike. It could have all been covered in one episode.

Speaking of failures to adapt, it’s hard to know if the plan was always to have Rae, Nanjiani and Prince-Bythewood be such limited parts of the show. But thanks to Rae’s acting responsibilities on Barbie, Nanjiani’s commitments to Welcome to Chippendales and Prince-Bythewood’s post-production schedule on The Woman King, the mentors are presented as more busy than helpful. Rae’s Hoorae shingle is producing Project Greenlight so that keeps her involvement relevant. She’s funny and thoughtful and too invested to feel honest. Prince-Bythewood and Winbush are immediately simpatico, so that keeps her invested. She absolutely comes across as any young filmmaker’s best texting buddy. It’s much harder to know whether, at any point, Nanjiani was expected to have more connection or value. All three mentors share a common, “This is what we signed on for?” expression throughout.

Past seasons have thrived not on the big-name mentors but on showcasing the personalities of various development executives, professional coddlers or truth-tellers relishing the spotlight. There is no breakout star from Hoorae or Catchlight Productions, as even they seem to move from enthusiasm to resignation to damage control at the repetitive note-giving. Still, I have to salute any show that builds drama around an introverted production designer or a hopelessly optimistic post-production supervisor.

Unlike previous seasons, this Project Greenlight hits its stride as Gray Matter hits production, specifically with the butting of heads between the Project Greenlight and Gray Matter crews. It’s an escalating series of aggressions that may be the definitive illustration for why, no matter what anybody may hope, Project Greenlight will never actually yield a great movie. Whether it’s the HBO executive taking Winbush to task for removing her microphone pack to talk to actors or the simmering war between the first assistant director of the movie and the cinematographer on the TV show, it’s incredibly illuminating and completely entertaining in ways that the first half of the season fails to be.

Project Greenlight has always been about how hard it is to make movies, and this season is at its best when it’s about how hard it is to make a television show about how hard it is to make a movie. Since 10 episodes proved to be too many here and since I love Project Greenlight and would love to get more seasons, a proposal: Perhaps the next season should be six episodes, but the TV crew should be followed by a documentary crew making a two-hour movie about the making of the show? Maybe THAT movie about the TV show about the inevitably not-great movie would be great?

I am not a crackpot.