Veteran Producer Tucker Tooley Is Ditching Distributors For His Bitcoin Doc ‘Finding Satoshi’

With three decades of experience producing films like “The Fighter” and “Den of Thieves,” producer Tucker Tooley has seen a lot of trends in Hollywood come and go. But at a time when more indie filmmakers are considering ditching Hollywood entirely and releasing their work on their own, Tooley is taking that route on his upcoming documentary on the mysterious origins of Bitcoin, “Finding Satoshi.”

And by marketing and releasing his film directly to the cryptocurrency community, Tooley tells TheWrap’s Office With a View that he is building a strategy around his film that is in keeping with a core tenet of that community when it comes to Bitcoin: cut out the middleman.

“We’re telling a story about Bitcoin, which really disintermediates traditional finance. If I want to send you a Bitcoin, I’m sending you a Bitcoin. There’s no bank in between me and you and the blockchain,” he said. “The best way to get this movie out in the way that’s most true to the ethos of Bitcoin is direct to consumer, no studio in between.”

Co-directed by Tooley with Matthew Miele and releasing on April 22, “Finding Satoshi” follows private investigator Tyler Maroney and financial journalist Bill Cohan in their efforts to find the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. As seen in the trailer below, the topic of Nakamoto’s identity is one that few in the upper echelons of the tech world were willing to discuss at length.

But over the course of the film, Maroney and Cohan find and present their evidence through interviews, emails, public records and other data that points to who Nakamoto is, and the answer is one that some may not have considered.

“We weren’t doing this to chase trends because the price of Bitcoin was surging when we filmed it,” Tooley said. “We agreed with Bill and Tyler that if we didn’t feel that we could completely stand behind what we found, we wouldn’t show the film.”

Even before our post-monoculture world took hold, understanding how to engage an audience interested in a film’s subject matter is essential for any documentary filmmaker. But with the theatrical market for docs still largely in a deep slump, more filmmakers like Tooley are opting to go through the release process without a distributor, and every film brings its own unique challenges and opportunities.

Tooley spoke with TheWrap about his upcoming film and how he and his team built the strategy of marketing and releasing “Finding Satoshi” on their own. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you always know from the beginning that you wanted to self-distribute “Finding Satoshi”?

We always thought that doing it direct to consumer would be keeping in the spirit of what Bitcoin was made for. Then, as we started to get close to finishing the movie we did have some early conversations with some traditional distributors, and it just became really clear to me that from an ethos and a financial standpoint that the better path for us to have the control and influence that we wanted to have would be just to go direct to consumer.

So there’s not even a third-party VOD platform. It’s through your own website.

Yes, but we also established partnerships with groups like X, Reddit, Substack and Coinbase, and the Coinbase one is interesting because we are offering Coinbase wallet holders a chance to buy the film 24 hours before anyone else. That’s something I think is cool because Coinbase is the largest crypto exchange, certainly in the U.S., and if you have a wallet in Coinbase, hopefully you’re predisposed to liking a doc about the origins of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto.

What went into building these partnerships? Did it take some convincing to get these brands interested in the film?

We started by working with Range, a group that had done a lot of digital marketing in this space and had done direct to consumer before, which I haven’t. But I think our partners came onboard because obviously, there is a core audience in the crypto community for a film like this. But I think they also saw what we saw over the course of making this movie, and it’s that it’s a very human story that can appeal to people beyond the core audience with a mystery that people would be naturally curious about.

It’s a story about this anonymous creator who has a wallet of just over a million Bitcoin that have not been moved or sold since they were first mined. So why? When we started the film in 2020, it was just at the beginning of the bull run during COVID, and a lot of that was driven by institutional investors, and I would think that if they were going to allocate all these resources into Bitcoin, they’d want to try to find out who created it, right?

But as we found out and you see in the film, they haven’t, and not a lot of people even want to talk about it. So we wanted to find out, but not in a gotcha way but in a human way. I wanted to discover the story of the human beings behind this who made this thing, and I think that’s what could get more people interested.

This ties into the whole concept of understanding your core audience, but there are some in the crypto community who don’t want Nakamoto’s identity revealed because it is part of that ethos of anonymity. How do you approach that mindset when outreaching to this community?

You’re right, and that’s something that we saw ourselves making the movie and going on forums. People in the community don’t want to be doxxed. If you don’t want people to know who you are, nobody should reveal that, right? And I somewhat empathize with that. But I think we really conveyed a sense of respect around Satoshi and it’s why the people we’ve shown it to, whether it is the influencers we’ve reached out to in order to spread the word or people we talked to during filming who didn’t want Satoshi to be revealed, have really liked it. It’s not a spiteful reveal. It honors the work Satoshi did leading up to the writing of the white paper and the creation of the code. And I think people will be inspired by that.

You have been involved in the film industry for decades and have seen so many trends, including now when the barrier of entry for making a film is lower than ever but the challenge of finding a significant audience is tougher than ever. If you were releasing “Finding Satoshi” even five years ago, how might the release strategy have changed.

I think it would have been easier certainly to get the film on a streamer, because that’s when there was a huge bull market for docs. Production was still not back up and running due to COVID, the streamers just wanted so much content. I think it would have been a tempting market for a doc like this.

But in the years since then, the doc market has really matured and I think Netflix has found their lane when it comes to docs, and it’s not this film. It’s films with defined good guys and bad guys like “Tiger King” or biographical docs like “AKA Charlie Sheen.” This is more of an old school investigative piece, and with a film like that you have to take it directly to the people most interested in what is being investigated and hope it spreads.

After going completely independent on distributing “Finding Satoshi,” is that something you would consider doing again?

For the right film, yes. I’ve spent a long time making films through the traditional system, and I understand those models pretty well after so many years of doing it. But self-distribution is a bit of the Wild West and a lot of taking that path with “Finding Satoshi” was figuring things out as we go. But what we could fall back on was retaining ownership. This was a low budget film, so we were okay to take the risk to do that and hold on to the film and take an approach that, as we said, was in keeping with the ethos of Bitcoin and its creators that we explore in the film. But I think over the next five to ten years, we’re going to see a lot more self-distribution strategies and a lot more experimentation with what works and what doesn’t, and from that we’re going to see a lot more effective ways for filmmakers to get their work out there.

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