
Rustic Canyon’s dining room
Jack Coltrane
Josh Loeb has spent the past two decades surviving the high-risk, low-margin, passion-driven local restaurant business with his pioneering farm-to-table restaurant Rustic Canyon, which has become a Santa Monica classic. Now, he’s turned to a similarly precarious second act: independent filmmaking, with his directorial debut, In Spite of Ourselves, debuting Friday in limited release at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and the Westside’s Landmark Nuart Theatre to follow Oct. 16. It’s a wry, winsome romance featuring a meet-cute over a cinnamon bun, and a hospitality-vet love interest based on his ex-wife, the pastry chef Zoe Nathan.
“I can’t help it, I have this stubborn, idealistic streak,” Loeb says. “I can only open and operate the restaurants I want to spend time in and make the kinds of films that I want to see. Even if the marketplace isn’t easy for them.”
Rustic Canyon — which regularly draws the likes of Michael Mann and Larry David, as well as Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann on a date night — turns 20 this fall. It’s celebrating in October with a series of bring-the-band-back-together-again dinners highlighting old hands, including the critically acclaimed chefs Jeremy Fox (now at Edna in San Luis Obispo) and Evan Funke, who’s since made his name with the local coterie of Italian restaurants Felix, Mother Wolf and Funke. “What Josh was trying to do at Rustic, and is still trying to do, is the hardest thing: Instill true sense-of-place and conviviality,” explains Funke. “His intention was to build the quintessential neighborhood restaurant, and that’s what he’s done.”

Rustic Canyon’s dining room
Jack Coltrane
Loeb named Rustic Canyon after the tony Westside neighborhood where he grew up, tucked between Brentwood and the Pacific Palisades. While in college at Berkeley, studying English and film (his favorite movie: the culinary classic Big Night), he became entranced by Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse and Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Kitchen. After a post-grad stint reading scripts in New York, he decided he wanted to bring their spirit home. “I just loved their idea of food at that level, delivered in a non-fancy way,” he says. “There’s a way it makes you feel.” Nathan’s father, Stephen, the Bones showrunner, describes the appeal as “like going to someone’s house for dinner, where you just know the food is going to be great and everyone will be comfortable. You can relax.”
Loeb’s family, which includes brother Dan (now the billionaire hedge funder), was always food focused. “I had my bar mitzvah lunch at Michael’s,” he recalls of the Santa Monica standard-bearer of California cuisine. “Michael [McCarty], who’s a friend now, gave me a bottle of Bordeaux then, at 13, that would be maximizing when I turned 21. It was really very thoughtful.”
Farm-to-table, hyper-seasonal, organic-oriented cooking has become a cliché. When Rustic Canyon opened, sourcing from the nearby Santa Monica Farmer’s Market and other independent local vendors, it was still pioneering. Loeb and Nathan made it easier for other L.A. restaurants to follow them. “They demanded better eggs, better milk, better flour — at scale,” says Karen Beverlin, vice president of specialty sales for FreshPoint Produce. “None of those things were available in Southern California at the time they started with Rustic. Their impact isn’t only on their own restaurants, but how they’ve influenced food service in our entire region.”

Dishes at Rustic Canyon
Alex Scott
Loeb’s deceptively modest notion of what he’s always been after with Rustic Canyon is specific. “For some people, ‘neighborhood restaurant’ means you come in and get the same thing every Friday,” Loeb says. “I would be so bored by that. For me, it’s like, ‘I know there’s always going to be a chicken and a fish and a steak and maybe a pasta and a few salads and a few interesting appetizers and some greens — but I don’t know what exactly they’re going to be, or how they’re going to be served.’ Just that they’ll be excellent.” Director Ed Zwick, a neighbor during Loeb’s childhood in Rustic Canyon, affirms the point: “I’m trying to think of how many other restaurants that I’d go to where I’d just order a chicken. Then they’ll do a reduction on it that’s very special.”
Nathan, who now operates The Dutchess and Three Birds in the industry-favored getaway town of Ojai, says, “what’s cool about Rustic is that it continues to evolve. We’ve all had a mom who suddenly got really into Moroccan food. But it’s still the same mom, and she’s still having the same conversation with you across the table. As we would bring in new chefs over the years, it was about having somebody cook with the same values, whether that was expressed as Persian or Italian or Californian cuisine.”
What are the values? According to Loeb, “we used to have shirts printed for Rustic. They said ‘Simple Ain’t Easy,’ which I think encapsulates it.”
Yet, as the years pass, everything has become more difficult. Like every other restaurant in L.A., Rustic Canyon has dealt with rising costs for everything from labor and ingredients to insurance, along with persistent bureaucratic challenges. There’s also been the one-battle-after-another of the Covid pandemic, industry strikes, streaming collapse, corporate layoffs, and, most recently, the 2025 wildfires. 30 percent of Rustic Canyon’s clientele lived in the Palisades, many of whom are still displaced.
Hollywood’s doom cycle is felt at the restaurant, along with others in Loeb’s since-expanded hospitality group, which also includes fellow Santa Monica spots Milo & Olive, Huckleberryand Sweet Rose Creamery, as well as the since-shuttered Esters and Cassia.Not long ago, 40 percent of diners were from the industry. Now it’s 25 percent. “There’s less expense accounts, less group orders, less big events,” he says. Then there’s other trends, including appetite-dampening GLP-1s, sober living and delivery app culture. “You don’t choose a place like Rustic for delivery,” he says. “That’s not what it’s about.” Loeb observes, more broadly, “All these things make it much more difficult to operate. There’s a lot of headwinds.” (His Midwestern-Jewish place Birdie G’s and Mexican concept Talullah’s have closed in recent years.)

Conor Leslie and Brett Dier in Loeb’s directorial debut, In Spite of Ourselves.
LMNL Productions
For now, Loeb’s turned his attention mostly to film, launching a production company to develop the kinds of character-driven, tender projects that major studios and streamers aren’t prioritizing anymore. “With [In Spite of Ourselves], when we screened it at the Playhouse in Ojai, people kept saying it felt like one of their favorite movies from the Eighties or Nineties — something in the tradition of what John Hughes or Rob Reiner or Nora Ephron made. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
As for Rustic, Loeb sees its philosophy of change — over seasons and years — as key to its persistence, despite the many challenges it faces. “I love that Bob Dylan quote, ‘Either you’re busy being born or you’re busy dying,’” he says. “That’s restaurants, too.”
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Production company Anonymous Content is entering a new era where they are looking to become a financier in the film marketplace, rather than just a “fee-for-hire production company,” which will allow them to finance their own projects.
For one of the new projects, announced during the Bloomberg Screentime conference Thursday, Anonymous has commissioned author Nicholas Boggs, to write the script for a feature film adaptation of Boggs’ Baldwin: A Love Story, along with his partner, author Marlon James, author of The Disappearers. The project will be co-produced with Higher Ground.
Additionally, the company, backed by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, said it will look to move into live events including Broadway and potentially move into the content creation space. This comes after the Emerson Collective made a “material investment” in the company in January, alongside Walker’s appointment as CEO.
“So there’s no doubt that the content creators, these independent content creators, figuring out how to have a portal to that community, that community of writers, that community of creators in places that we don’t normally go, and making sure we have team members who can have tentacles in those places,” Walker said. “And then looking at things like theatrical, and looking at different ways for us to work. And when I say theatrical, I mean Broadway. I mean live events.”
As part of this new era, under Walker, who joined in January after serving as the president of the Ford Foundation, the company is also reconstituting the board, with Jobs joining as a board member, alongside former HBO CEO Richard Plepler.
“We have been a fee-for-hire production company. We have not invested for the most part. We have not been lead, in part because we haven’t invested. The board now and Emerson has made it possible for us to become a financier in the market, so we’ll be able to co-finance, finance, take the lead in financing in film,” Walker said.
“It’s necessary because fee-for-service is a bad way to build a company,” Jobs added.
They added that this will mean the balance sheet for the company will increase, but that the company will have “an envelope” with which to make the financing decisions.
“It’s is a slight, subtle change in priorities when you look for excellence, when you look for the highest quality, when you look for material that moves humans and touches us and stays inside us and reminds us of what we’re capable of, if that’s your number one, and then making money is number two, then you actually end up making films that people really want to see that,” Jobs said.
More to come.
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“I guess we should just start at the beginning, and tell us how this happened,” New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim asked filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim at a Q&A after a screening of You Can See Everything on Wednesday night.
It was the second public showing of the documentary, which was filmed in and over years and blew the roof off the Telluride Film Festival (see Deadline review). It’s a hard-to-describe flow of verité filmmaking unspooling in real time at the San Diego home of disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she reported to Bryan federal prison in Texas. The Stanford dropout and Theranos founder is still serving a 10-year sentence for defrauding investors in the high-profile case.
Fielder and Oppenheim said the project, oddly, was launched during a magic show the two friends attended in L.A. in 2023, at the height of Holmes’ notoriety. “A magician there asked for a celebrity’s name, and someone called out ‘Elizabeth Holmes’,” Oppenhiem said. “I was like, so interesting. Elizabeth Holmes.” He said he “had just heard that she was looking for someone to document her life and that she had reached out to A24.”
Fielder was also curious. “I knew that she hadn’t… spoken to anyone in, I think, seven years. Total silence.” He didn’t necessarily see a documentary brewing “because it felt like the story was very told. But I was really curious to meet her, just as a personal thing.”
Holmes’ epic rise and fall was the subject of an HBO documentary and a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried.
Fielder called A24, and went to meet Holmes. “I remember having this weird experience… where I’m like, “She seems so genuine at times. But then I’m like, no… I know she’s a liar… It was a weird mental thing.” Homes has always insisted she did nothing wrong.
She agreed to let the cameras into the home she shares with with her partner Billy Evans and their two young children.
Fielder made no promises to A24. “We don’t know what the story is. But we want to see what happens,” he said. The studio said, “‘OK, that’s fine. And if you want to pull the plug anytime, you can.’ Which was amazing.”

L-R: Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder and the New York Film Festival’s Dennis Lim
Jill Goldsmith/Deadline
They started filming. “And after, Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there, and we’d completely disagree on… what we thought was happening. And we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting, if we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”
The filmmakers ultimately moved from one camera to three, shooting 16 hours a day with two small crews of which no more than four individuals were in the house at any one time. “We had a wide lens that would cover the whole house so if something happened, we wouldn’t miss it. And then the other two … lenses could be wide but then also zoom, so we could basically capture everything,” said Oppenheim.
“We were trying… essentially, to just take all the pressure away from any moment, so they wouldn’t really know what we were interested in necessarily.”
“Actually, we didn’t always either,” Fielder added.
“One thing we realized with the [initial] one camera that’s panning, which you see in some of the earlier scenes, is that the moment you say something to someone you want to see their face the moment they hear it. Especially in a movie like this, where you’re trying to evaluate if someone’s being honest or not. And when you have to swing, you’re missing a few seconds. And you realize this is maybe a problem in this kind of thing,” Fielder said.
He himself went from solely behind the camera to very much on, registering reactions to Holmes, including to her circular responses to questions like did she know her claims about Theranos’ blood-testing kit were false.
Fielder said he has no idea why she and Evans granted them the access they did.
“It’s so hard to understand… Maybe there was a sense that inviting someone who was a friend of theirs, no one would take that seriously. So I don’t know. It’s so hard to speculate as to why.”
You Can See Everything opens in theaters October 16.
“I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder said. “Why I’m excited for the movie to come out is I’m really curious to hear what everyone else thinks and what they make of certain things. I think it will actually help me understand… So I’ve been looking forward to this release for a while.”
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River, the IFC title that Universal and Blumhouse acquired out of TIFF Midnight Madness for $10M, is getting a Friday, Jan. 15, 2027 theatrical release.
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