EXCLUSIVE: Mark Webber and Jennifer DeLia have partnered to launch Beyond Culture, an artist-led production banner, unveiling their initial slate.

Beyond Culture is billed as a company integrating film, art, music, technology and experience, which will champion uncompromising voices and stories that expand consciousness, provoke convention and transcend mediums. Built around a model that prioritizes creative ownership and greater financial control for artists, the company takes inspiration from the original United Artists, founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith in 1919 to give artists greater autonomy over their work.

The founding partners will celebrate the launch with a panel, live performance and reception taking place as part of the Speakers’ Summit Series at the 2026 Toronto Film Festival.

Beyond Culture launches with a slate that includes Webber’s Figments of Freedom, executive produced by global recording artist Sia; DeLia’s Mary Pickford: Love Wild, produced by DeLia, Jack Cook, Julie Pacino and Nitsa Benchetrit; documentary series Painting in the Dark; and the company’s namesake series, Beyond Culture.

In Figments of Freedom, written, directed by and starring Webber, a Marine goes AWOL, burns his life to ash, and vanishes into America’s fractured heart. Haunted by war and chasing ghosts of himself, he drifts through a divided nation that might be the only mirror left to find himself. Currently in post, the film also stars Afia Fields, Eugenia Yuan and Winona LaDuke.

Mary Pickford: Love Wild is DeLia’s surrealist exploration of the life of pioneering actress, producer and United Artists co-founder Pickford. Sophie Kennedy Clark plays the title role, starring alongside Cary Elwes, Scott Haze, Balthazar Getty, Summer Phoenix, Fran Kranz, Mike Sirow, Adam Fergus, Luke Arnold, Allie McDonald, Jeroen van Koningsbrugge, Brionne Davis, Jane Stiles, Josephine de La Baume, Heath Freeman, and singer Angela McCluskey as Mary’s mother, Charlotte Pickford.

The Pickford project was shot by DP Dan Kneece, whose career included collaborations with David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. Kneece passed away unexpectedly just five weeks after completing additional photography on the film; Freeman and McCluskey also passed away before its completion. Following a creative pause, the film has now entered its final stage of post-production.

Docuseries Painting in the Dark follows muralist Joel Bergner, aka Joel Artista, CEO and co-founder of Artolution, whose large-scale collaborative works span more than 30 countries across five continents. From refugee camps to prisons and underserved communities around the world, Artista uses collaborative art-making as a force for connection, expression and social transformation.

Beyond Culture is also currently developing a namesake series — a reality-documentary hybrid that takes artists and cultural figures beyond persona and into radical self-exploration. The inaugural journey, produced by Brody Baker and shot by Cameron Dunbar, follows Orange Is the New Black actor Taryn Manning alongside hosts DeLia and Taylor Olandt through a spiritual marathon of healing practices. Through tantra, breath, mantra and sweat, layers of identity are stripped away, revealing the human being beneath the public perception.

DeLia and Webber bring decades of combined experience across film, art and culture to their new company.

A director, producer and actor, DeLia’s credits include the films Billy Bates, Abracadabra and Aligned, as well as the Off-Broadway production Phoenix, starring Julia Stiles and James Wirt. She has also directed music videos for artists including Dr. John, Bobby Rush and Amadou & Mariam, created live experiences at Cannes, Berlin, TIFF, Sundance and New York Fashion Week, and founded Sovereignty Fest.

DeLia observed, “Artists are often asked to surrender some part of their vision in order to participate in the machinery around it. Beyond Culture is about imagining a different relationship between art and commerce, one where creators can remain sovereign, take meaningful risks and create work that has cultural and commercial power without losing the thing that made it alive in the first place.”

Webber, whose acting credits span more than 40 films, has worked with filmmakers including Jim Jarmusch, Todd Solondz, Lynn Shelton, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier, Edgar Wright and Gus Van Sant. As a writer-director, his films have screened at SXSW, Sundance and Tribeca.

“For me, the most meaningful work has always come from protecting the human impulse behind it,” Webber said. “Beyond Culture creates a space where artists can experiment, collaborate and create from a place of truth, rather than reverse-engineering their creativity around what a system thinks it knows how to sell.”

DeLia and Webber first collaborated on Webber’s feature directorial debut, Explicit Ills, with DeLia helping secure the film’s financing. The film went on to win the Audience Award for Narrative Feature and Best Cinematography at SXSW in 2008.

Beyond Culture’s launch event at TIFF will feature artists and collaborators from across its slate, including Senegalese-American singer Marieme, who will also perform. Additional participants include Eugenia Kuzmina (Noon), voice actor Karen Strassman, For Love filmmaker Matt Smiley, Narcos: Mexico actor Brionne Davis, Bergner, Olandt, Webber and DeLia.

EXCLUSIVE: Good American Family is becoming an anthology — Hulu has greenlighted a limited series about Lorena Bobbitt as its second installment. It comes from the same team, led by creator, writer and executive producer Katie Robbins and executive producer Ellen Pompeo.

Shortly after the Good American Family finale aired on April 30, 2025, Pompeo and Robbins started to discuss ideas for expanding the limited series into an anthology, with Lorena Bobbitt quickly emerging as a subject of a followup installment under the Good American Family banner. By June, the project was heating up for a green light.

The cases of Ukrainian-born girl with dwarfism Natalia Grace, which was covered in the original Good American Family, and of Lorena Bobbitt share some similarities — both feature smilingly ordinary families, both tell stories with bizarre elements that made headlines around the world and stayed in the tabloids for months, and both involve two sides with contradicting accounts of the events.

Per Season 2’s official logline, it is Inspired by the ripped-from-the-headlines story of Lorena and John Bobbitt, a Virginia couple who incited a media circus that treated trauma as entertainment, launched a thousand dirty jokes, and ignited a gender war.

In 1993, Lorena severed John’s penis and drove around with it for awhile before throwing it out and calling the police. She explained her actions as triggered by systemic abuse — psychological, physical and sexual — she had allegedly suffered at the hands of her husband.

The infamous incident was the subject of the 2020 I Was Lorena Bobbitt, part of Lifetime’s Ripped from the Headlines TV movie franchise, which was narrated and executive produced by Lorena Bobbitt, with Dani Montalvo portraying her and Luke Humphrey playing John Bobbitt. There was also the 2019 Amazon true crime docu-series Lorena, produced by Jordan Peele, which features interviews with both Lorena and John.

Pompeo and Laura Holstein executive produce under their Calamity Jane banner, alongside Andrew Stearn who also served as EP on the original Good American Family. Pompeo, who played the adoptive mom in Season 1, is not expected to act in the second installment.

Since its March 2025 launch, Good American Family has amassed more than 140M hours streamed globally on Hulu and Disney+.

This marks the second Hulu green light for Robbins and Pompeo this summer; they also have dramedy Chicks starring Pompeo, which received a pilot order in June. Both Good American Family and Chicks are produced by 20th Television, part of Disney Television Studios, which signed Robbins into an overall deal earlier this summer and where Calamity Jane is based.

Robbins also created Apple TV and A24’s dark comedy Sunny, starring Rashida Jones and was a writer-producer on Showtime’s The Affair. She is repped by UTA, Aaron Kogan Management, and Jonathan Shikora of Lichter, Grossman, Nichols.

Pompeo stars in and executive produces ABC’s venerable medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, which is headed into its 23rd season. She also executive produced spinoff series Station 19 and is an executive producer on the upcoming offshoot set in West Texas, which will premiere in midseason 2027. Pompeo is repped by CAA, Linden Entertainment and Hansen Jacobson.