Indie Success Story: The View from Muck Media

Mariana van Zeller and Cristina Costantini spoke at the TV Real Festival today, offering insights into how Muck Media, founded by five friends, has assembled a portfolio of some of the buzziest factual shows on linear and streaming, including Trafficked on National Geographic, Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful on Netflix and Sally on Hulu.

You can watch my conversation with van Zeller and Costantini, two of Muck’s five co-founders, here.

“We all worked together in different capacities at other companies before and instantly became best friends, realized we liked working together and wanted to think of a way that we could keep working together,” said van Zeller on Muck Media’s origin story.

“We want to treat people well, treat each other well, and we want the drama to be on screen,” Costantini said of the company’s overall ethos. “The production company exists so that we can make good stories. We understood that controlling the money oftentimes means controlling the quality of what you’re able to make and the editorial of what you’re able to make. The production company exists so that the five of us can make stories that we think are good and important. Oftentimes, they have some kind of civic underpinning, some issue or injustice that we’re trying to address. Some of our stories are very, very dark, and some are very light.”

The production company operates as a “filmmakers’ collaborative,” van Zeller noted.

“We’re all rowing in the same direction and rooting for each other,” Costantini added. “This industry is hard, but we act as a support system for one another and we work on all of one another’s stuff. We all have different talents and skill sets.”

For example, fellow co-founder Jeff Plunkett is the showrunner of Trafficked, the acclaimed series van Zeller hosts on National Geographic, which is up for a slew of News and Documentary Emmys next week. Over five seasons, van Zeller and her team have used the show to investigate black markets across the globe.

“Every single black market—scams, guns, drugs, assassins, crypto scams. We thought that as time went by, it would get easier, but it’s always hard. We’re trying to convince people who are hiding to get them to speak on camera. These black and gray markets occupy a third of the world economy. It has an enormous impact on our lives. We’re giving people an opportunity to peek behind a curtain and see what happens, why they exist, who the operators are and what we can do to stay safer and create a better world.”

Speaking to the diversity of the Muck Media slate, one of Costantini’s most recent projects was Netflix’s Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, following the pop star on tour. “My background is in investigative journalism, so the idea of following a pop star around seemed like a piece of cake. It was not! A tour doc is a hard thing to make. It’s a real marathon. And it was a great privilege to get to be with her when she broke every record for Latinas ever in her stadium tour.”

Costantini’s latest, meanwhile, Sally, explores the life of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

“Two women who could not be more different, but both of them navigating what it means to be a famous woman in power, and all the complications that come with that as a real person,” Costantini said.

On how they are responding and adjusting to the needs of the market, van Zeller noted, “It’s impossible not to be paying attention, but at the end of the day, we try to stay true to ourselves and the stories that we’re ultimately interested in doing. We didn’t come into this business to chase money. We are privileged to do the work that we do, and we hope that the work we’re doing has some sort of impact on the world. You can be really good at being a filmmaker, but if you don’t also know how to read a contract or sell the pitch or figure out creative ways of finding financing…there’s so much more that as a filmmaker you have to be good at or at least you have to learn.”

Costantini added: “We always have one eye on what the market is saying they want. But if you’re chasing the market, oftentimes by the time you put your pitch together and get it out in front of somebody, they’re chasing the next thing that they’ve been told they need to be chasing. To a certain extent, we are guided by our inherent sense of what a good story or a meaningful story is. And what we want to make. We try to find the overlap of those things constantly. And we don’t just do something because that’s what people say they’re buying. We do something because it’s meaningful, because we would do it anyway, and it happens to be, hopefully, in the list of five bullet points that this week, the network says they want to buy.”

Muck Media, like many production companies, is also finding ways to embrace YouTube, launching its first channel with a new podcast from van Zeller. “In a market like ours right now, where it’s so hard to get your stuff commissioned, I’m excited about this new opportunity. I have this Rolodex of people that I’ve interviewed in these black markets—criminals, former criminals, law enforcement experts—and I want to be able to interview them at length and share some of my own stories. We’re hoping that from that comes a lot of IP. We have these incredible stories. We’re not only exploring YouTube, we’re also going into the scripted world as part of the IP that we’ve created with all our reporting. There’s a lot to be scared about at the moment, but also a lot to be excited about for the future.”

“People will always want good stories,” Costantini added. “We’re going to try to find ways to do it in the way that we’re proud of in these different mediums. So, YouTube, TikTok, all of it, I think it’s exciting if you’re down to play in the sandbox.”

Daswani asked van Zeller and Costantini for some closing words of advice for other indie creatives navigating the business today. Embrace all the platforms out there, they said, and make sure you have an abundance of skill sets.

“It used to be that if you just knew how to pick up a camera and tell a story and edit, that would be enough,” van Zeller said. “No longer. You really have to figure out how to read a contract, how to sell, how to find financing and how to play in the sandbox of all these new mediums. At the end of the day, our biggest advice is determination and keeping at it because you’re going to get millions of no’s. We are used to getting rejected constantly. So, persistence but also optimism.”

Costantini added: “Find community—collaborators who will stick with it with you.”