TPF Q&A: Kevin Lincoln, writer and documentary filmmaker

He plays chess, too.

Kevin Lincoln always wanted to be a writer. Now he produces excellent documentaries on aliens, cats, and other inexplicable phenomena. Storytelling, as we know, transcends genre. He recently launched Good Moves, which is a newsletter about chess in the same way that Without Limits is a movie about running. 

I called him up on a Wednesday afternoon to talk UFOs, Hollywood’s writing crisis, being the OG pivot to video, and which former NFL star called him “skinny jeans” on the reg.

Losing to a teen but smiling while doing so.

Three Point Four Media: So, where are we on aliens?

Kevin Lincoln: I've made two seasons of television totaling close to eight hours on the subject, and I don’t have a great answer for you. From my very amateurish perspective, there’s something weird happening in our airspace. We don't know what it is, or at least, nobody's publicly saying what it is. I don’t think it's dudes from Alpha Centauri who are cruising around. It’s a weirder thing. There is way too much evidence of disruption.

I'll take that. My college advisor’s speciality was the rhetoric of alien abductions. 

That's a good way in. Alien abductions are a very cultural phenomenon, right? I do think studying the way it's described and the way it iterates is a good way to grasp what they are related to as far as fear of nuclear tests or technology or whatever. 

We met a long time ago at Business Insider. Now you’re making documentaries about all kinds of good stuff. How did that happen?

Post this, word for word: I'm the original pivot to video. It started with me. [We laugh.]

My career is a succession of happy accidents. If you put yourself out there and try enough different things, you wind your way to the place you want to be.

I wanted to be a magazine journalist, like John Jeremiah Sullivan. 2011 was an interesting time to get into the business with that kind of ambition. It wasn't totally impossible to do, but the avenues to getting there were much more digital. You had places like Business Insider and BuzzFeed that did offer the opportunity to do compelling original journalism, but they also came along with a lot of other stuff. I wrote about media (at BI) and sports (at BuzzFeed). They were both interesting experiences, but they weren't really what I wanted to be doing. 

When I was at BuzzFeed, I got a job offer. FS1 was starting a SportsCenter competitor called Fox Sports Live. They wanted a young internet-y, Deadspin-type person to bring that sensibility to the show. It sounded fun and felt like an interesting choice. I got to sit in a room with Andy Roddick, Gary Payton, and Donavan McNabb every day, and hear them talk about sports. McNabb referred to me as "skinny jeans.” 

It was all pretty cool, but late-night sports television is an excruciating lifestyle. I'd work from noon to midnight. Being 23, single, and in a new city, it was a tough way to live. I left on good terms after nine months. The experience did give me the idea that I could work in film and TV, which was something that hadn’t occurred to me before. I freelanced for Grantland and spent a couple years covering movies and the film industry for Vulture. The whole time I was trying to wind my way back into film and TV. 

RIP Grantland. 

Indeed. Grantland ruled.

There are a few people in the film and TV industry called documentary writers. That doesn’t mean writing the narration. It’s a person who focuses on story. I connected with some producers who had a need for that specialty, which was something that I felt pretty comfortable with, having done so much longform journalism. 

In 2017 I started working on documentaries from that perspective. The more jobs I got, the more involved in the process I got, learning all the other stuff that goes into making a documentary. What I do now is called creative producing, where I’m hands on figuring out what the project is going to be. Sometimes I help during the interviews. Sometimes I’m in the edit. It’s all over.

How many projects are you pitching at the same time? I started reading Colby Day’s newsletter on your suggestion. He seems to be writing, connecting, and pitching a totally overwhelming amount of things while also being in a writer's room.

The reality of Hollywood is that's what you have to do. Colby is very transparent about it, whereas most people want to hide what it's like. As intense as he can sound in that newsletter, it's mostly because he’s being honest and straightforward. 

I would say there are two different types of people in Hollywood. Colby and I are one type, and then both of our wives—Emma Miller, Colby’s wife, and Alina Mankin, mine—are the other type. Colby and I tend to be volume shooters. (Whenever I think of the term “volume shooter,” I think of Monta Ellis. A dated reference for sure.)

We both will develop a lot of projects with the expectation that many of them won’t work out. I tend to have anywhere between five and 10 projects in development: It has a treatment, people are attached to the project, there’s money being spent on it, and we’re building this thing to go out. 

Our wives work on one or two things really, really focused and intensely. They'll do a really great job, that thing will be really successful, and will propel them on to the next one. 

There are so many articles about the writing crisis in Hollywood. I find myself sympathetic to some of the arguments but it’s also pretty clear that the amount of television shows produced in the recent past was unsustainable. Thoughts from someone who is in that world? 

I'm familiar with the business, but I'm not a WGA screenwriter, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. 

People forget that the TV industry is very young. The way we make TV now is a very recent development. There was a huge boom in television because all these cable channels, streamers, and companies—even, briefly, Facebook—decided to make TV shows. And then a bunch of people decided, oh, maybe we shouldn't do that. The networks consolidated, the number of shows decreased, writers rooms got smaller. At some point, it’s a basic math equation.

The strike was designed to improve the quality of a television writing job, and in that sense, they were very successful. But I don't know how much the WGA can do to increase the number of TV shows and TV jobs. That is a much larger economic question. 

There is also the complete breakdown of the film industry. There are very, very few film distributors that will take a documentary and put it in theaters or fund it from the beginning. It’s a very difficult environment. That’s true for scripted films, too, because you have fewer movies hitting theaters. 

The economics seem tough.

That’s a glaring difference, right, between writing and journalism, and film and TV. With writing, you can start a newsletter to build your own following and make money. You can't do that in film and TV. It costs so much money to make a film or show. It’s a very capital-intensive business. It’s very hard to be like, well, I’ll just do something on my own. You can do it. You can make a short film, you can make a web series, you can make a micro-budget movie, YouTube is a whole different thing that we don't have time to talk about. But most of the time, you could write 100 scripts, and you still have to find somebody to give you millions of dollars to make a movie.

I really enjoy Good Moves. It made me laugh. Your intro was all about, quite fairly, how you were busy with your documentary work, your new baby, and your life, but also, you’ve gotten really quite good at chess and here’s 3,500 thoughtful words about one move. Is this a way to use some part of your brain that wasn’t getting activated in your day job?

I'm very realistic and practical about film and TV. I understand that ultimately, I need to serve forces larger than myself. Ideally, those forces aren't purely capital and stock fluctuations. And I think usually that’s been successful, that there’s a larger collective vision achieved with the projects I work on. 

The newsletter is me being able to write about something I love, and do it for fun. I'm going to try and derive meaning from this thing that I'm doing anyway. If people read it: cool. If they don't read it, I’m sure at some point I will quit writing, but right now it’s fun. I don't need to make any money from it. That’s been really satisfying. 

The people who do care about chess care very deeply. The engagement I'm getting from it is deep and meaningful. People do seem to be connecting to it. I am the type of writer who likes to go really deep, to really dig into one thing, blow it out, pull it apart, and really understand it. Chess is perfect because it's such a rich and complicated game.

I skim the chess parts because I don’t care about 1. e4 (sorry), but I like meditations beyond chess.

I've been really inspired by the Growth Equation guys: Brad Stulberg, Steve Magnus, and Clay Skipper. They’re doing self-help that's constructive and deliberate, rather than circular. 

Any pursuit that you love and put a lot of time into can offer up lessons that are useful for other people. So many hobbies involve developing the same sort of qualities. 

To some extent the newsletter is an attempt to justify the amount of time I spend on chess. There is a reason I'm playing this game. It's not just to waste time. There's a deeper quest going on here. I've been pretty edified by the fact that there does seem to be something there. When I started the newsletter, part of me thought, “Is this really going to work?” So, I mean, so far so good.