Ted Passon didn’t set out to start a thriving film and video production company. The plan was simple: Pretend to be a real company; get more gigs. Over time however, All Ages Productions became less of a farce and more of a real thing. Passon is grateful for the gambit. “I think if we had tried to start a company, it would have failed,” he says.
Over a decade later, the success of Philly D.A., a mini-series about District Attorney Larry Krasner that Passon co-directed, launched All Ages Productions into an uncanny echelon. After the project received numerous awards and topped critics’ year-end lists in 2021, Passon reminded himself to not be too swayed by praise. “Do whatever you can do to enjoy it,” he told himself, “but try not to get stuck there.”
The core of Passon’s work is creating a pathway between Philadelphia talent and the broader film and video industry. His longtime collaborator is Alex Da Corte, a Philadelphia-based art megastar who happened to art direct Passon’s senior thesis film. Recently they created a couple of music videos for Philadelphia rap star, Tierra Whack. It’s a common thread for Passon: Keep your friends close and your friends-turned-collaborators even closer.
Passon’s latest venture is a documentary about Patrice Jetter, a larger-than-life personality Passon has known for 20 years. Patrice: The Movie, is a “documentary rom-com” that follows the romance of Jetter and Gary Wickham, who wish to live together and get married, but doing so would mean losing their Social Security disability benefits. To capture Jetter’s vibrancy, Passon combined documentary filmmaking with storybook reenactments where she plays herself, and kids play everyone else. The result is a culmination of Passon’s oeuvre, he says, “from the experience of doing music videos, commercials, kids television and documentary. [We were] putting it all together and trying to see what happens.” Patrice: The Movie is currently available to stream on Hulu.
As part of a partnership with Forman Arts Initiative, The Citizen caught up with Passon. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Logan Cryer: What is your relationship to Philadelphia?
Ted Passon: I grew up in South Jersey, and when I was 12 or 13, my cousin and I figured out that if we just walked a mile in this one direction, we could get on a train that would bring us to Philly. We used to sneak over here all the time and just go to record stores on South Street. That was really exciting. When it came to college, I didn’t think I was going to stay here. I thought I was going to go to New York but I didn’t get into NYU.
I’m very glad it didn’t work out, because Philly was awesome. I didn’t realize how good I had it here. I was already in the music and punk scene before getting really into the art scene. That was a magical time where everything was still super cheap. I had a bedroom in a three-bedroom house that I shared with two friends right at Broad and Washington. I also had a studio space in Space 1026. For eight years my combined rent for my house and my studio was less than $400 a month.
How did you get involved with Philly’s iconic art studio Space 1026?
I was around when it was founded and I used to go to shows there. The first person who I remember meeting there was Andrew Jeffrey Wright. I want to say it was in 1999. He had just made this animated film called The Manipulators with Clare Rojas and they had a screening of it at Space 1026. I was so impressed by it and ended up talking to him afterwards. Slowly but surely I got to know everybody there and eventually that turned into me getting a studio there.
All Ages Productions co-founder David Dunn also was a Space 1026 member. Is that how you met?
Actually, we knew each other in high school. There was a band that we both had friends in and we would see each other at shows. We lost touch in college, but in 2004 I was running an experimental film screening series called Small Change with a bunch of friends. We would host it at different venues around the city. We would also be a place where touring filmmakers could stop in Philly and show their work. We brought in a lot of filmmakers from outside the city.
For a while, we would try to match the venue to the program that we were showing. We did a screening at a funeral parlor. We did a screening at a roller skating rink. We did screenings outside. Eventually we kind of just housed it in Space 1026. We did that every month for five or six years. Dave came to a screening and was like, “Hey, if you ever need any more help, let me know.” And then the next month everybody I was working with all had something come up in each of their lives and they all moved away. So we started running this film screening series together.
How did you all start All Ages Productions?
I got my studio around 2006. Dave and I were both working freelance, trying to establish ourselves as directors, and trying to look bigger and more experienced than we were. Eventually we thought, Hey, why don’t we combine our portfolios and combine our client list, and just make a website that puts all of that together? We had a friend, Lori D., who was an animator and was in the same boat. She became a part of it in the beginning too. The three of us combined our work samples and our client list. We made a website that was just a company in name. And it was only “All Ages Productions” because I happened to own that domain from a school project in college.
Not long after, Dave was doing a job for an ad agency and they were like, Hey, we have this big project coming up. We’re looking for a new production company to work with. Can you recommend anybody? He called me and said, “Hey, they know I’m not a production company, but why don’t you go take this meeting? I’m going to refer to this thing as a company. You go take the meeting and maybe we can do this together.” So we did. I went to this meeting, totally lied, and we just pretended to be a production company. It was a really big job. And we got it! We were just like, Oh my God. Who are they going to make a check out to? None of this is real. We had to just hurry up and become real and figure it out.
When did you first realize you wanted to be a film director?
When I was younger, I used to walk to this video store in my town and they had a free rack. As a little kid, I didn’t have any money, so I would go and just get stuff from the free rack, and they were always making-ofs or behind-the scenes-videos generally. I thought they were so interesting and when you know how it works, you want to try it yourself.
Every job, every project, I feel like there’s always something that I don’t know. There’s always something to learn. I don’t know that you can ever learn everything there is to learn. I just don’t think that’s possible.
I started making my own little movies and I figured out: I could do this. But there’s a certain humility that directing teaches you; you’re always expected to know the answer to everybody’s question and sometimes the answer is, I don’t fucking know, but someone’s got to make the decision and it’s your job. You just try to make decisions confidently. Every job, every project, I feel like there’s always something that I don’t know. There’s always something to learn. I don’t know that you can ever learn everything there is to learn. I just don’t think that’s possible.
Did the success of Philly D.A. feel like the natural culmination of your skills as a director?
I mean, in some ways it was a bit of a shock because I was surprised that anybody watched it. When we were trying to sell it to different networks, something we would hear a lot was like, Oh, it’s really interesting, but it’s just so local, which meant not New York or L.A. After we sold it, myself and my co-director, Nicole Salazar, would always have these meetings in the edit room where we would argue about one little minutia of something for an hour. After we’d settle it, the joke afterwards would always be like, Well, nobody’s going to watch this anyway. So none of that mattered.
We were just very pleasantly surprised that people did watch it. And the press was really great to us. I mean, the critics really helped us stay out there long enough for people to watch it. It was a little surreal going to some of the award shows, like the Independent Spirit Awards, and you look over at like, the Reservation Dogs team, who was sitting next to us.
So on one hand, it’s bizarre to be at these places. I don’t know if this is a healthy takeaway, but there was part of me that was like, Oh, look, I did a thing using my own judgment of what I thought was good. And there are people that agree with my judgment of what I think is good. There is something about that where you’re like, Okay, I guess my barometer is not bad. Maybe I can trust myself. Maybe.
How long have you been working on Patrice: The Movie?
About three years. The principal subject of the film is named Patrice Jetter, and I’ve been lucky enough to know her for 20 years. The first music video I did out of college was for a singer-songwriter named Kimya Dawson, and Patrice is their aunt. Kimya would come to town three or four times a year to play shows and Patrice would always come to the show, so we would always hang out. We just kept in touch over the years.
Patrice is this amazing, charismatic, beautiful personality you just kind of fall in love with immediately. I always had it in the back of my head that there’d be a project to film with her, but I didn’t know what. Later, I worked on this Netflix series called Worn Stories and Patrice got to be a part of that.
After completing Philly D.A., I was with my friend Emily Spivack from Worn Stories, and Patrice mentioned that her and her partner were thinking about getting married and how excited they were. That felt like it could be a story but then quickly thereafter, it was like, No, you can’t get married because you’re going to lose your benefits.
As a non-disabled person, that was something that I was not familiar with that impacts so many people. We also had this whole other storyline in the film that involves recreating key moments from Patrice’s past. When you hang out with her, she talks in stories a lot. She’s just got a million stories from her life, and it’s just unbelievable some of the things she’s gone through.
Patrice had been doing all these drawings from her life. She also used to have a kid’s television show on public-access for many years. We made Patrice’s drawings into backdrops and the idea was that Patrice will play herself, no matter what age she is in any of the stories, but all of the other parts will be played by kids.
It gave us some flexibility with tone, but also it gave us this great gut punch for the moments that were hard. Hearing these things come out of the mouths of children that were said to her, that were done to her, carry a lot more gravity than they had been said by an adult actor. It really helps with this emotional sweet spot that we were trying to find, in a way that felt true to how Patrice would want to fly in.
Logan Cryer is a curator based in Philadelphia with a penchant for local art histories. They currently serve as the Co-Curator of Icebox Project Space and they like to rewatch documentaries.
This story is part of a partnership between The Philadelphia Citizen and Forman Arts Initiative to highlight creatives in every neighborhood in Philadelphia. It will run on both The Citizen and FAI’s websites.
