Each week on The Rushfield Lunch, I have a live conversation with the most interesting people in my world, which is to say, the most interesting people in the world. People from all walks of life: thinkers, doers, gallivanders, gadflies, muckety-mucks — you name it.
This week, I’m happy to have my longtime friend, Priyanka Mattoo, sit for a chat. Mattoo is a former agent at UTA and WME who later partnered with Jack Black at their production company, Electric Dynamite, and produced Black’s comedies The D Train and The Polka King, among other projects. But wait, there’s more: Mattoo also founded the first-ever all-female podcast network, Earios, has written guest essays for the New York Times and wrote the 2024 memoir, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones. In our enlightening conversation, we discussed the current state of the industry and how the goalposts have moved significantly for writers.
“For a writer, the ceiling has moved down. But the ceiling has always kind of been moving down,” Priyanka says. “Even the people who started 20 years ago were talking about the guys who ran The Simpsons before them — like there was The Simpsons money, now there’s the streaming money, and it’s all just becoming more of a work-a-day job. Once you have good insurance for a while, and you have a stable job that pays your bills, and you can do that without doing anything else, I think that’s the new making it.”
Mattoo is the latest deep thinker I’ve hosted on The Rushfield Lunch, following lively discussions with the likes of Black List founder and CEO Franklin Leonard, Girls and Too Much creator Lena Dunham, reality television legend Parvati Shallow and many more. Check out our YouTube page to watch earlier episodes and make sure to subscribe for the latest uploads.
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