Introduce Yourself : Veteran Archival & Clearance Producer | 25 Years | Finally Joining the Stage 32 Community by Teddy Cannon

Hi Everyone;

I'm Teddy Cannon, based in Los Angeles.

I've been doing archival and clearance work on documentary and unscripted productions for about 25 years. For many of those years I was "the clearance guy" on the crew. A few years back I formalized it into a company — Crux Entertainment, Inc. — and built out something I hadn't seen structured before: a single shop that handles archival research, clearance supervision, and entertainment legal, all under one roof. My attorney Gerald Gottesman works through Crux, which means productions don't have to manage a clearance supervisor on one end and a law firm on the other. One relationship, one pipeline, one set of eyes on the whole chain of title from pre-production through delivery. I’m not sure which is the bigger win—they’re really one and the same: our combined services are budget-friendly, and putting archival clearance and legal under one roof saves eons of production time.

The credits are across Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Peacock, Starz, Paramount+, and Showtime — docs, true crime, sports, unscripted. Some recent ones: Homicide (Dick Wolf/Netflix), Unsolved Mysteries S1 & S2, Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told (Hulu), Kiss The Future (Paramount+), Everything's Gonna Be All White (Showtime), Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart & Snoop Dogg (Peacock). Commercial side includes work for Nike, Adidas, Converse, and the IOC.

The thing that keeps me up at night — and that I keep banging the drum about at places like FootageFest and the Documentary First podcast — is how consistently archival and clearance gets engaged too late. Not slightly late. Catastrophically late. More than half the time, decision-makers aren't bringing in clearance expertise until problems have already materialized. By then you're not preventing a fire, you're negotiating with it. The E&O carrier is already asking questions, the delivery date is two weeks out, and someone is suddenly very interested in whether that six-second Instagram clip from 2019 is actually cleared or just forgotten about.

I joined the Stage 32 because I want to be useful here — not to pitch services, but to contribute to the conversations this community has better than anywhere else. If you're mid-production and staring at a clearance problem, I'm happy to think through it. If you're pre-production and want to understand what a real clearance budget should look like before you go to a platform, I'm even happier to have that conversation earlier.

Also a member of D-Word, APA, IDA, DPA, AMIA, and the Video Consortium — so chances are we've already crossed paths somewhere. If we have, say hi.

— Teddy

Crux Entertainment, Inc. — Archival • Clearance • Legal teddy@cruxentertainmentinc.com cruxentertainmentinc.com (323) 493-0350