Dear Film Fans…

By the time you're reading this, my narrative debut, Primetime, will have hit multiplexes. I come from making documentaries that have mostly lived in the streamer-verse, and I feel both emotional and elated to have a movie out in the world, in real movie theaters, playing to rooms full of strangers.

I'd love to take you back in time with me for a second… to the recent past… to tell you how this film came to be. Because Primetime, as far as I know, may be the first movie ever inspired by a Cameo video.

In March of 2024, well before I ever received Ajon Singh's brilliant script, my wife, Abbey, knowing I was a fan of To Catch a Predator, bought me a Cameo from Chris Hansen. In the video, he congratulated me on the release of my documentary SPERMWORLD, asked me to "have a seat," and then proceeded to pitch me his new, self-produced shows, all available exclusively on his streaming crime network, TruBlu.

It was the most confounding present I had ever received. As a kid, Hansen felt like a mythological being to me, a grandmaster architect of reality who commanded every room he walked into. His show collapsed fiction and reality in a way nothing else on TV did: real predators acting on real, horrific impulses, led into a world of actors, fake houses, and hidden cameras, with Hansen as ringmaster. And now here he was, delivering his most famous line to me, on request, for $40 (now $140!). The crusading journalist I grew up watching had become a completely self-aware entertainer.

I became obsessed with his Cameo page. I'd spend hours a day watching the new videos he'd log. In one, he calls someone a “registered flex offender." In another, he asks a whole group of guys on a golfing tournament to “have a seat” before warning them of one of their members’ chat logs. Each video showed me another side of him, and together they told a story. The serious work he'd done had been absorbed into a strange, performative version of himself. A man had become a meme. A person had become a persona. These videos crystallized the whole idea of a film for me, and that tension is what I knew I wanted to live inside.

Two weeks after Abbey's gift, I met with Rob Pattinson about a documentary project. The meeting was coming to an end, and I didn't want to leave without showing him the Cameo. It was an intrusive thought. What would he think? Did he even know who Chris Hansen was? I bit the bullet, pulled out my phone, and played it for him and his producing partner, Brighton McCloskey. I was surprised they both remembered Chris, and even more surprised to learn that Rob had independently been a fan of the show. He'd discovered it right after moving to the States around 2007, when he was making Twilight.

About a month later, I saw Rob again at his birthday party. He told me I should talk to Brighton about a mysterious script they'd just gotten their hands on. I wandered over, she flashed her phone at me, and there it was on the title page: TO CATCH A PREDATOR —! I grabbed her phone, sent myself the script, ran to my car, and devoured it in one sitting. Everything I'd felt watching those Cameos was there in Ajon's depiction of Hansen. It felt like destiny. I knew I needed to make this movie.

What Rob, Ajon, and I made, alongside a truly wonderful cast and crew, is not a conventional biopic. It's a fever dream, a media collage of every version of Chris Hansen that's ever existed, and an homage to Ace in the Hole, To Die For, Natural Born Killers, and Demonlover. It's an institutional portrait of To Catch a Predator at the height of its success, following a journalistic crusader, a mercenary TV producer, and a wide-eyed Hollywood dreamer as they converge on a moment of crisis. It's about the ancient idea of achieving your dream and being swallowed whole by it, set in the early 2000s, before the news landscape fractured, when a primetime slot felt like a matter of life or death. And for some, it was.

I owe everything to the people who jumped into this strange world with me, many of them the same band of collaborators I've worked with for years and so many new, amazing crew in our New Orleans, New York, and Sri Lanka units. Coming from documentaries, I'm used to following reality wherever it goes. On Primetime, we uncovered reality, the same way the To Catch a Predator apparatus did, and every person on this film brought their full heart to that task. I will never be able to thank them enough.

Now the movie is yours. Please do me a favor, will you, and have a seat.

Lance Oppenheim

P.S. Abbey, thank you for the strangest and best gift ever…