Meet Jeremy Lunt

We recently connected with Jeremy Lunt and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeremy, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

In the late 2000’s, I had moved from New England to Los Angeles in order to work in the film business. Most everybody that makes that move has ambitions to either act, write or direct, and for my part I was very interested in becoming a director. I dabbled in various areas of the industry for a number of years without really making much progress or meeting much success. Then, in 2014, I joined startup firm that was doing international film sales, which is the process by which the rights to independent movies are sold to distributors on a country-by-country or region-by-region basis. That involved quite a bit of travel, and my first trip was to Cannes in 2015, where I accompanied the CEO.

Cannes is not just a film festival; concurrent with the festival event there is also a massive trade show, or “film market”, in which buyers and sellers of film rights can meet face to face and close deals. On our first morning there, the CEO, claiming sickness, threw me to the metaphorical sharks by telling me to go and take all the day’s scheduled meetings by myself. Mind you, I had no real qualifications to be having those discussions by myself, and just in general, I wasn’t much of a talker, nor was I very social. But as I started taking the meetings, as I began talking more and more with various other film people, I began to realize that it was very easy for me to speak their language. All the talk of deal points, minimum guarantees, license fees, territorial exclusions, etc, made much more sense to me than I had expected. At the end of Cannes, I left with a real sense that this was the kind of work that I actually might be good at. The CEO encouraged this, pointing out that not many people were good at this kind of work, and even fewer wanted to be good at it. (In the film business, most everyone wants to be a creative and only a select few want to master the economics or the dealmaking side of it)

Later, and as the company grew, the CEO kept expanding my portfolio with new responsibilities, all of them useful, but not all of them welcome. By 2019, I been given a great deal of responsibility when it came to signing new films and new clients, and in selling the distribution rights and delivering those films to buyers. But I was also doing much more thankless tasks like supervising our interns, overseeing the client accounting and generally managing the office most days. But at the end of that journey, I knew precisely how to start and run my own film company, and I was ready to strike out on my own.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Gemini Entertainment Group, or just Gemini Entertainment for short, is a Maine-based film sales, film distribution, and film production company. The original mission of Gemini (back in 2020 when the company was founded) was to offer New England-based filmmakers distribution and sales expertise that would otherwise be difficult to access. I knew from experience at my Hollywood job that filmmakers living outside the major production centers tended to be pretty uninformed about how the business part of the film industry really worked, and that opened them up to exploitation from all sorts of unethetical and sleazy characters. I also wanted to help them access foreign distribution, which I had quite a bit of experience in, especially when it came to localizing content into other languages.

We currently distribute our content on home video, on television, and on a myriad of streaming services, and while we still have plenty of Maine and New England-based filmmaker clients, sometimes in business you grow in unexpected ways. Case in point: we now have clients from across the U.S., and some from as far away as Chile or Romania.

What I have become particularly passionate is using new technology to distribute our library into corners of the world where audiences never would have had the ability to see it before. We took a fantastic indie teen drama and put it out in Japan. We took an almost lost Argentinian horror film and made it available in English for the first time. And those are just of everyday examples of the work that Gemini does.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

First, be open to receiving knowledge and wisdom that you don’t necessarily want or think you need. For me, that was knowledge about the world of business. There was a time when I had a great deal of disdain for business and entrepreneurship, I felt like it was dirty or beneath me. Like a lot of artistic people, I wanted to create without having to worry about the nitty gritty details. But because I made myself open to new information and new ways of thinking, it opened up new possibilities that would have been unimaginable before.

Second, while it is essential that you learn from your own mistakes, it is even better to learn from other people’s mistakes. There are plenty of knuckleheads out there that you can learn from without having to make those same errors yourself.

Third, it’s important to have a good mixture of stubbornness and curiosity. Stubbornness because it allows you to keep going on a task and not give up. And curiosity because it will open up new approaches that will be quite powerful when you combine it with that quality of stubbornness.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

We are always looking for new filmmaker clients with movies or series that they have produced or want to produce. The perfect client for us is often the newer filmmaker who wants to learn about the business side of the film industry and grow a lasting relationship with us as a company. The best way to connect with us is through our website, geminientertainmentgroup.com or give us an Instagram follow at “geminientus”.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://geminientertainmentgroup.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/geminientus/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe1cpHoQ6IsIbJXV8BhUNUQ

Image Credits

Joel Carpenter (the image with the film crew)
All other photos are by Leah Carter