Dakota Johnson is just like you—overwhelmed by peak everything, at a loss as to what to watch, googling “best of Netflix….” Or rather, she was operating in this perpetually dissatisfied mode until she realized that she didn’t need other people telling her what to watch or read or listen to. “I have very specific tastes,” she tells me from her home in L.A., where she’s been sheltering since social-distancing rules went into effect. “I know what I think is good and worthy and profound. It’s the things that have honesty and integrity, a sense of wonder behind the storytelling, and pay profound attention to detail.”
It’s these kinds of cultural products that Johnson hopes to champion through her production company, TeaTime, launched last fall with her friend (and former Netflix exec) Ro Donnelly—“I stole her,” Johnson cheerfully explains. “The ideas for TeaTime was to allow people to experience what we think is brilliant and hilarious and thought-provoking.” The company has several projects in development, but given the shutdown of life as we know it, many of these things have been pushed back to uncertain timelines. Right now, however, Johnson and Donnelly are releasing top-10 lists of their favorite things to stream, and, at the top of each month, their favorite things to read and art happenings to “visit.”
The lists are a service, but they are also a calling card of sorts for TeaTime. “We want to put out the message that we have really specific taste, but that taste isn’t confined to one genre.” Johnson says that she wants TeaTime to be the kind of place that would champion a young playwright dipping her toes in the screenplay-writing world. If this seems like a more transparent model of film and TV development, it’s by nature, not by design: “This mode is just what felt natural to us,” Johnson says. “Production companies are often seen just as big factories that push out content. It’s unclear what the industry is going to look like when we come out of this. But we will need to be supportive of like-minded artists.”
This is an attitude she seems to harness naturally. When I ask her about “the one that got away”—the book or article that someone else snapped up before she could—she answers quickly but gracefully. “Before we even started the company, I was sent the manuscript of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and I was just flabbergasted by it.” But, she continues, “Margot’s making that movie, and it’s just perfect for her.”
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