A frustrated toy salesman’s collaboration with three women grows into the biggest toy craze in history in Directors Kristin Gore & Damian Kulash’s comedy, The Beanie Bubble.
Gore & Kulash’s film tells the unbelievable story behind the Beanie Baby toy obsession that took off in the 1990s, centered on manufacturer-turned-billionaire Ty Warner, and the women who were integral to his success.
On August 12, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Gore & Kulash discussed the making of the film during a Q&A moderated by Directors Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton (Battle of the Sexes).
During the conversation, they spoke about working together as a directorial team, and communicating their joint vision to members of their crew.
“The creatively fulfilling parts of it were great in terms of figuring out this spreadsheet that was the color scheme for the movie with each woman being assigned a primary color and they have their individual journeys. Damian’s brain thinks in spreadsheets, and I think in Word documents and other visual ways. We had to join forces to figure out how to communicate this to our production designer, our cinematographer, our costume designer,” said Gore. “Not a lot of people on a film set want to see a spreadsheet it turns out,” added Kulash. “We were very lucky. The department heads knew from our first meetings that we had this plan that was not particularly normal. That was part of the attraction for them, I think. Everybody was very on board with thinking differently about how we will structure it.”
The Beanie Bubble is Gore & Kulash’s feature directorial debut. Kulash also has directorial credits for music videos for the group OK Go. Gore joined the DGA in 2022 and Kulash has been a DGA member since 2017.