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How to Survive a Pandemic Cash Crunch

Brenda and Aaron Gilbert at the Bron @TIFF party
Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for BRON Studios
Matthew Belloni
June 13, 2021

As I mentioned last week, I’d like to use this space to occasionally interview industry people who are doing innovative or interesting things and whose insights might help readers. For Aaron Gilbert, like so many of us this past year, that innovative thing was merely surviving.

Gilbert and his wife, Brenda, run Bron Studios, which over the past decade has become one of the most prolific producer-financiers of studio and independent films and TV. (“Bron” is a smash-up of their first names.) I first met Aaron, a former music licensing specialist, during Sundance in 2016, at an ebullient premiere party for The Birth of a Nation in the upstairs space at Robert Redford’s Zoom restaurant, just before the film set a record with a $17.5 million sale to Fox Searchlight. Birth ultimately fizzled after director Nate Parker’s college rape charges resurfaced (he was acquitted), but the deal signaled a coming-out of sorts for Bron and the kind of bets the Gilberts were willing to make.