Pulp Productions Studios

08/28/2026

08/27/2026

Casting, crewing, music, and other job listings are being posted throughout the day on our new Smoky Mountain Pictures Presents: Almost Trying page. Follow it for the most current information for this production!

08/26/2026

OUR FIRST CASTING ANNOUNCEMENT! FOLLOW OUR NEW FILM PROJECT Smoky Mountain Pictures Presents: Almost Trying!

🎬 **OFFICIAL CASTING ANNOUNCEMENT**

**KEVIN BAKER WILL PORTRAY CHAZ MERCER**

We are incredibly excited to announce that Kevin Baker will star as Chaz Mercer in *Almost Trying*.

Kevin is an actor and filmmaker from East St. Louis, Illinois. His journey began when his friends challenged him to stop talking about becoming an actor and start pursuing it. In 2017, he accepted that challenge by launching the **Kev UnPHazed** YouTube channel and creating his own movie-parody videos.

Those videos became the beginning of something much bigger.

Kevin moved to Chicago and enrolled in DePaul University’s film program, earning his Master of Science in Film and Television in 2020. He is also a proud United States Army veteran.

Since beginning his acting journey, Kevin has built an extensive independent résumé. His credits include Brody Maurice on *The Maurice Show*, Jordan on *Warriors of the World*, Jackson on *The Khaleel Show*, and roles in *Remedyy*, *Love Beat the Hell Out of Me!*, *Jason Escaped from Hell*, and *Spade*. His experience has also included work on *Empire*, in a scene with Taraji P. Henson, and Tyler Perry’s *Mea Culpa*, starring Kelly Rowland.

And yes—Kevin was also a contestant on the April 6, 2020, episode of **The Price Is Right**.

Perhaps Kevin’s greatest accomplishment so far has been creating a feature film of his own. Through his **Kev UnPHazed** brand, Kevin wrote, produced, and starred in the independent horror film *Puzzled Literature*. The film is now streaming on Tubi, has received regional television and radio coverage, and Kevin is already working toward a sequel.

That determination is a major part of who Kevin is. He wants his career to represent more than personal success. He wants to give back to East St. Louis, inspire others to chase their dreams, and help change the narrative surrounding the city that made him.

But a list of accomplishments can tell you only so much about someone.

I know Kevin as the man who played Cooper Stone in *Pizzodyssey*. I know him from the conventions we attended together in Illinois, Tennessee, and Kentucky. I know him as someone who has supported me, encouraged me, and continued believing in the power of creating movies—even when this business gave me every reason to stop.

Most importantly, Kevin was with me in Los Angeles when the idea for *Almost Trying* first entered my mind.

We had just watched the Dodgers defeat the Diamondbacks and were riding back to the Hollywood Roosevelt. Our driver was incredibly talkative, sharing stories and opinions about practically everything. As I listened, something clicked: What if there were a movie about a rideshare driver and the parade of people who entered his car?

We were surrounded by Hollywood history—walking where legends had walked and experiencing the places that made me fall in love with movies in the first place. Somewhere during that trip, the earliest pieces of this story began coming together.

Kevin was there before Chaz Mercer had a name. He was there before I wrote the first page and before I understood exactly what *Almost Trying* would become.

Now he is going to lead it.

Chaz is not an easy role. He is funny, selfish, frustrating, wounded, and completely human. He speaks directly to the audience and carries the story from its most outrageous comedy into its most vulnerable and emotional moments.

That requires more than someone who can simply recite the lines. It requires an actor with humor, heart, discipline, vulnerability, and the ability to make Chaz feel like a real person.

Kevin Baker is that actor.

More importantly, he is one of the best people I know. There is nobody else I would rather make this film with—and nobody else I would trust more with the responsibility of bringing Chaz Mercer to life.

Please join me in officially welcoming Kevin Baker as Chaz Mercer in *Almost Trying*.

**This is our Chaz.**

08/24/2026

More than three years ago, I filmed *Crying to the Stars*. At the time, I believed it was the beginning of something. I never imagined how much pain would follow.

What happened afterward changed me. Broken trust, personal conflicts, legal battles, depression and years of stress slowly drained the joy out of something I had loved for most of my life. Filmmaking had always been where I felt most alive, but it became tied to anger, anxiety and disappointment. I lost my motivation. I lost my confidence. Eventually, I began wondering if I had made my last film.

For a long time, I wanted to give up.

But dreams are strange things. They can go quiet without completely dying.

Last year, I traveled to Los Angeles with actor Kevin Baker—someone you will be hearing much more about very soon. That trip affected me more deeply than I expected.

As someone who has loved film and Hollywood history for most of my life, Los Angeles felt like walking through the history that had shaped my dreams. I stayed at the Hollywood Roosevelt, in the hotel where Clark Gable and my all time favorite actress Carole Lombard once carried on their legendary affair. I stood inside the room where the very first Academy Awards were held. I visited Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and looked at the handprints and footprints left behind by generations of actors and filmmakers.

I was standing where legends had stood.

These were no longer photographs in books, stories from documentaries or pieces of history I had spent years reading about. They were real places. Real rooms. Real pieces of a dream that had survived long after the people who created them were gone.

Being surrounded by that history reminded me why movies had mattered so much to me in the first place. Every film we remember began as an idea someone refused to abandon. Every person whose name became part of Hollywood history faced rejection, uncertainty, failure and moments when walking away would have been easier.

For the first time in years, I began to feel connected to that dream again.

After Kevin and I attended a Dodgers game, we got into a rideshare and headed back to the Roosevelt. Somewhere during that ride through Los Angeles, listening to this particular Uber driver, an idea came to me about a driver navigating one chaotic day in a driver's life.

It was only a small idea, but something inside me had started moving again.

That idea followed me home. The characters began taking shape. The story grew. Page by page, the part of me that wanted to make movies slowly came back. There was no single moment when everything stopped hurting. I simply kept writing until I remembered who I was before everything went wrong.

Now the screenplay for *Almost Trying* is finished. This fall, I plan to return to Tennessee and make the film..

Making *Almost Trying* will not erase the last three years. It will not undo the betrayals, the depression, the legal battles or the time I lost. But it will prove that none of those things defeated me. They hurt me. They delayed me. For a while, they made me lose my way. But a few bad eggs do not get to decide how my story continues.

If there is something you still dream about doing, please do not let disappointment convince you that the dream is dead. Do not allow the people who hurt you, the mistakes you made or the years you lost to have the final word. Rest if you need to. Step away if you must. Give yourself time to heal—but never believe that you cannot come back.

Sometimes coming back does not begin with a grand plan.

Sometimes it begins by standing in a room where history was made.

Sometimes it begins with a quiet ride back to a hotel after a ball game.

For me, it became *Almost Trying*.

After everything, I am ready to make another movie.

Please follow the official page. There will be much more to announce soon:

https://www.facebook.com/AlmostTrying/

After his girlfriend walks away, a directionless rideshare driver spends one chaotic day navigating the Smoky Mountains and an unforgettable collection of passengers. As the night grows stranger, funnier and more personal, he is forced to confront the pas

07/28/2026

You can plan for every problem you think might happen during a film production. You prepare for difficult locations, limited time, technical problems, schedule changes, and all the other obstacles that come with making an independent movie.

But somehow, it is always the things no one could have imagined that get you.

The journey to finish this film has taken far longer than we originally intended, and there were moments when its future seemed uncertain. Yet that extra time also created new opportunities. It allowed us to step back, reconsider what the film could be, and discover a stronger, darker, and more compelling way to tell its story.

What we have now is not simply the version we planned years ago. It is something more ambitious, more unsettling, and ultimately much better.

There is no official release date to announce yet—but the work is moving forward, and TREAD THIS FANTASY will finally be seen.

Every fantasy needs a victim.

07/27/2026

The other day I said to myself, "I need a day off." Things have been crazy as of late and mentally, I was drained, overwhelmed, and a lot of other things after learning some very very disturbing things and knew if I didn't take a little time, I would regret it. Sadly, I cannot seem to turn my brain off anymore, but I was going to try to relax a bit before I have a stroke.

I started to relax, which is something I haven't really been able to do for some time, but I flipped through videos on Youtube and came across this video about the mob in Chicago in the 1920s and a story that I thought was interesting, so I researched it, and long story short, in less then 8 hours (really about 7.5 hours later), I had a 22 page script for this event, all fact checked against the historical record. It has two roles that are the kind of parts written for actors to really perform. I call this new short film "The Arrangement" and we plan to shoot it in September this year before our new feature. This is a great little script and I am so proud of it. More details will be coming, but we will be looking for a cast of six soon. This will be our first historical piece.

07/25/2026

We are reworking a definitive version of Tread This Fantasy through editing for release. We made a great movie. Things have changed since we shot it. There were things I wish I could have done back then that I can do now. There are things I have wanted to change that I can change now. There are things I can add. This film has greatly benefited from being delayed. I am sooooooooooo excited to share this film very soon (before we shoot our new feature in October!) See less

07/22/2026

"Have I not reason, think you, to look pale?
These two have ‘ticed me hither to this place:
A barren detested vale, you see it is;
The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,
O’ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe;
Here never shines the sun, here nothing breeds
Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven.
And when they show’d me this abhorred pit,
They told me here at dead time of the night
A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes,
Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins,
Would make such fearful and confused cries
As any mortal body hearing it
Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly.
No sooner had they told this hellish tale,
But straight they told me they would bind me here
Unto the body of a dismal yew
And leave me to this miserable death.
And then they call’d me foul adulteress,
Lascivious Goth, and all the bitterest terms
That ever ear did hear to such effect.
And, had you not by wondrous fortune come,
This vengeance on me had they executed.
Revenge it, as you love your mother’s life,
Or be ye not henceforth called my children."
William Shakespeare - Titus Andronicus

04/18/2026

Three years ago today—April 18, 2023—we were on our way to Gatlinburg to film Crying To The Stars.

What we filmed was incredible.

What followed was a nightmare.

A single bad casting decision brought someone into this project who turned what should have been a great production into a hostile, toxic situation. What should have been a brilliant finished film became delays, damage to multiple projects, and a fight that ended up in court in two states so far.

I’m not interested in arguing about it online. The record already speaks for itself.

At the end of our first case, the judge stated:

“In his testimony, he basically tried to avoid answering almost every question poised to him. He was very defensive in his answers. At one point, he lost his temper, started to get angry. When they were discussing this incident in Tennessee, the court on at least three or four, maybe five occasions, had to instruct him to answer the question that was being posed to him. He was nonresponsive probably around 70% of the time, and I think the record will reflect that and that is important in this case because there are postings that are attributed to other people and Mr. Schilling, the defense's argument here was they think you did that, that you posted those things to benefit your position, not only in this case, but in ever whatever contractual dispute you're having, and your testimony in this case did not help you in any way with convincing the court that that wasn't possibly you. I find your testimony to be very incredible, and because your testimony has been so incredible today, the court simply is not accepting much, if anything, of what you've said.”

That’s not spin. That’s not opinion. That’s a judge, on the record.

Since then, I’ve done what you’re supposed to do when someone tries to derail your work and your reputation—I fought it. And I’ve won where it matters.

This isn’t over. Not even close. We are back in court in a few weeks in Illinois and more lawsuits are being prepared in three states.

But here’s the part that matters most:

It didn’t stop the film.

It didn’t stop me.

If anything, it created something new.

Later this year, we begin Burden of Proof—a film born directly out of everything that happened.

Some people create problems.

Some people create excuses.

I create solutions. I finish what I start.

Crying To The Stars will be completed.

No matter how long it takes.

No matter how many fights it takes.

04/15/2026

The last three years have tested me in ways I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

There were moments where everything felt stacked against me—personally, professionally, and creatively. Projects I poured everything into got delayed, derailed, and dragged through the mud. I kept pushing, but no matter how hard I worked, it felt like I was fighting uphill every single day.

I won’t get into all of it—but just know, it was real. And it was a lot.

What matters is this: I didn’t quit.

Even when it would’ve been easier. Even when most people probably would have. Even when I felt so broken that I really wanted to, I kept going. Quietly. Persistently. Doing whatever I could to keep these projects alive.

And now… we’re finally moving forward.

🎬 Pizzodyssey — July 18, 2026
🎬 Tread This Fantasy — October 24, 2026 (Digital Release)
🎬 Crying To The Stars — Coming Soon (more updates soon)

These aren’t just releases to me. These are projects that survived.

And we’re not stopping there:

• Untitled Horror Film (Illinois) — Shooting Summer 2026
• Almost Trying (Tennessee)— Shooting October 2026
• Burden of Proof — Shooting Winter 2026

Looking ahead to 2027:

• The Youth Know No Pain
• Measure of Devotion
• Untitled Civil War film
• Untitled Retail Comedy film
• Blessed Are The Dead

We’re also stepping out publicly for the first time in over two years with a convention October 23–25 to show off our new projects, and are actively pitching two TV series.

This didn’t come easy. None of it did.

But if there’s one thing I’ve proven to myself over the last few years—it’s that I’m not going anywhere.

I honestly feel like the world has thrown everything it possibly could at me—situations so absurd they don’t even sound real. Road trips where someone thought bringing a sword was a good idea, and dealing with legal battles that never should have existed in the first place. Through all of it, I’ve realized one thing: I’m stubborn as hell, and that’s the only reason I’m still here. Most people would have given up a long time ago. I didn’t.

If you’ve supported me, believed in me, or even just stuck around while things were quiet… thank you. It means more than you know.

This is just the beginning of what should’ve happened a long time ago. The best is yet to come...