Willonius Hatcher was looking for a way in. He’d tried just about everything to break into Hollywood, and because there no longer exists a traditional entry point into its hallowed pantheon of performers—we can thank the internet for doing away with all notions of conventional success—the pursuit of it sometimes felt like a mirage. He could see it, and he knew he could get there because he believed in his talent, only the closer he got the farther the door seemed. He’d done the stand-up circuit, short film work, sketches, even video editing. None of them got him fully in the door. Then Covid-19 hit—and everything changed.
“When the pandemic started, I was like, OK, all of this is done. Let me focus on screenwriting. I can get a check. I can still be creative,” Hatcher, 39, told me from his Palm Beach residence when we spoke by Zoom.
He doubled down on his script writing, constructing epic worlds of his own, joining writer programs and later creating a web series. By then, generative AI was taking off, and Hatcher, who was an early advocate of ChatGPT, became proficient in two programs. Although he relies on his writing to build out the story and string together narration when crafting a video, Hatcher learned to generate AI images using prompts in Midjourney, and to animate them via Runway.
The trailers—or, really, mini-films—that came from that period of incubation have slowly become legend among a devoted fan base eager for a new breed and look of Black imagination. Hatcher’s work is resonating with audiences during a moment when many people in the filmmaking world have mixed feelings about generative AI’s creative use. In its most extreme iterations, gen AI extends a grotesque American tradition: the deliberate devaluing of Black life through distortion and theft. The unbound innovation of what gen AI can produce is also one of its greatest dangers, because of what it can unleash.