THIS POWDER’S GOT A KICK TO IT: VAN TOFFLER’S SKY-HIGH AMBITIONS

Van Toffler is a madman, and a proud one at that. The former Viacom Music Group CEO and MTV/VH1/CMT/MTV Films leader has always been obsessed with the rebellious side of art. That’s why he joined MTV in the ’80s, when it was shiny, new and disruptive, and why he was a major force in greenlighting everything from Beavis and Butthead to Jackass. Now at the helm of sharp-toothed indie studio Gunpowder & Sky—which he runs with Floris Bauer, Endemol’s former head of strategy—Toffler is more jazzed than ever to be championing rule-breakers through music-centric films, series, podcasts and documentaries. (He also maintains that we at HITS are idiots and that he has “the receipts to prove it.”)

Toffler’s a self-described “addict for chaos,” who’s “drawn to the instability and stories of music and musicians”—he’s also a disarmingly unguarded hip-shooter— and he’s clearly on a roll. Six years into Gunpowder & Sky’s run, his team has already produced more than a few envelope-pushing projects. Indeed, the good folk at G&S are endeavoring to become the preeminent storytellers with, by and about musicians and music.

When he left his prestigious—and seriously corporate—job in 2015, the media landscape was in the midst of a renaissance. With distribution options multiplying like termites on a crumbling structure, he knew he could venture off on his own and still bring no-holds-barred content to the masses, but with more agility. “I just had to take risks again and go with my gut,” he says, adding that he was tired of working with peeps who were focused exclusively on the bottom line. “When the world turns right, I want to turn wrong.”

It started with a series of three-minute animations of music-industry fables—about Kurt Cobain's accidentally coming up with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Louis Armstrong's asking President Nixon to hold his trumpet case on a transatlantic flight because he had weed in it, for example. They’ve since kicked things into high gear.

On the feature-length side of things, Team G&S showed the world another side of Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss when she appeared as a tumultuous punk singer in Her Smell, which got her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Female Lead. They also put together an all-star cast with Nick Offerman, Toni Collette, Ted Danson and Blythe Danner for a charming movie about a father/daughter indie band, Hearts Beat Loud. And they worked with Vice and legendary video director Jonas Åkerlund to create Lords of Chaos, an at-times comedic horror movie about the beginnings of Norwegian black metal.

Still, the guy known for having a big impact on Unplugged back in the day remains committed to nonfiction endeavors. In Everybody’s Everything, the story of the late Lil Peep, Gunpowder & Sky told the SoundCloud generation’s version of an age-old story, wherein a fragile soul is thrust into the limelight too quickly. It was #1 in per-screen average its opening theatrical weekend. Then, in 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez on Hulu, Gunpowder & Sky took an investigative look at the controversial 6ix9ine, searching for the person behind the villainous façade.

Earlier this year, they released Sheryl, which gets up close and very personal with Sheryl Crow. Shortly thereafter, they announced that they’re working on a new Jim Morrison documentary—which, Toffler insists, positions the rock icon in a new light. “People who didn’t know Jim picture him as this sex-god Lothario and loud drunk,” he points out. “But he was a timid poet who had this wonderful love story,” he says. “We found all these poems, journals and home movies that will tell a different story, which is really interesting.”

Podcasting has also proven a viable outlet for the company. Energized by the success of their Words and Music series, which quickly became the #1 podcast on Audible, G&S has developed two more podcasts that will launch this year: Shelved, which dives into never-released albums by the likes of Pink Floyd, Tupac, MC Hammer and Yoko Ono, and Lighters in the Sky, based on a book about the best 50 concerts of the last 50 years.

No matter what comes next, Toffler is bound and determined to go against the grain with the kind of intensity one would expect from a guy who believes his “maturation stopped at about 19.” When he was stuck answering to lawyers and accountants in a previous life, he had to participate in things like asking Nirvana not to play “Rape Me” on the VMAs, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love it when they started their performance with it anyway. And he wasn’t exactly worried each time Kanye refused to tell him what he planned to perform on the show either. At Gunpowder & Sky, he’s confident he can make room for mayhem and continue to avoid “the homogenized point of creativity where people just keep repeating franchises.”

Now, he’s looking to explore the potential of VR and incorporate live events into G&S's repertoire. He believes the streamers will find a way to perfect live programming on a global level soon enough. “The fact that anything could go wrong is so exciting to me, and musicians are the best for that,” Toffler says. “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about Kanye hosting a live show and just handing him the keys. Linear TV has gotten boring. We just have to get back in trouble again.”

Speaking of trouble, Gunpowder & Sky has done a multi-picture deal with MTV to develop more “loud comedies,” as Toffler puts it: “Turns out they were stupid enough to give me the keys again,” he quips through a chuckle. “There aren’t many low- and mid-budget comedies in today’s movie business. Paramount and Viacom were willing to tackle that. If there were 20 places making them, I’d do it for 20 places, but I have good history with that run of movies—Napoleon Dynamite, Blades of Glory, Hustle & Flow—so why not try my hand at some new ones?”

Of course, he avers, it’s crucial that he has a strong team behind him. David Gale—with whom he made many movies at MTV—oversees the scripted team, on which he works with Jason Goldberg. Over on the docs team, there’s Joanna Zwickel and Janet Brown. He also shouts out Art Lyons and Anne Loder on the unscripted side—as well as a “bunch of wonderfully unpredictable, immature creatives.” He says Towers of London singer Donny Tourette—who’s also known for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother for one night in 2007 before getting drunk and escaping by climbing over the wall—is coming up with some particularly “demented” ideas for the unscripted team.

Essentially, Toffler just wants to keep crafting explosive and far-reaching content that commands attention like fireworks do—hence the company’s name, which was plucked from the lyrics of a typically brilliant Aimee Mann song called “Fourth of July.” “In doing all this premium content around music for all formats and platforms, we gravitate towards resonant personalities and stories,” says Toffler. “And we always have to be able to expose something novel and surprising.”

He just wishes he weren’t constantly surprised—even after all these years—by how much we suck.


Photo credits (from top): Toffler with Miley Cyrus at the 2015 VMAs (Christopher Polk for Getty); with Jimmy Iovine at the 2005 Get Rich or Die Tryin' after-party (Kevin Winter for Getty); on the MTV Movie Awards Red Carpet in 2010 with Tyrese Gibson and Sean Puffy Combs (Kevin Mazur for WireImage); with the legendary Pootie Tang (aka Lance Crouther) at the 2001 Movie Awards (Jeff Kravitz/courtesy FilmMagic, Inc.)