Case File 008: DJ Khaled "You the Best!" Part 1
It could have been Tony Robbins meets The Defiant Ones meets Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, executive produced by Jay-Z. Instead, it became a $20 million lesson.
This is a POW x ALMOST GREENLIT collab post, written by Adam Bhala Lough and edited by Paul Thompson.
ACT ONE: THE SHOE COVERS
Before I was allowed to pitch DJ Khaled a documentary about himself, I had to put little cloth booties over my sneakers. Not to enter his house, not in a recording studio, and not because we were performing surgery. Just to step into the man’s backyard.
A security guard handed them to me after attempting and eventually abandoning a COVID test in Khaled’s garage, while I stood there staring at roughly half a dozen Lamborghinis, Bentleys, and Maseratis and wondering how a man with this many exotic cars did not have a functioning nasal-swab procedure.
My director, Amman Abbasi, and I had flown to Miami to discuss a documentary. Neither of us was sick. Neither of us had symptoms. But if either one of us got a false positive, the meeting was over. We would have flown across the country, sat outside DJ Khaled’s gated mansion looking like two confused tourists with luggage and a DSLR, and then been medically disqualified before we got to say wassup.
The guard wrestled with the tests for a while.
Then, finally, he looked up.
“I don’t know how to do this shit… Y’all vaccinated?”
“Yes,” we said.
He nodded.
“Aight.”
Then he handed us the shoe covers.
I slipped mine over my sneakers and followed Amman toward the backyard, where someone on Khaled’s staff was waiting with two drinks that were described to us as “starfruit elixirs.”
I have had worse meetings.
But I had also not yet met DJ Khaled.
To fully fathom why I was standing in booties outside a mansion in Miami drinking a starfruit elixir and waiting to discuss a documentary with one of the most famous optimists in America, we need to go back about two months.
To January 6, 2021.
Our country was having a difficult day.
And I was emailing a UTA music agent a list of potential documentary subjects that included:
DJ Khaled (motivational speaking tour doc?)
Pitbull
Guns N Roses
Snoop
Toby Keith
Nickelback (something funny)?
21 Savage.
Let’s just pause here for a second and bask in the glory of this list, which was almost certainly assembled while I was either drunk, stoned, or experiencing some other form of chemically induced confidence.
DJ Khaled gets a fully formed, weirdly specific concept: motivational speaking tour doc?
Pitbull, Guns N’ Roses, Snoop, Toby Keith, and 21 Savage get their names thrown into a pile like I was drafting a fantasy team made entirely of people whose dressing rooms probably smell wildly different.
And then there is Nickelback:
Nickelback (something funny)?
Not a premise. Not even an idea. Just a question mark attached to one of the most commercially successful and publicly mocked bands in modern history. My entire creative vision was apparently: There is probably something funny about Nickelback.
That is how a lot of documentaries begin.
Not with a lightning bolt, a great artistic revelation or somebody saying, “This is the movie I was born to make.” Sometimes they begin with a list you typed too fast after smoking a joint, one semi-formed idea, six enormous personalities, and an irrational belief that somebody, somewhere, is going to let you make a movie about it.
And in this case (as has happened more than once in my strange career in the film industry) somebody did crack the door open just enough for me to start imagining a DJ Khaled documentary.
UTA technically owed me a favor. A few months earlier, I had been developing a project with a major female pop star represented by them and that project had blown up in a way that deserves its own Case File, because it was a whole different type of batshit crazy.
But when a project dies in Hollywood, nobody gives you a fucking fruit basket.
Sometimes they do give you another phone call though.
So we got on the subject of musicians. People with big lives, big archives, big public personas, and enough cultural weight to justify a documentary. I threw out names. Some were obvious. Some were impossible.
For the record, Guns N’ Roses was not a throwaway. That was a great idea. It still is.
I had soft-pitched it to HBO and they flipped for it. The agency told me Axl Rose controlled all the rights and, during the pandemic, was “considering finally telling the story,” which is one of those phrases that can keep a producer emotionally attached for months.
So I pursued it followed up waited probably imagined the opening sequence twelve different ways. And then? Nothing. Never fucking happened.
That is another story. But if anyone with access to Axl Rose is reading this: that documentary needs to get made. Please DM me.
Still, on that particular list, the name I kept coming back to was DJ Khaled.
What interested me was not a standard “from Miami Heat ball-boy to global superstardom” biography.
I did not want two hours of people telling us Khaled always had confidence, followed by old photographs of him in a studio, followed by Rick Ross, Drake and Justin Bieber saying they “believed in him from day one.”
I wanted to make a self-help movie starring DJ Khaled, a film where Khaled stood in front of a real audience and delivered his particular, deeply sincere philosophy of gratitude, hustle, abundance, family, God, loyalty, business, and not allowing “they” to stop you.
A Tony Robbins video with a narrative spine.
Every lesson would open a door into his actual life. He tells a room full of people how to ignore “they.” We cut to the years when “they” were probably right to doubt him. He talks about abundance. We go back to the version of Khaled before the personal chef, the manicured estate, the custom sneakers, the motivational ocean videos, and whatever department had been assigned to procure starfruit elixirs.
The joke was that DJ Khaled was already a self-help guru. The deeper idea was that he might have actually earned the right to be one.
And please understand: DJ Khaled was not some random name I had circled because an agency had briefly opened a door.
I had history with the mythology.
Back in 2007, when I was shooting The Carter, I kept hearing about this New Orleans record store called Odyssey Records. Not some legendary studio. Not a nightclub. A record store. But in New Orleans rap history, it was practically a sacred site.
It was there, in 1993, that an eleven-year-old Lil Wayne met Bryan “Baby” Williams for the first time, at an autograph session for Cash Money artist Lil Slim. Wayne rapped for Baby, got his number, and then reportedly called him so relentlessly that Baby eventually told him to come by the Cash Money office.
That was the beginning of Lil Wayne.
And standing behind the counter that day working, spinning records, watching this tiny kid with a giant future walk into the orbit of Birdman was a young DJ Khaled.
Not “another one” Khaled. A teenage DJ Khaled, behind the counter at a New Orleans record store, already right there in the middle of the culture before anybody knew who the fuck dude was.
That mattered to me because I had spent decades in hip-hop, and I knew how easy it was to mistake somebody’s later success for overnight success. Khaled’s public image made him seem like he had materialized one day fully formed: a lovable, yelling, motivational man in expensive sunglasses whose primary contribution to civilization was “screaming his name on tracks” and announcing that God had done something.
But this dude had been paying dues for decades.
He had been in record stores. Had been around Cash Money before Cash Money was Cash Money. Had watched Lil Wayne meet Birdman. Had done the unglamorous, low-paid, deeply uncool work that everybody has to do before they become a brand.
So no, I was not trying to make a documentary about DJ Khaled just because I had a temporary opening. I thought there was a real story in the fact that the guy telling millions of people to believe in themselves had spent thirty years believing in himself first.
And then, through a bizarre chain of agency favors, old relationships, and an email list that also included Toby Keith and “Nickelback (something funny)?,” somebody cracked the door open just enough for us to try.
I knew exactly who I wanted to direct it.
Amman Abbasi and I had known each other for years. He had made a great indie film called Dayveon, then began working with David Gordon Green, which is how we first connected. When Rough House started building out its documentary division with me, David had mentioned Amman as someone I should talk to.
We also had a natural shorthand. I am Punjabi from the Indian side. Amman is Punjabi from the Pakistani side. He is a filmmaker and a musician. He had helped me develop the pop-star project that had just gone sideways. And, in a weird way, this felt like a chance to bring him into something bigger after that thing collapsed.
The agency was doing me a favor. I was doing Amman a favor (or so I thought). And, without really acknowledging it to myself, I was trying to do myself a favor too.
The pop-star project had just died. I had spent real time on it, FaceTime-ing with her weekly, listening to voice notes she texted me in the middle of the night, clearly stoned, about ideas for scenes. I had brought Amman into it, and watched it blow the fuck up magnificently. Then, almost immediately, this new opening appeared: a huge subject, a great director, Rough House, hip-hop, an old connection to The Carter, and a movie I could already see in my head.
I did not just think DJ Khaled could be a good documentary. I started to think he could redeem the one that had just fallen apart. That is a dangerous thing to ask of a person you have never met. Before Khaled had agreed to anything, I had already quietly assigned him a role in solving several problems in my own life. So I emailed Amman right away:
DJ Khaled is interested in doing a feature doc with us. I think he’s pretty funny and something funny could be made here.
Amman wrote back a few hours later:
Man I LOVE this idea.
He was in immediately. And once he was in, the project started moving with the kind of speed that makes you think the universe has finally decided to apologize for every other project that died in development.
A few days later, DJ Khaled’s manager wanted to speak. His name was Lenny Santiago. At a certain level of fame, a musician does not have a manager. He has a small government:
There is the music manager. The film manager. The commercial manager. The tour manager. The brand manager. The social-media manager. The manager who manages the managers. Then, somewhere above all of them, there is usually one person whose name makes everyone else on the call shut the fuck up. Lenny was that person.
Lenny Santiago—Lenny S.—had come up from the street-promotion side of Roc-A-Fella, back when getting a record heard still meant physically putting it in people’s hands. Then he spent decades moving through the Jay-Z universe: Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam, Roc Nation, A&R, artist management, the whole infrastructure of modern hip-hop power.
By the time I got on the phone with him, he was not some intermediary whose job was to politely pass along our deck. He was one of the people who had helped build the fucking hallway we were trying to enter.
In the film world, it would be like getting a call from a producer who had been in the room since the beginning of an entire studio empire—somebody who knew the star, the business manager, the label, the lawyers, the brand people, the people who actually make the decisions, and who could get the principal on the phone without anyone asking why.
Lenny had that kind of gravity. And he was telling us that Khaled was interested.
Here is the distinction I did not appreciate at the time: Lenny was telling us Khaled was interested.
Khaled was not telling us Khaled was interested.
I had not spoken to him. I had not gotten a text from him. I had not heard his voice say, “Adam, I want to make this movie with you.” What I had were a series of very encouraging messages relayed through a chain of agents, managers, assistants, and people whose job was, at least in part, to keep possibility alive.
When you're in development, you end up translating any polite 'maybe' into 'we start shooting Monday.' “Interested” sounds like “committed.” “Let’s find a date” like “we’re doing this.” And a meeting at somebody’s house feels suspiciously like an invitation into their life.
The call with Lenny S went well. He said Khaled was a fan of Danny McBride, said Khaled had been approached about documentaries before but had held out and revealed Khaled had a huge archive of footage going back years.
This is the exact sentence documentary producers want to hear:
He has a huge archive of footage going back years.
That is not a sentence. That is a drug.
The second somebody says it, you start imagining the movie. You see the early radio footage, grainy studio footage, wild backstage footage. The footage nobody thought mattered because DJ Khaled had not yet become DJ Khaled. You are already cutting the trailer in your head. And like every good drug, it made me hear more than had actually been said.
Lenny had said Khaled had a huge archive. I heard: Khaled is ready to give us a huge archive. Those are not the same sentence.
Having an archive is one thing; actually getting the keys to it from a guy who controls his own narrative is another. At the time, I saw a gold mine. I did not stop to consider that Khaled might have seen a locked room.
Then Lenny looped us into the email thread with Khaled’s entire team. Khaled’s team told us he was excited to meet. Amman and I built the pitch. We refined the idea. Less standard music bio-doc. More guided self-help experience. DJ Khaled as Tony Robbins if Tony Robbins had a Miami accent, a sneaker vault, a jet ski, and an all-consuming desire to defeat an enemy known only as “they.”
Every email was good, said some version of: This is happening. That is the most dangerous stage of documentary development. Not the rejection or the silence. The part where everyone is enthusiastic enough for you to believe them.
Barely three months had passed and by late March, the meeting in Miami was set. Looking back, I had built an entire emotional structure out of other people’s enthusiasm.
UTA loved the idea.
Lenny S was encouraging.
Amman was excited.
Rough House was stoked.
The archive sounded incredible.
The pitch was getting better.
And because every piece around Khaled seemed to be moving toward us, I stopped asking the most basic question:
Had Khaled actually decided he wanted a documentary?
Or had he merely agreed to have lunch with some guys from Los Angeles with a connection to Kenny Powers, who had flown down with a deck and a dream?
Regardless, plans were underway. Amman and I would fly to Miami. We would meet Khaled at his house. We would pitch him ideas for the movie. Hopefully he would say yes we would get access to the archive we would begin making the funniest, strangest, most unexpectedly heartfelt DJ Khaled documentary ever made.
Instead, we took the worst Yellow cab in Miami to a gated mansion across the lake from our hotel.
We got out carrying luggage and camera equipment. The security guards stared at us like we had arrived to ask DJ Khaled for money. Then they made us wait on the street for twenty minutes while they confirmed that we were not, in fact, lost. Eventually, someone let us inside.
Then came the garage.
Then came the failed COVID test.
Then came the shoe covers.
And then, in a backyard full of children’s play equipment, an active homeschool, and very expensive-looking things that appeared to have been selected from the “Life Is Beautiful” aisle of an extremely upscale airport gift shop, DJ Khaled finally came outside to greet us.
Next week: the most insane meeting of my life, the beginning of the end of the DJ Khaled documentary, and the moment I realized I might have flown to Miami not to discuss a movie but to be told, in the most DJ Khaled way imaginable, that I was out of my depth.
Because this series deals with real projects, real people, and real companies, here’s the boring but necessary note:
Almost Greenlit is written from my personal perspective and memory as a filmmaker and producer involved in the development and pitching of these projects. It is not intended to be a definitive account of what any buyer, executive, company, filmmaker, subject, agent, financier, distributor, or other participant thought, intended, or decided at the time.
Where I describe meetings, pitches, passes, development history, business decisions, or creative choices, I am describing my own recollection, interpretation, and opinion unless otherwise stated. Any quoted material is included from my own correspondence, public materials, interviews, or with permission where appropriate.
Materials such as trailers, teasers, pitch decks, posters, stills, artwork, clips, screenshots, and other project-related assets may be included for commentary, criticism, historical context, archival reference, and educational purposes. I do not claim ownership of any third-party copyrighted material included or referenced here. Unless otherwise noted, photographs included in this series are my own or are used with permission.
Nothing in this series is intended to attack, disparage, or misrepresent anyone involved. The goal is to examine how projects are developed, pitched, passed on, revived, abandoned, or made anyway and what other filmmakers can learn from that process.
If anything here is inaccurate, incomplete, or requires correction, I’m happy to correct the record.
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Need part 2