When Danny Ramirez and Tom Culliver first met as NYU freshmen, their bond was forged in unlikely fashion — over a failed multi-level marketing pitch that quickly gave way to a shared obsession with movies. Over a decade down the line, that friendship has crystallized into Pinstripes, a production company they officially launched earlier this year with the aim of telling the stories no one else is, in a fashion you’ll never forget.
An actor working early in his career on the Sam Levinson film Assassination Nation and the Netflix series On My Block, Ramirez has in recent years taken on a much bigger profile with roles in the likes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Top Gun: Maverick. Culliver, meanwhile, has spent the decade-plus since graduating college building himself up as a producer and executive, most recently working alongside famed producer Cassian Elwes for more than five years as a creative executive at Elevated Films.
With projects like the forthcoming soccer drama Baton, which also counts Victoria Alonso & David Beckham as producers, the duo will now look to build on their individual successes to date and make their mark together as both taste-driven filmmakers and industry disruptors. Their first test arrives in the Gus Van Sant-directed Dead Man’s Wire, a true-crime drama marking Pinstripes’ debut feature, which is set to premiere in Venice on September 2nd before making its way to TIFF.
The film, starring Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery, is based on the true story of Tony Kiritsis, a former real estate developer who took the mortgage banker who did him wrong hostage. Ahead of the film’s launch, I sat down for an exclusive conversation with Ramirez and Culliver, during which they offered new details on their upcoming slate and highlighted what we can expect from Pinstripes in the years to come.
Sharing their timeline on getting to set for their next films Baton and Pursuit of Touch, both to be directed by Ramirez, they also touch on their ambitions to mount a fresh take on Scarface, lessons learned from the likes of Elwes and Tom Cruise, and more.
DEADLINE: Tell us a bit about how you two met. It’s an unusual story…
DANNY RAMIREZ: We met as freshmen at NYU. Tom went for film, and I went for first, mechanical engineering, and then transferred over to Tisch for acting.
TOM CULLIVER: The first time we met, really, was Danny was part of a multi-level marketing scheme, and he tried to pitch me to join. We’re 18, 19. He sits me down with his PowerPoint presentation, walking me through, “Here’s how you can be your own boss. This is the path to unlimited freedom and success.”
He runs through the entire “business plan,” and then I’m sitting there and have just one question, which is like, “I’m just confused about where the money comes from.” After that, he was like, “Let me run back to the PowerPoint. I think we missed that.”
RAMIREZ: I played college soccer and then transferred from a school in Atlanta to NYU, and while I was at NYU, I realized, if I’m not going to have a degree in sciences or in business and I’m going to be in the arts, the idea that I could make a living off of acting was still up in the air. So I fell into one of these multi-level marketing schemes targeted to college kids. I thought that I’d be able to pick my career as an actor and have some financial freedom. Obviously, [I] learned the hard way that easy money is not real money. But that was the beginning of how Tom and I realized, all right, first of all, we can hang. And the beautiful connective tissue to what we’re doing now is, we’re opening up Pinstripes, and that is one of the projects that we’re taking on.
Me and Lewis Pullman are doing this movie called The Juice, which is based on that multi-level marketing company that I was a part of. It’s an all-encompassing South Florida rags-to-riches tragicomedy, à la Wolf of Wall Street, I could say.
So that was the beginning of how we got started. And then as he graduated, he moved out to L.A. I stayed in New York for an extra year, and then we became roommates here in L.A. It was three of us that moved in together, and there was a moment where I wasn’t getting the roles that I wanted. I was getting supporting roles with really awesome directors, but no one’s giving me the lead that I feel like I’m able to wrestle with. So I was like, “I’m going to write something.” And Tom was like, “All right, pitch it.” So I said the outline, and we kind of agreed. Then, everything got quiet for a couple months, and I went to work. And I remember specifically showing the first draft of it. At that point, Tom and I knew each other as friends, but he read the draft and I saw the twinkle in his eye where he’s like, oh, he’s for real. He could write. And then from that point on, we were like, we could do this organized on Baton, the soccer [movie] that we’re working on now. The first draft of that was 2018.
In my mind, there’s so many actors that are like, “I’m going to write,” and no one actually does something. So I got that feeling from everyone around me that it’s like until you prove yourself, you’re just [in that same group]. But at that point, Tom had already been working for a couple years. So when I showed that first draft, I felt a shift of him not just respecting me as an actor, but being like, oh, we could do this, if this is the quality of your writing.
CULLIVER: When you’re early in the industry, like an assistant or a junior exec, and you hear about an actor, even if it’s someone that you love that wants to be a writer, wants to direct, it’s like, “Oh, good.” And then when they actually send you something and it’s exceptionally good — better than A-level writers that you’re reading — it changes not just how you see somebody. But creatively, you’re like, Oh, not only can Danny and I creatively riff, but this is somebody that’s going to make my work better, and we can help each other excel through the industry, in a way that’s a true creative partnership.
DEADLINE: What were the film’s that bonded you early on?
RAMIREZ: One of our favorite movies is Catch Me If You Can, and that’s actually where our company title comes from. Pinstripes comes from where [Christopher] Walken asks Leo [DiCaprio], “Do you know why the Yankees always win?” And Leo’s like, “Mickey Mantle.” And then Walken’s like, “No, pinstripes. They can’t stop looking at the damn pinstripes.” And so that was one that we instantly connected on.
CULLIVER: That’s a great touchstone for us, as far as one, I think Spielberg’s best movie of the last 25 years. Thematically, just very rich. Also, just expertly written, sweeping scope, a sense of swagger to it. A sense of charm and playfulness, but still approaching the human condition in a real way. I’d say that it encapsulates a lot of what we’re interested in, in film.
RAMIREZ: But it’s Director Park…
CULLIVER: Park Chan-wook. Bong Joon Ho.
RAMIREZ: Shoplifters.
CULLIVER: [Hirokazu] Kore-eda.
RAMIREZ: There’s this world that I think international film has been able to tackle head on that’s where our sensibilities have lived. It’s like, I remember the first time I saw Todd Field’s work and I was like, how is everyone not talking about this? And so there is obviously some left-of-center stuff, but there’s [also] four-quadrant stuff that we’re approaching. Baton is a sports drama, but it’s very much through the lens of an athlete. So I think our genres that we are interested in range from a family drama, to a thriller, to a heist movie. [But] it’s more so the quality of storytelling within that, within the tones and genres that we attack.
DEADLINE: Obviously, Danny, you’ve made significant inroads at this point in your acting career and can use that to your advantage as a producer. But that aside, why start a company together now?
RAMIREZ: Well, the company, the energy around it started in 2018, I think. It’s when we were like, “We could do this together.” He had his day job, I had my day job. And we could develop movies on weekends. So I think it’s always been like, all right, let’s make movies that one, aren’t being offered to me, or are not being made by Hollywood in the first place, whether or not I’m in them.
Now more than ever, I think Tom is at a place that as an individual producer, he’s incredibly well liked and respected, has great taste. He now is hitting that same curve that I feel like I’m hitting on my acting career. It’s kind of the perfect time to branch out. There’s a sense of responsibility, coming from the Tom Cruise school of film, that there is a craft and a work ethic around how to make something of quality. And I think once you’re exposed to that, it’s really hard to see a bunch of movies that are made without that same love and effort and sweat and blood equity.
So I think part of our whole thing is, we grew up on movies that took a lot of effort and quality to make. And it’s not just about just making money. I think we are craft-first. And once we realized we both have that same sense of responsibility when it comes to story, we were like, why not now? Why not us? We have a big group of people that believe in us, that have been championing our work, from the second film I wrote, Pursuit of Touch…Jeremy O. Harris and bb² are creative producers on it. And Baton, it’s Victoria Alonso…
DEADLINE: What’s the latest on Pursuit of Touch?
RAMIREZ: We have a shooting script. We have a couple of exciting attachments. Cast announcement is coming up shortly. But that’ll be the second feature that I direct.
CULLIVER: Just to go back to the question about why start a company, obviously for Danny and other actors starting companies, I think that you see an industry that needs a spark and that needs new ideas. I think where Danny and I coalesce is believing that movies that are made of the highest quality are generally the ones that last longest. And in this business, you sort of have to work outside of what is current, and work on what is eternal. Obviously, for me, it’s the easiest decision in the world because getting to make movies with your friends is sort of the whole point. But I do think that starting something is exciting, and then being with young people with new ideas and new energy is always going to be what Hollywood feeds off.
RAMIREZ: We have a ton of projects in development. We have at least 12 scripts, 50 other types of pieces in development at early stages. Unscripted [projects], we have a couple. We have an exciting host attachment to our main unscripted show… There’s other areas that we’re venturing to expand with different collaborations and partners. I don’t know if we’re ready to announce those yet, but basically wherever you could fit story in, we’re venturing to go to — now more than ever, where there’s so many different avenues, whether it’s video games or anything in the tech space. I think there’s so many ways to tell human, authentic stories in there that are made with sweat equity.
DEADLINE: Will you be acquiring IP to develop projects around, alongside your work on originals?
CULLIVER: Funny you should ask. One of the larger pieces of IP that we’re adapting at the minute is Scarface. Obviously, Danny will play Scarface. We want to modernize it, adapting the original novel. [Editor’s Note: Universal Pictures released the most famous Scarface movie — 1983’s from Brian De Palma— and has flirted with reimagining the property, attaching Luca Guadagnino to direct in 2020. But the source material, a 1930 novel by Armitage Trail, is in the public domain.]
We’re independently developing it; we have some development financing in place. Obviously, there’s the Pacino legacy of it from the ’80s and then the original 1932 movie, but I think it’s ripe for modernizing, and to have someone like Danny in the lead is really exciting.
RAMIREZ: [We’ll be] developing our own IP, but also then going out and finding partners that have interesting IP that want to partner with us as creatives. But there’s also some that we’re just, with our little bit of funds, developing ourselves.
CULLIVER: I think importantly on the IP thing, we’re not going to engage on something if we don’t have a totally unique, fresh way into it. You don’t want to do stuff where you’re just remaking stuff for remakes’ sake. We’re not going to do this cravenly; we have something to say with the material. There’s been too much of that in the last 20 years to just go around making remakes because you can latch onto some audience built into the IP. You’ve got to have a new story to tell within it.
RAMIREZ: Scarface, to us, is the one that it’s been a dream role to play, but also to develop it in a way that I understand it. I think in 2025, it’s more relevant now than ever. So that’s where we’re excited to take this on.
DEADLINE: You’ve talked about wanting to tell stories that haven’t been told. What do you see that isn’t being well serviced by the industry at the moment?
RAMIREZ: There’s a ton of stories, whether it’s Mexican-American to Latin American to Latino stories with people at the forefront who aren’t just supporting actors in somebody else’s story, but rather the protagonist. The amount of Latinos in the U.S. is remarkable, and it’s only growing, and the stories made for them are very specific to the places in culture that we’ve been allowed to walk through. So there’s a lot of TV for them; there’s not that much prestige film for them. It’s been limited to what is financeable. So part of the game that we’re having to approach head on is like, okay, we want to do prestige film with stories that usually have been put to the side or haven’t been told because there’s no perceived return on the value of it. So we’re trying to find ways to navigate the obvious financial culture that’s been laid out within film, but then tell those stories that are uniquely Latin American — that are Mexican, Colombian, being the two heritages that I share. But also, across the board, stories that have been put to the side. To make a shift in the world, it doesn’t happen in one moment, but it happens in a bunch of little ones. So those are the types of stories that we want to tell.
DEADLINE: Is it too early to speak to creative attachments to Baton, beyond what we already know?
RAMIREZ: It’s a little early. We might hear about it in the next month or so… As far as cast goes, as a first-time director, we put together a really amazing infrastructure around me. I can’t wait to share [the cast] because the more I think about it, the luckier I feel around my first film, having the insane amount of talent who all believe in the script, believe in the story, believe in the vision.
CULLIVER: The thing that to me is the most exciting thing about it is one, to make the greatest soccer movie ever. It hasn’t been done well, I don’t think ever. I mean we’ve said it in every pitch, basically: That soccer ball is really the best attachment you can have. That’s world religion, and you’ve got a World Cup year in America [in 2026]. The time is right to make a soccer movie in America.
RAMIREZ: Soccer was my first love. It was a connection that I had with my family. And so every single time I’ve ever stepped on any set, from Assassination Nation to Top Gun to On My Block, any time I’ve shadowed a filmmaker, it’s always been through the lens of every single one of these lessons, how can I take away from this in order, the moment that I’m able to tell the football film that I want to, that I absorb all these lessons in order to actualize it?
I’ve been able, thankfully, to shadow Chris McQuarrie. I’ve shadowed [Alejandro González] Iñárritu. I’ve been able to shadow Sam Levinson, Claire Denis, the filmmakers that I dreamed of working with, and not only got the chance to work with, but then got to be able to just see their processes and see how they develop shots. All of that has all been funneled through the lens of, this is all going to go towards this football film.
DEADLINE: Can you expand on the lessons you’ve taken from someone like Tom Cruise that remain top of mind in approaching a project like Baton?
RAMIREZ: From the first time we ever stepped on set [on Top Gun: Maverick], it was understanding how to ground and make the audience feel the most dynamic sequences ever shot. Being on an F-18 and trying to figure out how that visual language translates most effectively, and the amount of technical planning needed to actualize something to feel that texture.
Tom is a big champion of this project. He was able to connect us with a couple people that are now a part of Baton. From the visual bible that I created to the to the script, he’s someone that, as I shadowed him in a recent project, he sat down and is like, “All right, tell me, how are you going to shoot this? Have you thought of this?”
DEADLINE: You shadowed Cruise and Iñárritu film on their forthcoming film for Warner Bros?
RAMIREZ: Yes, sir. Unbelievable. All I’ll say is, “Wow, wow, wow.” That’s it. But in the times that we were able to talk, it was a lot of asking questions and then figuring out how some of these things are going to best translate on screen. He’s someone that has a wealth of knowledge, and since the first day, he literally is like, “Every door for every head of department is open on any project I do.” And so because of Pursuit of Touch, we are able to talk to the head of special effects on a different project. He’s opened up these doors.
DEADLINE: You shadowed McQuarrie on the most recent Mission: Impossible film?
RAMIREZ: Both 7 and 8. I mean, whenever a director says that I can shadow them, I fly myself out and I shadow them. It becomes that simple. As a geek myself, I’m not going to pass on that opportunity. I’d rather be on set than watch it just at home.
CULLIVER: For me, the last five years I’ve been working side by side with Cassian Elwes, one of the legends of the indie film biz. And then working next to him as a co-producer with him on our first title, Dead Man’s Wire, you get to work with someone like Gus Van Sant, who’s made some of the best movies of the last 30 years. You soak in process, you soak in what you’re willing to fight for, and you soak in their unique perspectives on the business and then story. Working with Gus was a dream, and then having five years to learn from Cassian is one of the best grad schools I could have asked for.
DEADLINE: Dead Man’s Wire will mark Pinstripes’ first producing credit. Tell us a bit about the film and what drew you to it.
CULLIVER: The movie started with Austin Kolodny, who wrote the script. It’s based on the true story of Tony Kiritsis, who took his banker or his mortgage lender hostage in 1977 Indianapolis, and it became a national news story. It’s one of those true stories that you just cannot f*cking believe actually happened, and the real character of Tony Kiritsis was just like an absolute motormouth, hilarious stand-up comic, one of the funniest dudes who’s ever taken somebody hostage ever. And so the minute I read that, which would have been like February 2022, I was just like, oh, this is a f*cking movie. From there, I brought it in and Cassian and I began working on it. I went around trying to find some development financing, and we got it set up. It went through a few iterations over the last two or three years, but myself, Austin and Cassian were with it the entire time. Sam Pressman joined us, from Pressman Film, at one point.
And then basically in September of last year, Cassian and Gus had worked together from Cassian’s days at WME. They ran into each other. Cassian sent Gus the script — we’d been working on the script, tinkering here and there — and basically the next morning, he was like, “I’m in.” From then, it was just a bullet train towards trying to make the movie. From the time that Gus signed on to the first day of shooting was about eight or nine weeks, which is pretty nuts, and we shot in the middle of winter in Louisville, Kentucky, where we’ve worked a bunch over the years…Gus hadn’t made a movie in seven or eight years; I think everyone was excited by [his return].
We got a snowstorm one day before first day of principal photography, which is perfect because the real thing happened during a snowstorm, or just after one. So we got this free production value of the entire ground iced over, which was perfect, even though it completely f*cked us with the picture cars, which I had to deal with. We had to get all these ’70s cars; obviously, the highways are closed. So you get these calls like, “You have to go and tell Gus Van Sant day one, ‘Hey, we’re not going to have any ’70s cars.” And credit to him, if I was that director, I would have been like, “F*ck you guys, I’m out.” Gus was like, “Oh, yeah, no. That’s fine. We’ll figure it out.” Been there and done that many times.
It was a dream of a shoot. Every single actor in this movie is brilliant, and then the day that Cassian and I saw the first cut with Veronica Radaelli, our producer…She’s very ingrained in Kentucky culture and she’s probably the best physical producer I’ve ever worked with; certainly is that. Cassian says that she’s the best physical producer he’s ever worked with, which probably means a lot more because he’s worked with about 300. We all saw the first cut, and I cried. I just wept, after three years, to have a real piece of cinema with our name on it and to know that it was going to be Danny and I’s first movie. It was like, “F*ck, we got a banger.” We just knew it. I’m very excited for the world to see it.
RAMIREZ: To me, the thing that I find most special, obviously, I go into the personal, which is what Tom was able to do. You can’t teach taste, and when you latch onto a piece of work that you know is special, whether it’s finished or not, and then you follow through with that…He’s read so many scripts through the years that some were good, some were terrible. But he had finished watching every Oscar-nominated film by the age of 14, and so I was like, Tom’s got taste. He’s been in Australia running up somebody’s credit card to be able to watch all these movies, but he was able to do it. And so I think those are lessons that I take away. I’m a big believer in the 10,000 hours, and as this whole thing came together and I got updates, whether I was on set or wherever it was in the process, it was just like, a few people believed in this film, and they got it done. And watching this, getting that link that has an expiration date and you’ve got to watch it by then, was one of the most surreal moments of my life, where I was able to watch a piece that started from someone finding it, reading it, sharing it, and to watch it, knowing that not just my business partner, but my best friend was a big reason as to why this piece exists in the way it does. That, to me, is my takeaway.
DEADLINE: How many films are you looking to make a year? And at what budget level?
RAMIREZ: We see around two to three movies a year right now based on the development money we have, but also the IP that we have in our possession. The budget would be $5 [million]-plus.
CULLIVER: We want to work with the studios and make massive movies, and we have the ability to make small movies at a very high quality, too. To us, the budget is somewhat irrelevant. It’s project-specific.
DEADLINE: How are you financing development? What’s the plan financially to get films off the ground?
RAMIREZ: We have a couple of partners that, since our inception, we’ve aligned with for development funds. As far as the productions go, it’s an independent basis. So Baton has a different setup than Pursuit of Touch or Five Star would have; I just said the title [of a thriller we’re working on]. The Juice, the MLM one, that is Lewis and I, and that had a different structure around the development. One of our luxuries is that there’s a lot of stuff in-house that we develop ourselves. We can write ourselves. We could also go out and find a writer. We have actors in-house, obviously. So I think we have immense flexibility in that way. And so far from what we’ve seen, that’s been a really awesome quality.
Sometimes if we’re fixated on something and we have a great creative partner, instead of having to go out and find necessarily a writer, we could look and be like, all right, is this something that we should write? And that’s helped us out. That’s where Five Star came from: Knowing that we wanted to tell this type of thriller story, I was like, “I am obsessed with that. That’s something I could take on.” So instantly, we put sweat equity into it and we have a script that somebody else has loved, and so that’s been one of the maybe 10 projects that we have done that way and have either set up or are setting up.
CULLIVER: I think it’s a mix of, as Danny’s saying, either we’ll write it ourselves. We can bring in outside development financing. Every now and then, we’ll build something from the ground up and just sell it off immediately. It’s project-specific at the moment. [Development is] something that I’ve been doing the hard way for five or six years now, and the hustle, you get used to it, and you get good at it.
DEADLINE: What is your current timeline for getting projects into production?
CULLIVER: Baton, we’re gearing up hopefully for the end of the year, trying to get that thing in the can before the new year so that we can hit a release around the World Cup. We’ve got some exciting Danny news on the acting front, so there’s that schedule, but [of] the next movies that we’ve got lined up, Pursuit of Touch is coming together very quickly. We think that that can be up, I would say, Q2 next year. There’s a few other smaller movies I think we can do in the next 12 months, but [Baton and Pursuit of Touch] are probably the two that are nearest on the horizon.
RAMIREZ: I think early on, [we were] putting our heads together and being like, all right, there is a need for Latinos to lead something. But since then, once we realized that story transcends who you attach to something, there’s a lot of projects that don’t have me involved, whether as an actor or a director or a writer, but rather just as a producer. So we’ve been able to break out of just films that were for me to lead. I think that, to me, has been the biggest surprise — [that] if the North Star is storytelling, everything around it is as exciting. It’s like finding, what actor fits into this character, [and is] as excited about this role as we are? I never thought that was going to be something that I’d be fascinated by, but it’s awesome.
CULLIVER: We have Old Men Drink Coffee Alone. That’s a small family comedy that Alex Lehmann’s directing, who directed one of my favorite movies of the last five years, Paddleton. It’s been a dream to work with him. We’re constantly working with high-end filmmakers. In the indie space, they come together very quickly, and we have a lot of excellent material that is gestating and can come together in the next three months.
RAMIREZ: And then I’m obviously pitching all my friends that I’ve worked together on everything. And it’s funny. Anthony Mackie is just staring at us right now [from a Twisted Metal Billboard]. [Laughs] Literally right at us.
