Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas.

In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed by BRON Studios. Manashil then went on to Executive Produce SXSW fan-favorite X and its sequel, Pearl, directed by Ti West. Manashil is an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated series Entergalactic directed by Fletcher Moules. Entergalactic was created by Kid Cudi and features voiceover from Jessica Williams and Timothée Chalamet. It was released alongside its album of the same name from Kid Cudi on September 30th.

Manashil is a native of Los Angeles and graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production.

KARINA MANASHIL

Scott is the most beautiful, kind, goodhearted man, but also he's brilliant. He's a generator of ideas. I feel like by being next to him, your role is to take all of these concepts that he's crafting and ideating and bring them to fruition, so it's a really beautiful gift where you feel like you're paired with an artist who is the source of so much. Scott was also really important to me in a lot of ways from our very beginning.

So the animated series Entergalactic tells the story of a black modern love story in New York City. It's simple in its core. Jabari, the character Scott plays, is a graffiti artist, and Cosmic Comics has decided to option his character and turn it into a comic book. So he's at this point in his life where he is moving into the loft apartment of his dreams, everything seems to be working for him when he meets Meadow, who's his neighbor. And she is this amazing woman, photographer, coolest cat on the planet. And essentially this show follows their meet-cute and their love story and the will they-won’t they of if they'll end up together. So there's something very warm in its aesthetic. But what's so interesting is that the love story is very nostalgic. It's, it just hearkens back to what a romance feels like.

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Scott sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to finish, and essentially the two parts exist simultaneously. So you've got the album on its own, and then you've got the event, which allows you to hear beats of each piece of music in all of these key beats of Jabari (Scott's character) and Meadow’s (Jessica Williams' character) love story. Scott had tweeted out that Entergalactic was the greatest piece he's ever created. This is the thing he's most proud of. Scott feels that this was an opportunity to create that new moment for his audience where they're going to get to experience something that they'd never had the opportunity to before because it feels so new.

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Scott lives in between the notes. So the things that you would expect, he lives right in the center, which is why his music is so interesting. The nuance and creativity of his choices is so indicative of the way that he hears sound.

Entergalactic was such a beautiful process. Throughout it, it felt like we were doing something new and different. And then what really hit home is that there was something so new about the colors, the fashion, the music, the sounds, the visuals, the thinks and purples, even Fletcher Moules in the way that he animated, it harkened back to hand-drawn animation, where instead of, you know, traditional 3D animation of today where you've got your arm up and then you draw the arm down and the computer generates a smooth move from top to bottom, so everything looks perfect. With Entergalactic, it was really important to him to make sure each frame was hand drawn. So every move was a deliberate choice by an artist and a team of artists around the world.

So there's something very warm in its aesthetic, but what's so interesting is that the love story is very nostalgic. It's, it just hearkens back to what a good romance feels like. And what was interesting watching it for the first time was I didn't realize how much I missed seeing that from the US. It just felt like the joy that we've been missing in programming.

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And what was so moving was when we went into Netflix to the theater to screen the finished product for the first time. You're sitting there and at the end of it, Scott was crying, and I looked over - it made me cry low-key - but Scott was crying and he said – This completely blows my mind because this is the first time I had a vision up here in my head and tried to express it, and then had to trust all 300 plus people, all around the world, working in different time zones, in different places, and each of them putting a hand to it and seeing exactly that vision. And then watching the product, and it is the best version of anything I could have ever possibly had in my head.

So, to us, that's the purest, most beautiful... Again, how fortunate that every hand was moving in tandem and moving in lockstep, and all of it. But that was the beauty of collaboration, this opportunity for a small vision to touch so many hands and become the big vision.

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In terms of things that Scott is developing - I kid you not - he called me one day and said, "Hey, let's write a pilot," and within a week... The process of how he writes now is we literally sit on the phone, and he tells me, top of his head, everything that happens in pages, scenes, and dialogue – all of it. And I quickly type it in notes, convert it to script, send him the pages. We look it over, and then move over to the next. So within a week, he wrote this pilot that now we're in negotiations on that would be an opportunity for him to star in a comedy. So this is just a typical Scott à la Ti West, who does things that sound absurd. Scott also pulls off the absurd as well. And there's a plethora of other projects and other arenas. As I mentioned, we're working on a video game, we're working on a comic book, there's a few different movies that Scott has ideated and created that we're getting into negotiations on and starting to set up.

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Also, in terms of another artist that we brought into the fold, there's this incredibly, incredibly talented artist, Jeron Braxton, who is 27 years old, from Indiana, and basically started making music when he was young, wanted to create cool music videos, and self-taught himself animation. His animation erupted, and he created a very distinct style that pulled from 2000's video game aesthetics, very cubism, abstract like hype, cool. And his career took off. He was on Sundance with his first film and continued on the kind of film trajectory, but also started working in the culture space, and he worked on Virgil Abloh's show. His artwork was featured in Christie's first NFT auction with Takashi Murakami, and he's become talked about in this space. And he had an idea for his directorial debut, which now we're putting together alongside Ron and our partner Alex Lebovici.

So the kind of next wave is very wide – a lot of different projects, and a lot of different spheres, and a lot of it à la Entergalactic, bringing Scott into the fold. So we have a project with Jaden Smith, we're talking to Sam Levinson about more projects.

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So I'm Iraqi-Iranian-Jewish. So I remember growing up where the movie that felt most reflective of our family was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which, it's Greek. They're not the same, but it was so close, talking about the lamb, and we have Nick, Nick, Nick, Nikki, and in my family, Shuly, Shuly, Shuly, Sol, and there was just... It felt like, Oh my God, this feels like my family seeing that. And the second thing like that was seeing Ramy Youssef, who's Egyptian, New York. I'm Iraqi-Iranian-L.A.-Jewish.

He's Muslim. It's not a like for like, but there was so much. I was like, that feels like us. So I feel my guidance would be, go for it! Because I feel like I've had these moments within the business, but seeing Ramy, it felt like content is renewed. All of a sudden, there's a whole new world that's open simply because he was willing to tell his story. And I would love to see a million more opportunities of that. And I would love to be involved in fostering opportunities like that. And I found it to be so inspiring to see content like that. So that, and maybe it's simplistic just to say, Yes, go all in. But my pride would be, and my appreciation would be, to see more opportunities for creators that move me in the same way that those two experiences felt reflective of who I am.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Mira Patla with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Mira Patla. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).