Mike Hickey’s company, Pulp & Paper Entertainment, produces films, web series, podcasts, commercials, music videos, and more.

  1. Why did you start a production company?

You kind of need one if you want to make movies. That’s the simple version of an answer. To get technical, I’ve actually been operating as Pulp &Paper Productions for a while, but to secure financing for a film I was working on, I needed my company to be incorporated. It turns out that “Pulp & Paper Production” is its own industry, so it was deemed too vague for a film production company. After some discussions with friends in the industry, I settled on “Entertainment.”

  1. What’s your company’s mission?

The business plan – which I’m still working on because I’m essentially doing this whole thing backwards – says “Pulp & Paper Entertainment is a film production company focusing on creating genre-based feature films & television as well as short-form branded commercial content.” That means I want to make horror movies and television but also pay bills.

  1. What’s happening with Mike Fardy’s short film Matchstick?

We’re done. We finished the film last week, which is crazy exciting, moreso for Mike because he worked on it for over three years and I just came on board to produce in March, but still very exciting. There’s an incredible amount of work by an amazing group of professionals that goes into making a film like this. It’s really rewarding to see it all come together in a product that we’re really proud of. We started submitting to festivals, so it’s wait and see time.

  1. What other projects are in the works?

A bunch I can’t really talk about, unfortunately. In this business, nothing is real until you’re on set, and even then it can fall apart, so there’s not much I feel comfortable talking about as though they’re real. I’ll just say that the next year or so could be really big and I’m excited about that. I do have Fright Hype, my weekly horror news series with Crypt TV. The 100th episode of that is scheduled for the last week of July, which is surreal.

  1. How did your participation in the NLFDC’s L.A. Business Development Mission help you?

I just got back from my second and it’s a great experience. Not only for the insight into how the industry works in L.A. and making valuable connections there, but because you travel with a group of filmmakers from here that you don’t always get to spend that kind of time with, so it’s conducive to collaboration that might not have happened if you were each working out of your own corner of St. John’s.

  1. What are your long-term goals?

I want to make spooky tourism commercials, essentially. Horror was what drew me to making movies and they are the types of stories I want to tell. Newfoundland and Labrador has a stunning and dynamic landscape – both geographically and culturally – that lends itself to the genre, and I don’t think it’s been explored to its full potential. I want to change that.