Meet the Creatives Looking to Change the Way Films Get Financed, by Fans First
Gregory Noveck has sat inside the machine long enough to know exactly what is broken. A veteran creative executive and producer stints at Warner Bros., DC Comics, […]
By: Taylor Fox
May 14, 2026
Entertainment
Gregory Noveck has sat inside the machine long enough to know exactly what is broken. A veteran creative executive and producer stints at Warner Bros., DC Comics, Universal and Paramount. He has spent decades navigating the gap between what creators want to make and what studios will greenlight. After leaving Paramount, he started asking a question that would eventually lead him to Vezzit: Why is it all just getting harder, not easier?
“The bottleneck that was always there has become even more constricted, ,” says Noveck, who serves as Vezzit’s Chief Creative Officer. “It’s getting harder and harder to make stuff. And coming out of Paramount, I was just watching this whole system and thinking, there’s got to be a better way for creators to get their things made.”
He found it through a mutual friend who introduced him to Marshall Uzzle, Vezzit’s co-founder, whose path to the entertainment industry is unlike most.
Uzzle started programming computers at 12 years old, working through Basic, Pascal, Fortran and C before pivoting to finance and applied statistics in college.
He spent years as a financial analyst doing high-stakes valuations for mergers, acquisitions and estate disputes, including the J. Howard Marshall estate during the Anna Nicole Smith case and the valuation of Koch Industries. He also handled the Wall Street Journal versus a derivatives company during the period when municipalities were losing significant money on bad instruments.
Then a screenwriter neighbor told him to pitch a dream at Universal. He walked in, described a nightmare he had literally experienced, and watched the executive ask for his list of credits. When the executive said he could not pay him to write the project, Uzzle had an epiphany.
“If people get paid just to make stuff up, this is awesome,” he recalls thinking. He decided that was what he wanted to do. For seven straight years, he wrote screenplays from 7:30 at night until 3 in the morning without missing a day. He optioned and sold material, moved through advertising at Chiat/Day, built out digital projects, worked at Anonymous Content and APA, and eventually got signed by management to write television. That is where the idea for Vezzit began.
He had lunch with Ron Matana, now Vezzit’s third co-founder, on the Fox lot. Matana had built all of Fox’s living room and content apps. Sitting in the cafeteria, still furious, Uzzle said something that became the foundation of the company.
“Why should six people in a room get to decide everything that is going to be presented to the rest of the world?”
They grabbed their phones and searched for a platform that let creators go directly to audiences for financing. Nothing existed. So they decided to build one.
What Vezzit Does
The platform allows anyone in the world to directly invest in a professional entertainment project in exchange for a cut of first-dollar gross revenue, paid off the top before any studio waterfall structure kicks in. Creators can raise up to $75 million per project per year and retain full ownership, financial control and IP rights throughout.
Uzzle references the film “The Platform” to explain the current industry structure. “It starts at the top with all that food, and as it drops down, people take and take.
By the time it gets to the bottom, those people have nothing. That is how the system is set up right now.” Vezzit removes the waterfall entirely. Key talent, including directors, writers and lead actors, can participate on a first-dollar basis alongside investors, a deal structure that is essentially unavailable to mid-level productions under the current studio system.
It is not an entirely new concept. Simons points to Disney’s Silver Screen Partners program from the 1980s, in which E.F. Hutton called accredited investors across the country and raised money for a slate of films on transparent, simple terms. Those investors funded “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Three Men and a Baby,” “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Footloose” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” The entire structure fit in two or three paragraphs of a 10-K filing. Investors received 100% of revenue for a set period, then Disney recouped marketing and direct expenses, and everything after that was split 50-50.
“It kind of already happened,” Uzzle says, “just manually, through a brokerage firm, with a very limited profile of investors who were already in the in-crowd.” The insight was that once the laws changed and technology matured, the model could be scaled, automated and made genuinely accessible. “Silver Screen on steroids, across every vertical that exists.”
Beyond Film and Television
Noveck and Uzzle are quick to point out that Vezzit is not just a film platform. It is an entertainment investment platform , covering film, television, video games, podcasts, novels and Broadway. They argue that every creative industry is converging on the same crisis: VCs have pulled back from indie game funding, podcast networks are consolidating, music deals remain punishing for artists, and major studios are simultaneously cutting staff while demanding the same talent work on their franchise properties.
“Everyone is going to the exact same hell,” Uzzle says. “The bottleneck is so constricted now.”
For creators, the pitch is ownership. Under the current system that has become predominant during the streaming era , a writer or producer who spends years packaging a project often hands it over in exchange for a check and becomes work-for-hire, with no ongoing stake in what they built. Vezzit keeps the creator in control. Their IP stays theirs. And because investors are by definition the most enthusiastic segment of the potential audience, they become a ready-made marketing community the moment the project is ready to distribute.
”Those people that have invested in it are going to want all their friends to see it and check it out,” Noveck says, “because they’re invested in it, emotionally and financially.”
For studios and streamers, Vezzit’s pitch is risk reduction. A project that arrives pre-funded, with a built-in investor base and an existing audience, represents a lower-risk licensing opportunity. “They don’t have to fund the entire thing,” Noveck says. “They can license it, make all sorts of different deals, and it’s coming with a built-in audience.”
The equity dimension is also part of what drives both founders. Uzzle raises the example of Asian lead actors on Hawaii Five-O who were told they would not receive equal pay and ultimately left the show. Under Vezzit’s model, a community that wants to see itself represented on screen can fund that project directly, without needing a traditional gatekeeper to approve it. “If the audience wants to see it, they can fund it, they can see it, they can make money from it,” he says.
The Creator Profile
At launch, Vezzit is focused on professional creators with established credits, people whose track records give investors confidence that a project will actually be completed. But the longer-term vision includes pathways for emerging talent to build audiences and access the same infrastructure.
The platform is also designed for talent who have grown frustrated with the terms of traditional deals: artists with exploitative music contracts, game developers whose creative vision gets overridden by publisher demographics research, producers who want to own their IP outright.
“There are the ones who just say, I want to own my IP, I want full control, I want to control my destiny,” Uzzle says. “I don’t want someone telling me what to do and how to do it and how I’m supposed to create this.”
Noveck frames the bigger shift simply. Rather than three people in a room deciding what gets made, it is creators and audiences deciding together. “We think that really serves everyone,” he says. “And for the first time in a long time, creators will retain control of the things they’re creating, as opposed to just becoming work for hire.”
The only parties who do not benefit in that scenario, Uzzle notes, are the ones who built their careers on Hollywood’s oldest tradition: obscuring where the money actually goes.
“The only losers,” he says, “are the crooks.”
Vezzit is currently building its creator and investor platform. More information at vezzit.com.
