Alum and film producer Luke Kelly-Clyne on his path to the entertainment industry

Luke Kelly-Clyne, A&S ’10, head of studio for comedian Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat production company, will attend a screening of a film he produced, Deepfaking Sam Altman, as part of Johns Hopkins’ Stories That Matter series on Thursday, April 30. Following the screening, Kelly-Clyne will join a panel discussion. Earlier that day, he will host a master class and Q+A for undergraduate and graduate film and media students.

Both events will be held at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Those interested in attending a screening of the verité film with a sci-fi comedy twist should register in advance.

We caught up with Kelly-Clyne to learn about his path to Hartbeat, the advice he plans to share with students, and being a new dad. The conversation has been lightly condensed and edited.

Please tell us about your experience at Johns Hopkins, and your path to entertainment.

I majored in political science and interned on Capitol Hill the summer after my freshman year. I liked politics, but I thought maybe I wanted to get a little bit closer to the legislative aspect. The summer after my sophomore year I went to work at Bloomberg LP in the chief counsel’s office, and dealt with media rights and IP law.

My junior year I had—as probably many college students do—another crisis of identity, and thought, am I really ever going to make the amount of money that I need to be secure? Maybe I just need to try the finance thing. So I interned at Morgan Stanley, and then was lucky enough to receive a full-time offer.

The first day of my analyst program, I kind of had a quarter-life crisis freakout. I was like, what am I doing? Who cares about the money if you’re not happy and fulfilled? Everybody at Morgan Stanley was so nice and supportive, and I ended up staying for a year and a half, but that moment was sort of an inflection point. I thought: This is the rest of my life, and I can’t make decisions purely based on perceived financial security. I have to make them based on happiness and what I want.

As a kid I was a child actor, and I always loved comedy and entertainment and performed in theater in high school. I sort of had half minors in both film and media studies and entrepreneurship and management while at Hopkins, which had given me just enough insight to understand that I really like film and media, and I really like entrepreneurship. I thought, why don’t I do stand-up and then try joke writing and writing humor pieces? Little by little, that was the beginning.

What do you do in your role today as head of studio for Kevin Hart?

I oversee traditional television and film, from unscripted TV to scripted TV and feature films and documentary films, and the entire gamut of his film and TV ecosystem, but I also oversee the non-Kevin work. So my typical day consists of managing a slate of about 50 film and TV projects, all in various stages of development and sale and production and delivery.

I would say 50% of my life is creative and 50% is business-focused. It’s helping the wonderfully talented executives and producers who work on my team identify the projects that we should be focused on, putting time into creatively developing, and taking out to market. And then once those projects are hopefully sold, it’s about making the deals with our legal team and packaging them with the right talent and the right directors and writers and crew, and then getting them up on their feet and actually producing them and getting them out into the world.

That sounds exhausting!

It’s a lot, but it’s fun! And all of those projects are in different silos and stages. So at any time, we probably have eight or 10 things that are in production, and six or eight that are in post-sale development, and another couple dozen that are early-stage ideas that we’re just putting the sales pitches together for.

What I like about it is that it allows me to utilize some of the business and finance skills I learned, because it’s company management and it’s financial management. And it allows me to utilize some of the politicking that I learned; it’s a heavy relationship business. And then it also allows me to utilize the creative skills that I love.

How did you go from dreaming of stand-up to where you are now?

There’s this three-legged stool, or three sides of a triangle, that I’ve identified as a strategy for success. The first of those sides of the triangle—which I call the virtuous triangle—is what is your skill set today? What experiences have you had? What are your accomplishments?

Then the second side: Where do you want to go in the next one year, five years, and ultimately? Sometimes it helps to start with, counterintuitively, where do you want to go ultimately, so that you can start to build your milestones in manageable chunks. But you have to have a big goal. And for me it was, I want to be a comedy writer.

And then the third side is, who do I know who could help me match my inventory of skills with my goal to hopefully achieve it?
You have to realize it’s a process. The inventory that I took was, I have some experience in performance. I was always in love with the process of writing. I don’t know if I’m as funny as I think I am but let me try my hand at this. Being creative, being entrepreneurial, those are all tools that I have. I want to be a comedy writer. Who do I know who could help me apply these tools and skills to achieve that goal?

How did things unfold from there?

I reached out to both the Johns Hopkins alumni network and my high school’s network. A high school alum named Nicky Weinstock, who is a successful film and TV producer out here in LA, agreed to have lunch with me. He said, you came to me with all these pitches and ideas; I need to see you having made something, a short sketch or a short film, before I can really ascertain what your true skill set is.

So while doing stand-up comedy, I started doing classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York, and learning about sketch comedy, and I started submitting to publications and pitching them humor article ideas. That body of work took me to a house team at Upright Citizens Brigade, where I was able to use their equipment to create sketch videos with like-minded creators.

I parlayed all that into my first entertainment job, taking a 90% pay cut from Morgan Stanley to go full-time at a very small production company. I worked there for a year, and I got my first writing credits on a tiny digital show, and I kept producing sketches, releasing them, and publishing articles.

While at that company, I had the opportunity to freelance with Tribeca Film and Maker Studios, who were starting a YouTube channel together, and they reached out to the UCB Talent Network to figure out who can take $50,000 and make a nine- or 10-episode sketch series. I tapped two directors who I admired from the CollegeHumor universe to direct those for me as I wrote and produced them.

Well, then the production company shutters a year later, I find myself back at square one, but I have this strong portfolio of work that allowed me to get a job writing at Nightline, which was a total left turn, and then five months later, there was a job offer at CollegeHumor, which was really where I wanted to be as a writer and director.

I started there writing and directing sketches, and then I graduated to running small, digital series, and then to running and executive producing very inexpensive television series, and eventually I took over the TV arm of CollegeHumor, which is called Big Breakfast, at the end of 2017. That was my foray into the executive space and the lead producer space, and bigger series and movies came, and that’s what led to my joining Hartbeat in 2022.

Congratulations on being a new dad! What’s that been like so far?

Thank you. My wife and I have a 4-month-old named Max. As a parent, you have this flash before your eyes of what his whole life could be. You want to impart the wisdom that you’ve learned, but you also want to provide them with a completely open aperture to find the path that they want to walk in this world. If I can say, hey, Max, you don’t have to do what I do, but let me tell you a story about how I got here, and give you the tools to figure out how you want to get to where you need to go, that’s, I think, the greatest gift, and one that I’m excited to give not just to Max, but hopefully to anybody who will listen.