When Hollywood Collapsed, He Hit Pause and Rebuilt Everything with Mas Moriya

In this special Thanksgiving episode, Ellen Williams sits down with Mas Moriya, filmmaker, producer, and founder of Filmclusive, a platform he built from scratch to make hiring in film, TV, and gaming more transparent and equitable. 

Mas was once an up-and-coming creative working with the likes of Alicia Keys.
But after the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, rising production costs, and the LA fires, the industry around him collapsed. 

Friends with feature films, fellowships, and awards were suddenly saying: 

“I’m just looking for a job. Any job. I need rent.”

That turning point pushed Mas into a powerful pause, a year-long reset where he stepped away from filmmaking entirely to understand what was broken in Hollywood and how to fix it.
What he found wasn’t just economic failure… but a systemic lack of tools, structure, and support for working creatives.
 
So he taught himself software engineering and design, leaning heavily on analogies (including Pokémon!) to understand complex concepts.
Yes, The story Mas Moriya shared included a very creative idea on how to learn a new skill.

And that learning led him to build Filmclusive, a market network designed to end pay-to-play capitalism in Hollywood and give creatives free access to opportunities and digital tools.
 
In this episode, Mas and Ellen discuss:
 

• How Hollywood’s economic shifts are pushing out working creatives
• Why the industry still depends on spreadsheets and 10 disconnected tools
• The moment he realized no platform truly served filmmakers and performers
• How AI and analogy-driven learning helped him teach himself to code
• Why small daily pauses can lead to major life pivots
• The leadership lesson Mas believes every CEO should practice

A perfect episode for anyone navigating change, reinvention, or the courage to build something new.
 
Learn more about Mas: https://www.filmclusive.com/about-founder

Learn more about Ellen: https://thesalientstrategist.com

 📩 Join the newsletter for updates: https://api.transpond.io/form?am=42668&fid=49041&host=true 

Transcript

[00:00] Mas Moriya: Sometimes those small pauses lead towards a bigger pause to stop and shift.

[00:06] Ellen Williams (Voiceover): Welcome to Time To Press Pause. Real-life stories from the C-Suite. I'm your host, Ellen Williams, CEO of The Salient Strategist. And today we have a really interesting story about how a short pause turned into a long pause, turned into new ways of learning new things.

[00:30] Ellen Williams: My guest today is Mas Moriya, and he's founder of Filmclusive. He's also a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and producer, dedicated to ending pay-to-play capitalism in Hollywood. Once an up-and-coming artist working with the likes of Alicia Keys, he feels the Writers and Actors Strike of 2023 turned his career and the career of millions into a wasteland begging to find a job.

[01:01] Ellen Williams: Since 2023, he taught himself software engineering and design to build his dream platform, Filmclusive, a market network built to give filmmakers, writers, and performers free access to opportunities and digital tools without subscription barriers. Combining his experience in filmmaking and community organizing, Mas uses technology to make hiring in film, television, and gaming more transparent, equitable, and accessible for everyone.

[01:35] Ellen Williams: Hello, Mas. It's so great to have you here today on Time To Press Pause.

[01:41] Mas Moriya: And so great to hear from you, Ellen. Thank you so much for inviting me to come on the podcast.

[01:45] Ellen Williams: I'm really happy that you're able to spend some time with us today, but most of all, I'm really eager to hear your press pause story.

[01:54] Mas Moriya: Well, I'm really glad to share it. I think this is such a good concept of a podcast just to be like, "Oh, what is that story?" And everybody has that pause moment—or I hope some people have that. And so I think this is... it's just a great question. So I'm looking forward to it.

[02:08] Mas Moriya: So, I come from the filmmaking background. I've been a filmmaker for 15 years. My uncle's been in the industry for 60 years. So entertainment has been a part of my life since the beginning. And I just love movies and I wanted to make movies. But if anybody's really noticed and kept watch about the entertainment industry right now, where it's been coming for the past few years, there's a big shift that's happening that no one kind of feels it, but unless you're in it, don't really understand it. So I'm going to take us a little back into a little bit of pre-COVID and post-COVID and then post-WGA strikes and the LA fires.

[02:45] Mas Moriya: Hollywood is the epicenter of entertainment for almost the global world. But what happened after Netflix started doing the streaming wars and started all those things, the cost of making film still stayed the same and even went up because they want to do more premium content. You think of House of Cards, you think of Orange is the New Black. But when you started to subscribe to those channels, you're only paying $15 a month. So for so many years, they weren't making money. And then Disney came on, Hulu came on, and then HBO came on, all their streamings—and they weren't making money either. They were just trying to grab the market to get people on because the cable networks were dying. Most people subscribed.

[03:28] Mas Moriya: But what didn't come over from cable was ads. And ad revenue was a big part of how these companies made money. Even pre-COVID, filmmakers weren't getting much. Post-COVID, that even just dropped even further because prices went up, economy went up, people coming back... people left the industry. But then we had the strike. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were a big success for the writers and the actors. We get more money. That means more costly productions. And as the economy went up, production [costs] even went further. And as the studios and streamers weren't making money—they're kind of making money now, but not really—everything just went higher and higher.

[04:14] Mas Moriya: So filmmakers like myself, we were just getting pushed out because unless you are famous, you're a celebrity, the risk factor of getting a new talent to come in with a new story is just so high so that studios don't pick them up. And then the LA fires happened. We just had a whole shutdown of everybody [asking], "Are you okay?" Like, we're kind of just okay. I even left my parents' house. I was like, fine, but it was bad here. So even just recovering from all that, people left cause they didn't have their house. They went to like Texas because it's just cheaper to live there and get a house.

[04:47] Mas Moriya: The filmmaking industry crashed. Almost none of my friends have jobs. I don't have a job. I don't have a real job. I work every day, but I don't have like a job that is consistent. Nobody has work. So my time to pause was about last year and thinking, if the friends that I have have made their feature films, got their awards and are getting fellowship placements—which they give you money—and then I asked them like, "Hey, so what's next? What are you doing?" And their answer is, "I'm just looking for a job. Any job. I need rent." And it made me think, where do I stand with that?

[05:24] Mas Moriya: So I actually took a pause on my whole career of entertainment and creative entertainment to try to figure out what is the problems within Hollywood. Not just the money in the filmmaking, but there's actually larger systemic problems and structural problems within the digital world. I took a full year. I took the time to pause to actually learn how to code. How to do software engineering. And it was something that I've always kind of wanted to do, but I'm... my keyboard fingers are just awful. It's such a big new skill that I didn't know. Always loved technology, always loved that.

[06:03] Mas Moriya: During that time of COVID and stuff, I also started a nonprofit to help other creatives find each other, network, do things, put together. But it was just so difficult. So difficult to organize. So difficult to get people on events, to put people in a group together. We were using 10 different tools. Email, spreadsheets, Eventbrite, Patreon, Facebook groups, Discord. Like there's just so many. But I realized there really wasn't a LinkedIn for the film industry that actually works. To make a platform, to make any software can be very expensive, especially if you don't know how to do it yourself because coding is a skill. It's a very expensive skill. And you think about developers, you think about anybody in Silicon Valley, it's like, you're getting 200, 300, 400, 800 thousand dollars a year just to do coding stuff, computer stuff. So when you have to hire somebody... you want this idea made, you usually hire somebody, maybe you go overseas and you hire somebody else to do it, but it just takes so much money, so much effort.

[07:03] Mas Moriya: But I just decided I want to do it myself. AI has gotten so good to help you do things and coding is one of the biggest things that they're working on right now. So I said, I'm going to take this whole next year to pause my whole career, learn this skill, learn what AI does, how does computer engineering work? How does the biggest companies in the world make their software and help other people solve a problem? And I wanted to solve my problem, but also the other problems of all the other nonprofits I've ever talked to, all their community groups I've ever talked to, cause they had all the same problems. Organizing their people, organizing their members in spreadsheets. And even I've talked to the studios, they're managing major clients on a Google Sheet! And you're like, wow, you're copying and pasting from email every day. Inboxes are flooded. And I just said, this can't... we can't continue doing this forever.

[07:56] Mas Moriya: So my pause for me, and I think it was so beneficial for me to pause my whole trajectory to learn this new thing, is now paid off a year later to feel like we're on our way. Doing great. Hard, but still good.

[08:12] Ellen Williams: I'm not even sure how to react to that, honestly. What an interesting and unique story in and of itself. And the wherewithal to not just realize you need to pause, but what to do with it. What is really interesting to me... You also threw in some other things about, okay, so what's wrong with my industry and how do I get everyone together to communicate about it? My 40 years of experience is in technology. So when you started down the path of "we were using 10 different tools," right? So I'm all about efficiency and I'm thinking, yeah, so many people go down all these paths. But the disdain in your voice when you said "spreadsheets!" [Laughs]

[09:02] Mas Moriya: [Laughs]

[09:05] Ellen Williams: That's the lifeblood of so many companies that everything gets exported in these spreadsheets and they run from them. And so I don't have quite the same disdain that you do, but I understand the value of leveraging something that's going to be much more impactful and efficient than a spreadsheet. So...

[09:27] Mas Moriya: I never understood formulas. So I barely can do the add formula on them. I'm like, ah, is it sum error? I don't know. I just wanted to add these numbers. I can barely do that. And so, and color coding... I just couldn't stay my life in my own spreadsheets and then they're all just like scattered spreadsheets in themselves. But then they're just not connected. So if I have a name in there, I can't... it's just a name on a, you know, string, but it's just a type of text. And I can't click on that name and go see their profile or their demos or their reels or anything else. And I'm like, I just want that. Because then I'm also... how the industry has been organizing is "Here, fill out this Google Form so we know that you're a part of this list and people can find you." But then I'm on like 30 different lists that I can never update cause it's just a Google Form. So I just was like, ah, there's gotta be another way.

[10:17] Ellen Williams: When you wrapped up your story, you went a little fast. Did I hear that now you've accomplished, you have a platform or a tool that you a year ago found was something missing within the industry? Were you able to not just create and develop it, were you able to launch it as well?

[10:38] Mas Moriya: That's correct. Yes. So I did create it. And it's not... you know, some people are like, "Oh, you just created it so fast. You must have quote-unquote 'vibe coded' it." Like yeah, of course, you can say I vibe coded it, but when does vibe coding become actual just software engineering? And how to think about architecture? And how things work? How the process works? How does design work? How does flow, user base, cognitive overload, all those types of things?

[11:08] Mas Moriya: You know, I've been researching this problem for three years. Even when I was doing the nonprofit, I called... was called Strong Asian Lead. I wanted to create a database of Asian Americans in entertainment so you could find us. It was so hard to find Asian Americans. And very specific. You want Japanese or Okinawan? Do you want Filipinos who speak Tagalog and English who know how to [do a] certain dance? Or a Bengali person, not just South Asian. Like a certain specific thing. So I did have a no-code tool that we were using for a long time, kind of like a Squarespace, a drag and drop type thing. But I had bigger ideas and they were still kind of a startup. So every time I had a bug, it would take weeks to even just fix that one bug, but I had like 400 notes for them! And so I was like, "Oh, can you do this feature?" Like, "Yeah, we can, but we have other clients that need other things." So I was like, okay, well, I want to do this now.

[12:02] Mas Moriya: So when AI started coming out, I was like, how does this work? Started doing the front end. What does it look like? But then you couldn't save things, you couldn't deploy it, other people couldn't touch it. So I just taught myself, how does this thing work? So I started watching YouTube videos. So every time I'd think about like, "Oh, that's cool. So that's what that does. Okay. So what do other things do? What is Node.js? What is TypeScript? What are all these things?"

[12:30] Mas Moriya: And I love this part of the story cause I get... how I learned how to do software engineering and those things was through ChatGPT. So I said, "Hey, teach me about this thing." But I said, "Teach me through Pokemon." Because I know Pokemon like the back of my hand, especially the old video games, just like Gameboy Red, Blue, Yellow. Gameboy is so simple, but it is still a computer. So how does it work? How did they code that whole thing over time? And so for... I always liked the basic example of like Type and TypeScript. A Type is a list of a form basically. What's your name? What's the, I don't know, a species? What's the number of that? So if you think about filling out a form, you just have to fill out that form cause it says, here's the title. An Object within that Type is the actual answers. So: Pikachu, Electric Mouse, Attack is Thunderbolt, the number is 25. So I'm like, oh, okay, so that makes sense. So when I want to do a Type for Users or Profiles, I put: My Name, My Location, here is my Profile Image, here is my Demo Reel, here is the photos... my headshots. So it's like, oh, okay, so that's how those work.

[13:51] Mas Moriya: Then you can get into more complicated things, something like caching. You always think about "clear your cache," where does that go? Well, it's on your computer and it's stored there. Well, if you had a Pokedex and you captured a Pokemon, you can keep it... log that on your Pokedex, but it's not on someone else's Pokedex cause they didn't capture it. So it's... I just learned that way and it just helped me so much to learn something new by learning with something I didn't know. And a part of that thinking was, I taught fifth grade filmmaking for a short period of time and they taught us to teach those fifth graders through analogies. So for me learning a new skill—also part of that time to pause—is I need to pause not just what I'm doing, but also to think about how to learn and relearn.

[14:40] Ellen Williams: Let's unpack a little bit of that. The fact that you had bigger ideas led you to "I'll do it myself." And I've been there. I've been there in my life like, ugh, I have to run my own company. I have to be an entrepreneur because otherwise I'm not going to get this done. So I hear what you're saying. And not that I don't love being an entrepreneur, but there have been times where I really was just like, really? Again? And I am there now, so we're all good.

[15:06] Ellen Williams: The other thing I wanted to really talk about, which I think is a very smart way of going about things, that when you're learning something new, especially coding—which I am not a developer. I can read a little bit of code because I can see what it's doing, but I could... I have never written code—the fact that you had the concept of "teach me in a relative way to something I already know." Analogies I get, I've done plenty of training with analogies, but I've never done like a big blown "Teach Me" and format it in this way. I think that's incredibly smart way to approach learning something new. I also appreciate that your choice was Pokemon. My son was all about Pokemon and now my grandson is all about Pokemon. So I just can't get it out of my life.

[16:09] Ellen Williams: So Mas, I have one last question for you. What advice would you give other leaders as to when they would identify it's time to press pause?

[16:21] Mas Moriya: The biggest advice I'd give to CEOs or anybody running a business or creating something from scratch that you have to lead other people is to listen to other people and ask them questions and see where they're at. See how they feel about the industry, how they feel about your work and their work. Asking questions gives you answers. And lets other people feel heard. And then think about the collective answers and see a through-line to figure out maybe I need to shift somewhere. If 10 CEOs have the same problem and you're having that problem, then something in that same trajectory is either broken or you don't want to be there.

[17:09] Mas Moriya: How to take a pause and listen to other people and then pause to figure out the solution to that problem... so then now you're able to solve your problem that can also be the answer to somebody else's problem.

[17:22] Ellen Williams: So if I understand you correctly, you're not saying there's any one specific thing that might cause a pause, but that leaders should regularly take the time to ask questions across peers and throughout organizations and within their network just to sort of do a pulse check to see where things are. Not necessarily that they're having an issue, but certainly if they are, this would be the path, but just in general to keep identifying where there are places they can learn.

[17:57] Mas Moriya: Sure. Yes, and... it's those small moments that you could take those pauses and take a step back. You know, there's always the feeling and want to be a leader, but sometimes you need to step back, even just for 30 minutes or a day or two, and figure those things out. And then sometimes those small pauses lead towards a bigger pause to stop and shift. There's a balance of yes, sometimes you need to take a big shift and a big pause to reevaluate life, business, any of those things. Even my whole personality, life has changed and the way I think about myself. But those small changes are your daily things. Cause maybe a life pause for maybe one year or two years only happens every decade. But there's time to pause every day, every once a week, once a month, some time to do that. Taking small pauses can lead towards really big—not necessarily inspirations—but really big thoughts.

[18:54] Ellen Williams: That really resonates with me. I love the "Take a few small pauses can lead to big things." I think that's great. And certainly I wish you big things. You have big ideas and you're having big accomplishments. And so congratulations. And thank you so much for not only sharing your story, but a little bit of a life lesson in how to learn, I think was also extremely valuable.

[19:23] Mas Moriya: Thank you for the time to give me a chance to speak and take a pause out of my day and a pause out of your day to share each other's. So thank you so much.

[19:31] Ellen Williams (Voiceover): Thank you for listening to this episode of Time To Press Pause. If you'd like to learn more about Mas, go to filmclusive.com. If you'd like to learn more about me, go to thesalientstrategist.com and be sure to sign up for my newsletter so that you get more information about my upcoming book, Creating Time, scheduled for publication in Q1 2026. And please listen again wherever you listen to your podcasts.