NEW JERSEY. NOW!
A declaration from the state that taught the world how to look at a screen.
Written by Adam Nelson, Co-Founder, Socko!
Photography by Samad Haq
Cover Model: Viva June
Location: Gleason's New Jersey home of NJ Give a Kid a Dream
Listen.
Somewhere tonight, on a backlot in West Orange that no longer exists, a man named Fred Ott is sneezing into the first motion picture camera ever built, and the sneeze is echoing down the Garden State Parkway 133 years later, bouncing off every diner sign and oil refinery and boardwalk arcade between Cape May and the George Washington Bridge, and it is landing, right now, on the windshield of a grip truck idling outside a warehouse in Bayonne. The grip truck does not know it is carrying a ghost. The grip truck does not know it is carrying a god. The grip truck is just waiting for the call.
The call is coming.
It has been coming for 133 years, and it is coming now, and if you cannot hear it you are not listening hard enough, because the noise is everywhere. It is in the crack of a slate on a Morristown lawn at four in the morning, it is in the hiss of a fog machine on the corner of Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park, it is in the scrape of a dolly track across a Hoboken cobblestone with Timothée Chalamet standing on top of it pretending to be Bob Dylan, it is in the beer fridge at Chef Freddy’s Table where Sydney Sweeney ate dinner after Paul Feig wrapped her for the day, it is in the collective breath of a thousand Teamsters waking up in Bloomfield and Belmar and knowing, for the first time in their working lives, that the job is here, not across the river, not across the country. The job is here, it is on their block, it is walking distance from the deli where they get their coffee, and it has their name on it.
I want you to understand what that means. I want you to sit inside what that means, because the people who write about this business from Los Angeles, they do not understand what that means, and the people who write about it from New York barely understand what that means, and even the people who live here have been shrugging about it for so long that they have forgotten how to feel the thing when the thing arrives. The thing has arrived.
Somewhere tonight, on a backlot in West Orange that no longer exists, a man named Fred Ott is sneezing into the first motion picture camera ever built, and the sneeze is echoing down the Garden State Parkway 133 years later, bouncing off every diner sign and oil refinery and boardwalk arcade between Cape May and the George Washington Bridge, and it is landing, right now, on the windshield of a grip truck idling outside a warehouse in Bayonne. The grip truck does not know it is carrying a ghost. The grip truck does not know it is carrying a god. The grip truck is just waiting for the call.
The call is coming.
It has been coming for 133 years, and it is coming now, and if you cannot hear it you are not listening hard enough, because the noise is everywhere. It is in the crack of a slate on a Morristown lawn at four in the morning, it is in the hiss of a fog machine on the corner of Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park, it is in the scrape of a dolly track across a Hoboken cobblestone with Timothée Chalamet standing on top of it pretending to be Bob Dylan, it is in the beer fridge at Chef Freddy’s Table where Sydney Sweeney ate dinner after Paul Feig wrapped her for the day, it is in the collective breath of a thousand Teamsters waking up in Bloomfield and Belmar and knowing, for the first time in their working lives, that the job is here, not across the river, not across the country. The job is here, it is on their block, it is walking distance from the deli where they get their coffee, and it has their name on it.
I want you to understand what that means. I want you to sit inside what that means, because the people who write about this business from Los Angeles, they do not understand what that means, and the people who write about it from New York barely understand what that means, and even the people who live here have been shrugging about it for so long that they have forgotten how to feel the thing when the thing arrives. The thing has arrived.
New Jersey. Now!
Say it with the exclamation point. Bite down on the now.
THE TORCH
Here is what they never tell you when you’re a kid growing up on this side of the Hudson, staring at a screen in a suburban multiplex, watching a California dream unspool in front of your face: They never tell you that it began right here. They never tell you that the first movie studio on earth was a tar-papered shack in West Orange called the Black Maria, with a retractable roof and a stage that spun on rails to chase the sun, and a man named Edison figured out how to bottle lightning and sell tickets to it. They never tell you that Fort Lee, a Bergen County town most people cannot find on a map, was the film capital of the United States before Los Angeles even knew what a backlot was, 49 studios stacked on top of each other like oysters on a plate, with Fox and Goldwyn and a woman named Alice Guy-Blaché who looked at a camera and said, “This should tell a story,” and then invented the thing we now call a movie. Invented it. A Frenchwoman in a New Jersey town made up what a movie is, and nobody in your high-school film class ever said her name.
They never tell you that the word cliffhanger came out of this state because Pearl White was actually hanging off an actual cliff, on the actual Palisades, in 1914, in a serial called The Perils of Pauline. Audiences walked out of the theater with their hearts in their throats and a brand-new word in their mouths. They never tell you that the first drive-in movie theater opened in Pennsauken in 1933, a man projecting light onto a sheet in a field for people in Model Ts, inventing a whole American ritual in a parking lot off Route 130.
They never tell you that Jaws was dreamed up by a former Jersey kid who grew up reading about real sharks eating real people off the real Jersey Shore. They never tell you that Kevin Smith maxed out his credit cards in Leonardo and shot Clerks at a Quick Stop and invented independent film for my generation with $27,575 and a VHS camera and the nerve to believe the Jersey Shore was worth looking at. They never tell you that The Sopranos is a Jersey story, Boardwalk Empire is a Jersey story, Severance is a Jersey story. Every time you turn on your television and watch a prestige cable drama unfurl in front of you, you are probably looking at a building in Holmdel or a diner in Belleville or a marsh in the Meadowlands.
They never tell you any of it. And then they wonder why the kids from this state grew up thinking you have to leave to matter.
You do not have to leave.
You never did.
Here is what they never tell you when you’re a kid growing up on this side of the Hudson, staring at a screen in a suburban multiplex, watching a California dream unspool in front of your face: They never tell you that it began right here. They never tell you that the first movie studio on earth was a tar-papered shack in West Orange called the Black Maria, with a retractable roof and a stage that spun on rails to chase the sun, and a man named Edison figured out how to bottle lightning and sell tickets to it. They never tell you that Fort Lee, a Bergen County town most people cannot find on a map, was the film capital of the United States before Los Angeles even knew what a backlot was, 49 studios stacked on top of each other like oysters on a plate, with Fox and Goldwyn and a woman named Alice Guy-Blaché who looked at a camera and said, “This should tell a story,” and then invented the thing we now call a movie. Invented it. A Frenchwoman in a New Jersey town made up what a movie is, and nobody in your high-school film class ever said her name.
They never tell you that the word cliffhanger came out of this state because Pearl White was actually hanging off an actual cliff, on the actual Palisades, in 1914, in a serial called The Perils of Pauline. Audiences walked out of the theater with their hearts in their throats and a brand-new word in their mouths. They never tell you that the first drive-in movie theater opened in Pennsauken in 1933, a man projecting light onto a sheet in a field for people in Model Ts, inventing a whole American ritual in a parking lot off Route 130.
They never tell you that Jaws was dreamed up by a former Jersey kid who grew up reading about real sharks eating real people off the real Jersey Shore. They never tell you that Kevin Smith maxed out his credit cards in Leonardo and shot Clerks at a Quick Stop and invented independent film for my generation with $27,575 and a VHS camera and the nerve to believe the Jersey Shore was worth looking at. They never tell you that The Sopranos is a Jersey story, Boardwalk Empire is a Jersey story, Severance is a Jersey story. Every time you turn on your television and watch a prestige cable drama unfurl in front of you, you are probably looking at a building in Holmdel or a diner in Belleville or a marsh in the Meadowlands.
They never tell you any of it. And then they wonder why the kids from this state grew up thinking you have to leave to matter.
You do not have to leave.
You never did.
THE HOOPLA
Here is the thing that the trade papers are missing. Jersey feels different right now.
It feels different the way a town feels different the morning after a rainstorm breaks a heat wave. The air has changed. The smell has changed. You can stand on the boardwalk in Asbury Park on a Tuesday in April and watch a film crew unload props out of a cube truck and a lighting guy flirting with the girl who works the coffee cart and a first AD with a walkie pressed to her ear shouting instructions at a PA. You will feel it in your chest, you will feel it the way you felt the opening riff of “Born to Run” the first time somebody played it for you, you will feel it and you will think:
My god. We get to be the place now.
We get to be the place. After a hundred years of being the punchline, after a hundred years of being the exit, after a hundred years of every sitcom writing us off as the smell off the Turnpike, after a hundred years of being the state that people are from, never the state that people come to. We get to be the place. The torch is in our hand. The torch has always been in our hand. Every producer I talk to is saying the same thing. They say: I do not know what happened, but I do not want to shoot anywhere else. They say: My people actually want to be here. They say: The mayor of Bloomfield called me back in 20 minutes. They say: I ate at a diner last night where a waitress who has worked the counter for 31 years asked me how the shoot was going, and I cried a little bit in my car before I drove back to the hotel, because nobody in Los Angeles has asked me how the shoot was going in 10 years.
That is the thing. That is the whole thing. The tax credit opened the door, but the tax credit is not why people are staying. People are staying because Jersey is a place, and the best crews and the best directors and the best actors in the world are tired of working in a place that is not a place. And the place they were looking for has been sitting here the whole time, on the other side of the Holland Tunnel, with its pork roll and its arguments and its exit numbers and its ocean.
Here is the thing that the trade papers are missing. Jersey feels different right now.
It feels different the way a town feels different the morning after a rainstorm breaks a heat wave. The air has changed. The smell has changed. You can stand on the boardwalk in Asbury Park on a Tuesday in April and watch a film crew unload props out of a cube truck and a lighting guy flirting with the girl who works the coffee cart and a first AD with a walkie pressed to her ear shouting instructions at a PA. You will feel it in your chest, you will feel it the way you felt the opening riff of “Born to Run” the first time somebody played it for you, you will feel it and you will think:
My god. We get to be the place now.
We get to be the place. After a hundred years of being the punchline, after a hundred years of being the exit, after a hundred years of every sitcom writing us off as the smell off the Turnpike, after a hundred years of being the state that people are from, never the state that people come to. We get to be the place. The torch is in our hand. The torch has always been in our hand. Every producer I talk to is saying the same thing. They say: I do not know what happened, but I do not want to shoot anywhere else. They say: My people actually want to be here. They say: The mayor of Bloomfield called me back in 20 minutes. They say: I ate at a diner last night where a waitress who has worked the counter for 31 years asked me how the shoot was going, and I cried a little bit in my car before I drove back to the hotel, because nobody in Los Angeles has asked me how the shoot was going in 10 years.
That is the thing. That is the whole thing. The tax credit opened the door, but the tax credit is not why people are staying. People are staying because Jersey is a place, and the best crews and the best directors and the best actors in the world are tired of working in a place that is not a place. And the place they were looking for has been sitting here the whole time, on the other side of the Holland Tunnel, with its pork roll and its arguments and its exit numbers and its ocean.
THE BROUHAHA
Steven Spielberg just shot a sci-fi picture in Cape May. The boy who grew up in Haddon Township and Camden, whose whole imagination was wired in this state before he ever saw a palm tree. He came home. He walked back into his own childhood, got a hotel room in the town where Teddy Roosevelt once summered, ate clam strips out of a paper boat, and pointed a camera at the sky.
Timothée Chalamet walked Hoboken in a peacoat with a harmonica around his neck, pretending to be Bob Dylan, and a couple of old guys on a stoop watched him go by and one of them said to the other, “Hey, that’s Dylan,” and the other one said, “No it isn’t,” and they were both right. Adam Sandler took over Bedminster, Morristown, Maplewood, Millburn, Newark, Verona, and West Orange and filmed a Happy Gilmore sequel inside the body of his own home state, and when he did it, he left more money on the table for local businesses than any movie has ever left in the history of the New Jersey ledger. Denzel Washington was here. Cameron Diaz was here. Robert De Niro was here, again, because De Niro has always been here, because if you scrape the paint off of De Niro you find a Jersey kid underneath. A24 shot its Best Picture nominee here. Bruce Springsteen let somebody make a Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me from Nowhere, and it shot in Asbury Park, which is the only place a Bruce Springsteen biopic has any right to be made, ever, for any reason.
And over in Hardwick, up in the woods, A24 is shooting a Friday the 13th prequel series called Crystal Lake at the actual Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, which is the actual camp where the original Friday the 13th was shot in 1980, which means that the scariest franchise in the history of American horror has come home to its actual, literal, haunted birthplace to make more of itself. These are not productions passing through. These are productions that could go anywhere and chose here. There is a difference between being used and being chosen. For a hundred years we were used. We were the cheap stand-in for the Bronx, we were the easy drive for a day player, we were the convenient parking lot. Now we are chosen. Now we are the destination. Now somebody in a production office in Santa Monica says the word Bayonne and the room nods instead of laughing.
Bite down on that. Bayonne.
Bayonne is a movie town now.
Steven Spielberg just shot a sci-fi picture in Cape May. The boy who grew up in Haddon Township and Camden, whose whole imagination was wired in this state before he ever saw a palm tree. He came home. He walked back into his own childhood, got a hotel room in the town where Teddy Roosevelt once summered, ate clam strips out of a paper boat, and pointed a camera at the sky.
Timothée Chalamet walked Hoboken in a peacoat with a harmonica around his neck, pretending to be Bob Dylan, and a couple of old guys on a stoop watched him go by and one of them said to the other, “Hey, that’s Dylan,” and the other one said, “No it isn’t,” and they were both right. Adam Sandler took over Bedminster, Morristown, Maplewood, Millburn, Newark, Verona, and West Orange and filmed a Happy Gilmore sequel inside the body of his own home state, and when he did it, he left more money on the table for local businesses than any movie has ever left in the history of the New Jersey ledger. Denzel Washington was here. Cameron Diaz was here. Robert De Niro was here, again, because De Niro has always been here, because if you scrape the paint off of De Niro you find a Jersey kid underneath. A24 shot its Best Picture nominee here. Bruce Springsteen let somebody make a Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me from Nowhere, and it shot in Asbury Park, which is the only place a Bruce Springsteen biopic has any right to be made, ever, for any reason.
And over in Hardwick, up in the woods, A24 is shooting a Friday the 13th prequel series called Crystal Lake at the actual Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, which is the actual camp where the original Friday the 13th was shot in 1980, which means that the scariest franchise in the history of American horror has come home to its actual, literal, haunted birthplace to make more of itself. These are not productions passing through. These are productions that could go anywhere and chose here. There is a difference between being used and being chosen. For a hundred years we were used. We were the cheap stand-in for the Bronx, we were the easy drive for a day player, we were the convenient parking lot. Now we are chosen. Now we are the destination. Now somebody in a production office in Santa Monica says the word Bayonne and the room nods instead of laughing.
Bite down on that. Bayonne.
Bayonne is a movie town now.
THE POUR
Three studios are rising out of Jersey dirt right now like something out of a Hart Crane poem, and if you have not driven past them lately you owe it to yourself to go.
At Fort Monmouth, on 292 acres of former Army base in the middle of Monmouth County, Netflix is building a billion-dollar East Coast production hub, and when it opens in 2028 it is going to swallow the regional economy and hand it back in the shape of jobs. A billion dollars. That is not a publicity stunt. That is concrete, permits, leases, ironworkers, and a co-CEO who stood at a groundbreaking and said the word thousands when he talked about New Jersey residents. Thousands of jobs. Not an estimate. A commitment.
In Newark’s South Ward, Lionsgate is pouring its own campus right now, and it opens in 2027. In Bayonne, Paramount just signed a 10-year lease on 1888 Studios and broke ground in late December, and a 10-year lease is not a handshake, a 10-year lease is a marriage. In Atlantic City, ACX1 Studios is already running out of the bones of an old mall on the Playground Pier, because this is Jersey and we turn our dead malls into soundstages now.
This state currently has 70 stages. Seventy places where a door can be built and a wall can be flown and a fake window can let in a fake sun. And within two years, that number is going up by another 30, purpose-built from the ground up, engineered for exactly the kind of work that used to require a plane ticket and a month of expense reports.
Know this: The lumber mills are running in Edison and Newark to cut set stock. A camera rental house just opened up in Secaucus. Grip houses and wardrobe houses and sound mixing rooms and color suites are sprouting up in every industrial park between Paterson and Pleasantville. This is happening because the demand is here, and the demand has outrun the supply. The demand is going to keep running, and anybody with the good sense to see what is happening is placing their bet on the Jersey side of the table.
We are not catching up. We are jumping the line.
Three studios are rising out of Jersey dirt right now like something out of a Hart Crane poem, and if you have not driven past them lately you owe it to yourself to go.
At Fort Monmouth, on 292 acres of former Army base in the middle of Monmouth County, Netflix is building a billion-dollar East Coast production hub, and when it opens in 2028 it is going to swallow the regional economy and hand it back in the shape of jobs. A billion dollars. That is not a publicity stunt. That is concrete, permits, leases, ironworkers, and a co-CEO who stood at a groundbreaking and said the word thousands when he talked about New Jersey residents. Thousands of jobs. Not an estimate. A commitment.
In Newark’s South Ward, Lionsgate is pouring its own campus right now, and it opens in 2027. In Bayonne, Paramount just signed a 10-year lease on 1888 Studios and broke ground in late December, and a 10-year lease is not a handshake, a 10-year lease is a marriage. In Atlantic City, ACX1 Studios is already running out of the bones of an old mall on the Playground Pier, because this is Jersey and we turn our dead malls into soundstages now.
This state currently has 70 stages. Seventy places where a door can be built and a wall can be flown and a fake window can let in a fake sun. And within two years, that number is going up by another 30, purpose-built from the ground up, engineered for exactly the kind of work that used to require a plane ticket and a month of expense reports.
Know this: The lumber mills are running in Edison and Newark to cut set stock. A camera rental house just opened up in Secaucus. Grip houses and wardrobe houses and sound mixing rooms and color suites are sprouting up in every industrial park between Paterson and Pleasantville. This is happening because the demand is here, and the demand has outrun the supply. The demand is going to keep running, and anybody with the good sense to see what is happening is placing their bet on the Jersey side of the table.
We are not catching up. We are jumping the line.
THE PIPELINE
Here is the part of the story I get to live inside, and I will not pretend to be objective about it, because I am not.
I teach at the New Jersey Film Academy at Brookdale College. I walk into rooms full of kids and grown adults, different generations sitting in the same chairs, who two years ago thought their only option was a Greyhound bus and a sublet in Van Nuys. I get to tell them, as a matter of simple fact, that they do not have to go anywhere. They can stay. They can work. They can raise their kids in the same zip code their grandmother raised their mother in, and still put their name on the back of a call sheet, and still build a life in pictures. That is not a pep talk. That is a pipeline, a classroom-to-set escalator that is already running. I have watched it run, and I have seen what it does to their faces when they get the phone call.
The academy is a network of 13 community colleges with Brookdale as the lead, and we are turning out production coordinators and production accountants and location managers and hair and makeup artists and, soon, costumers and editors, and every one of them is getting trained on the same curriculum the Georgia Film Academy used to build the crew base that turned Atlanta into a production capital. We have Emmy winners running the program. We have Michael Uslan and Armand Assante coming in to talk to the kids. We have scholarships abolishing the cost barrier. We have partnerships with Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson and Red Bank Regional High School, because we are starting early and we are starting deep.
The kid I taught last semester who told me, with tears in his eyes, that his father works a second shift at a warehouse in Linden and does not understand what a boom operator is, but is proud anyway. That kid just got placed on a real set, on a real production. When he came back to class the next week, he was nine feet tall. I have never seen a person stand that tall in my life.
Here is the part of the story I get to live inside, and I will not pretend to be objective about it, because I am not.
I teach at the New Jersey Film Academy at Brookdale College. I walk into rooms full of kids and grown adults, different generations sitting in the same chairs, who two years ago thought their only option was a Greyhound bus and a sublet in Van Nuys. I get to tell them, as a matter of simple fact, that they do not have to go anywhere. They can stay. They can work. They can raise their kids in the same zip code their grandmother raised their mother in, and still put their name on the back of a call sheet, and still build a life in pictures. That is not a pep talk. That is a pipeline, a classroom-to-set escalator that is already running. I have watched it run, and I have seen what it does to their faces when they get the phone call.
The academy is a network of 13 community colleges with Brookdale as the lead, and we are turning out production coordinators and production accountants and location managers and hair and makeup artists and, soon, costumers and editors, and every one of them is getting trained on the same curriculum the Georgia Film Academy used to build the crew base that turned Atlanta into a production capital. We have Emmy winners running the program. We have Michael Uslan and Armand Assante coming in to talk to the kids. We have scholarships abolishing the cost barrier. We have partnerships with Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson and Red Bank Regional High School, because we are starting early and we are starting deep.
The kid I taught last semester who told me, with tears in his eyes, that his father works a second shift at a warehouse in Linden and does not understand what a boom operator is, but is proud anyway. That kid just got placed on a real set, on a real production. When he came back to class the next week, he was nine feet tall. I have never seen a person stand that tall in my life.
THE STATE OF THE STATE
This is our Henry V moment. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” and if that sounds grandiose, so be it. Grandiose is exactly the register this calls for. Anything less is a betrayal of the moment.
Jersey has been hibernating for a hundred years. Jersey has been sitting at the end of the bar with a cheap beer in its hand watching California dance on the jukebox and thinking, Yeah, but I taught you that song. Jersey has been the forgotten parent in every Hollywood biopic, the place that kids in black-and-white photographs leave in the first reel and never come back to. Well, here comes the second reel. Here comes the part where the forgotten parent walks back in the room and the whole story turns around and looks at her.
Here’s what it means: Alice Guy-Blaché is about to be retroactively vindicated by a billion dollars’ worth of Netflix soundstages rising out of a decommissioned Army base. It means that the next great American movie is probably being storyboarded right now in a coffee shop in Weehawken by a director who could live anywhere and chose to live here. It means that a kid in a classroom in Neptune is getting the same shot his great-grandfather never got, because his great-grandfather had to leave and take his dreams with him, and this kid gets to keep his.
Old Hollywood? We are Old Hollywood. We are the original Hollywood. Hollywood is New Jersey West. We are the drive-in where your ancestors first held hands. We are Marlon Brando on the Hoboken docks telling his brother he “coulda been a contender,” breaking every actor who came after him with one line delivered in the salt air off the Hudson. We are Orson Welles on a Sunday night in 1938, broadcasting an alien invasion out of Grover’s Mill and scaring half the country off its couch, because the first great piece of American science fiction was a radio play about Martians landing in Mercer County. We are a kid named Zach Braff who loved this place so much he named a whole movie after it, just so the marquee in every theater in America would have to say the words. We are Bruce Springsteen writing “Thunder Road” in a rented house in Long Branch, and we are Bruce Springsteen playing “Thunder Road” in a movie made in Long Branch, 50 years later, because the circle finally closed.
The torch is in our hand. The goddess is on our cover. Fuhgeddaboudit.
This is our Henry V moment. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” and if that sounds grandiose, so be it. Grandiose is exactly the register this calls for. Anything less is a betrayal of the moment.
Jersey has been hibernating for a hundred years. Jersey has been sitting at the end of the bar with a cheap beer in its hand watching California dance on the jukebox and thinking, Yeah, but I taught you that song. Jersey has been the forgotten parent in every Hollywood biopic, the place that kids in black-and-white photographs leave in the first reel and never come back to. Well, here comes the second reel. Here comes the part where the forgotten parent walks back in the room and the whole story turns around and looks at her.
Here’s what it means: Alice Guy-Blaché is about to be retroactively vindicated by a billion dollars’ worth of Netflix soundstages rising out of a decommissioned Army base. It means that the next great American movie is probably being storyboarded right now in a coffee shop in Weehawken by a director who could live anywhere and chose to live here. It means that a kid in a classroom in Neptune is getting the same shot his great-grandfather never got, because his great-grandfather had to leave and take his dreams with him, and this kid gets to keep his.
Old Hollywood? We are Old Hollywood. We are the original Hollywood. Hollywood is New Jersey West. We are the drive-in where your ancestors first held hands. We are Marlon Brando on the Hoboken docks telling his brother he “coulda been a contender,” breaking every actor who came after him with one line delivered in the salt air off the Hudson. We are Orson Welles on a Sunday night in 1938, broadcasting an alien invasion out of Grover’s Mill and scaring half the country off its couch, because the first great piece of American science fiction was a radio play about Martians landing in Mercer County. We are a kid named Zach Braff who loved this place so much he named a whole movie after it, just so the marquee in every theater in America would have to say the words. We are Bruce Springsteen writing “Thunder Road” in a rented house in Long Branch, and we are Bruce Springsteen playing “Thunder Road” in a movie made in Long Branch, 50 years later, because the circle finally closed.
The torch is in our hand. The goddess is on our cover. Fuhgeddaboudit.
New Jersey. Now!
Say it with the exclamation point.
❖ ❖ ❖
This story appeared in the inaugural issue of Socko! Magazine [May, 2026]. Click here to subscribe
Adam Nelson has lived at the intersection of performance and American storytelling for more than three decades. As the founder of Workhouse, the New York public relations agency he has run since 1999, he has built an award-winning firm representing filmmakers, artists, festivals, and cultural institutions. A professor at the New Jersey Film Academy, he is currently training a new generation for the state's rapidly expanding production economy. His film Food for Thought, directed by Gary Hanna, was a finalist at the AP'N3 Film Challenge and went on to win Best Silent Film at the 2026 Absurd Film Festival in Milan. Huckleberry Jim, his debut novel, arrives October, 2026. Nelson is co-founder of SOCKO! Magazine
