Movie Studio SUMMER Learn-by-Doing Experience in the PA Wilds

THE PA WILDS MOVIE STUDIO CAMPUS EXPERIMENT

Summer 2026 · Coudersport, Pennsylvania · INTERDEPENDENT

A ten-week cohort. A state-funded feasibility test. A slate of films in pre-production. And one of the darkest skies in the northern hemisphere, fifteen miles up the road.

INTERDEPENDENT has received a Pennsylvania State planning grant to test the feasibility of building and operating a hybrid AI + traditional filmmaking movie campus in Potter County, Pennsylvania.

This summer is that test.

We are bringing a world class cohort of students to Coudersport, PA to live together, work together, and help us prove — or disprove — whether the next great American AI-forward movie studio belongs in the backwoods of a remote PA township. What we build this summer will produce a GO / NO-GO decision for INTERDEPENDENT on whether to break ground on the full campus, and move our slate into principal photography on location in the area. You will be in the room for that call. Your work will be part of the answer.

This is not a shadow-the-executive internship. It is not a coffee-run internship. It is a do-the-actual-thing, on-the-actual-land, with-the-actual-production-team-and-the-actual-slate internship. Everything you do here is material evidence in a feasibility study with real consequences.

Ship cool sh!t. Scout real locations. Greenlight real films. Do the math,  build and train the AI models, read the scripts, cast the actors, produce the behind-the-scenes content. 

Bond with your cohort. 

Work hard. 

Play hard. 

About INTERDEPENDENT

We are simultaneously:

• Developing and green lighting a slate of 8–12 feature films to be shot on location in the Pennsylvania Wilds under the supervision of Amazon WW Physical Production head Tim Clawson, with support and training from commercial Emmy award winner Denis O'Brien (you will produce the commercials and BTS social content that is part of our build-in-public marketing to generate genuine public awareness and excitement).
• Building the software product (a streaming platform and studio LOT as a multi-coding-agent-built progressive web app; with a lead product engineer from META, Disney, and Dreamworks Animation, Esan Mandal)
• Planning and evaluating a rural campus and production town in Potter County — soundstages, housing, AI compute, post-production, architectural-grade solar power generation and designing the creative future AI generative video collaboration workflows of the future — alongside Hackman Capita Partners — the largest owner-operator of Hollywood and studio lots worldwide.
• Enjoying the dark skies summer setting of the PA Wilds environment, estate home, and 20 acre campus dubbed Skyward Haven and the surrounding areas.

Summer 2026 is the inflection point. The planning happens now. You are the planners.

Everyone welcome.

Future Accountants

Agents

Lawyers

Producers

Directors

Engineers

and more…

Why Coudersport

You may not know the name yet. You will.

Coudersport is a small town in Potter County, tucked into the hills of the Pennsylvania Wilds. A generation ago, it was the global headquarters of Adelphia Cable — at its peak the fifth-largest cable company in the United States, built from this valley. The town remembers what it is to be the home office of something ambitious.

Fifteen miles up the road is Cherry Springs State Park — one of the darkest skies in the northern hemisphere, an International Dark Sky Park, a place where the Milky Way casts shadows on the ground. It is impossible to stand there on a moonless night and think small. This is where you will be dreaming under the stars and making movie magic, in the peace and solitude of an authentic bygone era.

The feeling is secluded. Nestled into hills. Surrounded by forest. And yet:

• 1.5 hours from State College, PA (Penn State / Bellisario College of Communications)
• 2 hours from Buffalo, NY (University at Buffalo)
• 2.5 hours from Ithaca, NY (Cornell, Ithaca College)
• 4.5 hours from New York City
• 45 minutes from the PA Grand Canyon (Pine Creek Gorge)
• 30 minutes into the Allegheny National Forest

Our thesis: the next great international studio does not need to be built on a backlot in Hollywood. It can be built where the land is cheap, the light is extraordinary, the people are honest, and a production can step outside and scout a river, a forest, a farm, a bygone town, or generate their own setting with a mix of human collaboration and prompt artistry. You will feel that thesis every day you are here. And if this future campus model playbook works, it will be replicated globally with our design team at Hackman Capital Partners. 

Who You'll Be With

Students from our SoCal pipeline — UCLA and LMU have already been selected for this year, with USC students returning for a second year to execute on our planning already accomplished — will live and work alongside students from our Northeast network at Penn State, Cornell, Ithaca, Buffalo, Pitt-Bradford, St. Bonaventure, and beyond. You will meet people from rooms you would never have otherwise been in, all week, every week, for ten weeks.

You will be working directly with the founder and with our studio leadership — a Head of Physical Production with Amazon MGM, HBO, New Regency, and Miramax credits; a Studio Operations and Distribution lead who built Annapurna Pictures' operational structure from inception and ran United Artists; a Fund Operations advisor with twenty-five years of Wall Street pedigree. No layers. No committees. No design-by-consensus.

What the Summer Is For

This year's cohort is focused primarily on pre-production for the 8–12-feature slate and on the planning of physical infrastructure — soundstage, AI compute, post-production facilities — for the campus itself. Tracks are:

Studio / Development & Production Track

• Help move a slate of 8–12 features from development into pre-production
• Scout locations across Potter, McKean, Cameron, Elk, Tioga, and Clinton Counties — rivers, forests, bygone Main Streets, farmhouses, ridgelines, Cherry Springs itself
• Sit in on budgeting, scheduling, and packaging sessions with our Head of Physical Production, and train the AI models that will automate the process.
• Run reads, coverage, and development notes on the full slate with Stanford AI grad and Amazon software engineer Michael Lin.
• Support casting self-tape review and green-light decisions using our audience-driven data framework and producer instinct
• Contribute to the Mailroom — our AI-assisted screenplay discovery and evaluation pipeline and spark the conversation that will produce the audience engagement data

Campus Planning / Infrastructure Track

• Contribute directly to the campus feasibility study funded by the Pennsylvania SITES grant: compute tiers, power generation (architectural solar, natural gas, propane, battery), Starlink + Zito Media connectivity, floodplain grading, pond remediation, housing for 50+ residents
• Help produce the full AI pre-visualization of the campus — still and video — that anchors architectural plans, structural engineering scope, and stakeholder presentations to LPs, the Commonwealth Financing Authority, and the community
• Work on site with local partners, contractors, and county officials
• Support grant reporting, letters of support, and DCED engagement

AI + Product / Engineering / Design Track

• Push code and pixels against the PWA: THE LOT, Mailroom, Reader, interdependent.tv, Backstage
• Work inside our BMAD AI agent framework — Figma-to-Cursor MCP pipeline, screenplay evaluation agents, open-book Stripe Treasury ledger
• Prototype the AI + traditional hybrid workflows that are the whole point of the experiment — on-set LED volumetric stage tests, pre-training on our own film library, fine-tuning for screenplay evaluation
• Contribute to DESIGN.md and the single canonical Figma design system

You will apply to one track. You will end up touching two or three, because that's what happens when the cohort is small and the studio is real.

The GO / NO-GO

At the end of the summer, INTERDEPENDENT will make a GO / NO-GO decision on whether to break ground on the full campus and move the slate into principal photography on location in Pennsylvania.

The evidence for that decision is what this cohort produces.

If GO — the cohort that helped prove it out gets first consideration for return offers, named roles on the films that shoot here, and equity participation in the platform they helped build. You will have helped decide whether this studio exists. That is not a line on a resume. That is a story.

If NO-GO — you still leave with ten weeks of real work, an on-the-record recommendation from the founder, a body of evidence from one of the most rigorous feasibility studies ever run outside of a top consulting firm, and a cohort of collaborators you will carry for the rest of your career. That is the floor.

A Week in the Wilds

Monday through Friday — stand-ups in the morning, deep work in the middle of the day, field days in the afternoon (location scouts, contractor walk-throughs, site visits, casting reviews, reading sessions, production meetings). Shared dinners on the porch. Long conversations about movies, power grids, architecture, screenplays, the country.

Saturdays belong to the cohort. Every weekend there is a planned group excursion, in and around the PA Wilds:

• Guided Dark Skies star party at Cherry Springs State Park — scheduled on the darkest moon-phase night of the summer. We plan this one around the Milky Way, not around our calendar.
• Kayaking and tubing on the Allegheny and Pine Creek
• Biking the PA Grand Canyon rail trail through Pine Creek Gorge
• Boating and water-skiing on the Allegheny Reservoir
• Side-by-sides and 4-wheeling on the Allegheny National Forest ATV trails
• Trail running and group workouts from HQ
• Welcome dinner at the Bradford Regional Airport Runway Grill the night you land
• Send-off dinner at the A&W Grill (across the street from the Runway Grill — you'll see the symmetry)

Sundays are yours.

This is the "play hard" half of "work hard, play hard," and we mean it as much as the other half. You will bond. You will collaborate. You will be human with each other in a way that is honestly harder to do in a city. That is part of what we are building, too.

What's Paid. What's Not.

We believe in being direct about this up front.

Paid (covered by INTERDEPENDENT):

• Round-trip flights to Bradford Regional Airport (BFD) or nearest reasonable alternative
• Housing at or near HQ for the full ten weeks
• Three homemade meals per day, seven days a week
• Weekly planned group excursions (side-by-sides, kayaking / tubing, PA Grand Canyon bike rentals, boating, the Cherry Springs star party)
• Welcome dinner at the Runway Grill
• Send-off dinner at the A&W Grill

Not Paid:

• This is an unpaid summer experiential internship with a return-offer option. Approximately 1 in 3 interns will receive a return offer (full-time post-graduation with equity participation, or paid part-time continuation during the school year — both contingent on the GO / NO-GO decision and track fit).
• Side quests — e.g., a Niagara Falls day trip, a run into State College, a drive into Buffalo. (Niagara has been a fun one.)
• Sheetz runs (Sheeeeetz!)
• Personal snacks, drinks, and incidentals

We do not pretend the unpaid part isn't a real cost. Flights + housing + food + guided excursions changes the math, but it does not zero it out. If this is still the wrong fit financially, we understand, and we would rather you apply next cycle than stretch yourself thin now. But NOTHING happens at INTERDEPENDENT without everyone risking something. Be prepared to be challenged and uplifted.

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NOTE:  The dates are alignable to YOUR academic calendar. May start early or continue late in Los Angeles @a16z location in Santa Monica, CA or Pennsylvania on a case-by-case basis.