Stay Cool Productions
Filmmaker
Cottrell Guidry is a filmmaker drawn to the stories history forgot, and the communities history erased. Whether it's the Black athlete who integrated the NFL a year before Jackie Robinson, the Negro Leaguers fighting to preserve their world as integration dismantled it, or the gay Black men who invented the whitest music genre on earth, his work asks the same question: who actually built this, and why don't we know their names? Stay Cool Productions develops film and television designed to make the forgotten impossible to ignore.
IN DEVELOPMENT
Kenny Washington
A year before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, Kenny Washington broke the NFL's. After walking off the Rose Bowl field to a standing ovation of 102,000 fans, Washington went undrafted for one reason: he was Black. Together with firebrand journalist Halley Harding, he forced the integration of professional football. Unlike Robinson's story, no white executive decided it was time. Washington and Harding built a movement, demanded change, and won. Stay Cool Productions holds the Kenny Washington life rights and is currently in direct development conversations with the NFL.
KING OF KC
Kansas City. The Negro Leagues are thriving, packed ballparks, jazz-filled streets, a community at the height of its power and pride. The Kansas City Monarchs sit at the center of it all. But integration is on the horizon, and with it, an erasure no one sees coming. At the heart of the story is Artie Banks, a sharp-witted former pitcher returned from war, caught between mob factions, corrupt political machines, and two dangerous loves. Based on a true story, Artie must keep the Monarchs alive while asking the question that haunts the whole series: when history moves forward, who gets left behind? King of KC blends the sharp-talking style of Mad Men with the slow-burn menace of Fargo. Co-created with Adam Scott Epstein.
House Music: The Birth of a Movement
Every person who's ever danced in a club owes something to a group of gay Black men in late-1970s Chicago, and almost none of them know it. After Disco Demolition Night wiped out the safe spaces that had sheltered queer and Black communities, a tight-knit group of outcasts found refuge in a gay members-only club called The Warehouse. There, DJ Frankie Knuckles began blending disco, soul, and electronic rhythms into something entirely new: House music. What started as a sanctuary became a revolution. But as the genre exploded into the mainstream, jealousy, ego, predatory record deals, and betrayal began fracturing the community that built it. House Music: The Birth of a Movement tells the story of how a world-changing sound was born, stolen, and reclaimed, and what it cost everyone involved.
Co-created with Tug Coker.
