1. Matt Pizzolo co-founded and runs indie film studio HALO 8 Entertainment with producing partner Brian Giberson and comic book publisher Black Mask Studios with partner Brett Gurewitz and creative director Steve Niles.
19 Facts About Matt Pizzolo
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In 2012 Pizzolo was selected by Wired as "World's Most Wired Comics Creator" for his work synthesizing genre media with street politics and innovating new storytelling technologies.
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Matt Pizzolo became involved in political organizing in 2017, leveraging the momentum of his comic book series Calexit.
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Matt Pizzolo formed the political action committee "Become The Government" to support first time political candidates in the 2018 Midterm Elections, ran interviews with first-time candidates and grassroots organizers in the non-fiction backmatter of Calexit, and hosted Indivisible to run voter registration at his booth on the showfloor of San Diego Comic-Con.
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Matt Pizzolo was 19 years old and living out of a backpack in New York City's Lower East Side, and working at Kim's Video and Tower Records when he wrote the screenplay for Threat, a radical, transgressive story of class struggle and youth violence.
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Matt Pizzolo intended to shoot Hi8 footage of the principal characters, and cutting their dialogue and reaction shots against footage stolen from obscure films, creating a unique project built on film sampling.
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Over time, the filmmaking workshops became a focus of the events and Matt Pizzolo invited local independent media-makers to teach various DiY-instructional workshops.
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The radical band Atari Teenage Riot invited Matt Pizzolo to create a video for their song "Rage" and utilize the documentary footage in the hopes of spreading it to a wider audience.
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In 2005, Matt Pizzolo formed HALO 8 Entertainment, a production, distribution, and marketing company devoted to counterculture films, punk rock cinema, and alt-lifestyle videos.
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One of the first films Matt Pizzolo championed at HALO-8 was the controversial and embattled Your Mommy Kills Animals, a critically acclaimed documentary about the animal rights movement.
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In February 2009, Matt Pizzolo announced his next film would be an illustrated film called Godkiller: Walk Among Us, adapted from his graphic novel of the same name, which was illustrated by Anna Muckcracker.
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The illustrated film format Matt Pizzolo developed with producer Brian Giberson for Godkiller merges sequential art with 3D CGI, motion graphics and dramatic voice performances in the style of a radio play.
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In 2012, Matt Pizzolo co-founded the comic book publishing company Black Mask Studios with Brett Gurewitz.
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The label was formed with Matt Pizzolo serving as president and Steve Niles as creative director.
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Matt Pizzolo organized the political action committee "Become The Government" in 2017 to support first time political candidates in the 2018 Midterm Elections funded by royalties from his comic book Calexit.
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Matt Pizzolo hosted Indivisible to run voter registration at his booth on the showfloor of San Diego Comic-Con in 2018, where he unveiled the charity comic book Calexit: All Systems San Diego which introduced the new character Emmie-X, a pirate radio DJ in Occupied San Diego.
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Matt Pizzolo has been announced as producer on the Warner Brothers feature film adaptation of the Black Mask Studios comic book series BLACK, about a world where only black people have super powers, and the PictureStart feature film adaptation of the comic book series 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank, about a 12-year-old girl who enlists her friends to rob a bank in order to prevent her dad and his friends from botching the job themselves and getting thrown back in jail.
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In July 2021, it was announced that Matt Pizzolo will write an adult animated series adaptation of the comic book series Faust, a deconstructed superhero comic contemporaneous with Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and The Crow, for Sony Television.
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In October 2006, Matt Pizzolo accepted the Grand Prize for Best Feature on behalf of Threat at the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival in Lausanne, Switzerland.