Deniese Davis and the Invisible Wall

Every so often a guest hands you the title of the episode without meaning to. Deniese Davis did it about fifty minutes into this conversation, when she described the thing that has shown up at every life-altering crossroads of her career. She called it imaginary. Our host called it brilliant. We're calling it the invisible wall, because that is exactly what it is: a barrier with no bricks in it, paralyzing while you're standing at it, and gone the moment you walk through. As Deniese puts it, you get to the other side, look back, and it isn't even there.

That wall is the through line of an extraordinary career, and watching her name it is the heart of this episode.

If you don't know the name yet, you know the work. Deniese is a three-time Emmy nominee who co-executive produced HBO's Insecure, produced A Black Lady Sketch Show, and served as executive producer on Rap Sh!t. She co-founded the management company Color Creative, and in 2020 she launched Reform Media Group to make socially and culturally relevant film and television that amplifies marginalized voices. Most recently, Reform entered a development deal with Tyler Perry Studios, the kind of arrangement Perry has almost never made with an outside producer. He clearly trusts her instincts. After this conversation, so will you.

What makes the episode sing is how far back the story goes. Deniese grew up in Las Vegas, and not long ago, digging through an old storage box in her mom's garage, she found an elementary school journal with a prompt about what she wanted to be when she grew up. The answer, in her own childhood handwriting, was a writer. She'd forgotten she ever wrote it. By then she'd already been making comedic short films and music videos on her mom's old tape camera, directing her little cousins as grown men with grown problems, editing in the camera itself so the playback jumps every time she rewound to the next shot. She was doing the work years before anyone gave her the words for it.

There's a basketball chapter too, and it's not a detour. Deniese was a point guard, captain of her middle school and high school teams, never the leading scorer and entirely at peace with that. She saw the whole floor. She knew everyone's strengths, kept the team together, won championships not with a single star but with five people pulling their weight. If you want to understand how she produces, watch how she describes playing. She's never claimed to know better than the director, the same way she never claimed to be the best player on the court. She just knew how to see the game two moves ahead and get everyone aligned around it.

The craft clicked at sixteen. Then came film school in New York, where she walked in convinced she was behind everyone else, an imposter who'd shown up late to a room full of people who'd been studying the greats their whole lives. She grounded that feeling by doing what she's always done: she went and learned. A Google search led her to So You Want to Be a Producer by Lawrence Turman, and she cracked it open on the plane from Vegas to New York. Half creative, half business, all the loose threads tied together. That, she realized, was the job. That was her.

What followed is a masterclass in trusting your gut. After AFI, three opportunities landed at once: line producing Issa Rae's Awkward Black Girl, shooting Sarah Shapiro's short Sequin Raze (which became UnREAL), and a coveted assistant job with a prominent director that most people would have grabbed without blinking. Deniese took the meeting, took the job, gave it ninety days, and walked away when she knew it wasn't hers. She operates on two principles she can finally name out loud: do what you actually want to do so you can own every choice as your own, and remember that nobody really controls anything, so what's the worst that can happen. Every time she's gambled on herself, it's paid off in ways she never could have planned.

Three and a half years of relationship-building with Issa led to Insecure, and the wall was right there waiting again, that quiet voice asking who she thought she was to make a TV show. Then she got into the trenches and realized she'd been training for it the whole time. Production is production. Five people or five hundred, the mechanics are the same, just more expensive and more pressure. She wasn't a deer in the headlights. She knew the space because she had lived in it for years.

And then the biggest wall of all. After so long building other people's companies, Deniese asked herself whether she could do it for herself, and the question terrified her. She noticed how few Black, female, producer-led companies existed, looked to the Kathleen Kennedys and Debra Martin Chases she idolizes, and wondered where her generation's version was. The fear nearly stopped her. She spent months going back and forth, sick with the anxiety of it, until her mom reminded her of something simple: she has always done exactly what she set out to do. So she made the decision, called Issa, and felt the relief land instantly. Reform Media was born, and she has not looked back.

Today she's juggling thirteen or fourteen active projects with the same strategic eye she brought to the point guard position, careful not to let any one genre crowd out the rest. What gets her out of bed is knowing how badly an audience might need a particular story, and getting to be the instrument that brings someone else's vision to life. Her hard-won lesson is that you can't put all your marbles into anyone else; at the end of the day, you have to bet on yourself.

Which brings us back to the wall. Deniese is clear-eyed that it will return, because it always returns for people who keep putting themselves in new rooms. That's the part our host loved most, and we do too: imposter syndrome doesn't visit the people standing still. It visits the ones who keep pushing past their own edges. The trick isn't to make the wall disappear forever. The trick is to remember, every single time, that it was never really there.

We're proud of this one. Proud of Deniese, for the generosity and clarity she brought to a conversation that doubled as a quiet roadmap for anyone afraid to plant their own flag. And proud of our host, for drawing out a story that connects every dot from a garage in Vegas to a development deal that almost never gets made.

Deniese Davis: @msdeniese

Reform Media Group: @reform.media

THE SMITH SOCIETY is a podcast featuring storytellers. From actors, writers, and directors to producers, editors, we discuss a variety of topics related to the film and television industry, everything from writing a screenplay to selling your idea and preparing for your next big project.

Host: Duane Fernandez

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