GKP

Rob Montz is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of Good Kid Productions, a studio in Richmond, Virginia. His subject is how American institutions fail. Those failures rarely come with a confession, but they leave a record — in documents, in footage, in people no one thought to ask — and Montz's films assemble it. Montz came to documentaries by way of a philosophy degree from Brown and a stint at the Cato Institute. He persuaded the Moving Picture Institute to back a film about North Korea and taught himself filmmaking to make it; Juche Strong (2013) was shot partly inside the country. He went on to make videos for Reason and We the Internet TV, including Silence U, a campus free-speech trilogy featured in The New York Times; its second installment, What Has Yale Become?, won the 2018 Reason Video Prize. Quillette's Jonathan Kay called his documentaries "both intellectually penetrating and surprisingly funny." His films have a habit of aging well. Harvard Canceled Its Best Black Professor. Why? (2022), on the university's case against economist Roland Fryer, found a second, far larger audience after Claudine Gay, a central figure in the film, testified before Congress in December 2023. Others have revisited the two shootings that made Kenosha, Wisconsin, a national flashpoint in 2020, and gone inside the Trump White House's COVID response. Between films, he hosts The Rob Montz Show, whose guests have included Charles Murray on education, Cal Newport on AI and Glenn Loury on fatherhood. He has also written for the New York Post and Quillette. In January 2025, the story came home. The Pacific Palisades fire destroyed the house Montz grew up in, and he went back to find out why. Paradise Abandoned: Inside the Pacific Palisades Fire drew on dozens of original interviews and previously unpublished video to argue that the disaster was man-made. It also reconstructed the fire's overlooked second day, when the neighborhood was effectively left to burn. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and RealClearPolitics covered it, and Montz discussed it on Fox & Friends and The Ingraham Angle. He is now at work on a follow-up.