STREAMING SUCCESS: Films on the GameStop and Herbalife sagas raise the stock of upstart producers.

• Author: Smith, Katherine Snow
• Position: NC TREND: Media

Raleigh investment strategist Burke Koonce has a pretty sexy side gig as co-partner in a film production company that has created documentaries on two notorious Wall Street stories of recent years.

With streaming overtaking theaters, the demand for content means relative neophytes like Biltmore Films can make a mark in the movie business.

In March, HBO Max aired Biltmore Films' "Gaming Wall Street," a study of how a barrage of individual investors coordinated through the Reddit website to boost retailer GameStop's share price in early 2021, hoping to thwart short sellers. The film, which was narrated by Kieran Culkin of HBO's "Succession" fame, has received good reviews and has been compared to "The Big Short," the 2015 film on beneficiaries of the U.S. housing collapse in 2007-09.

The new film is "about GameStop as well as the democratization of the markets and the little guy being able to level the playing field against the big guy," says Koonce, whose business partner is Darien, Connecticut, hedge fund manager John Fichthorn.

Their first documentary, "Betting on Zero," told the story of Los Angeles-based Herbalife Nutrition, a health supplement company that became ensnared in a multiyear battle with hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.

The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2016, earning a Special Jury Prize for Investigative Filmmaking. Herbalife fought behind the scenes to prevent the documentary from being bought or widely seen, blunting its distribution.

"With 'Betting on Zero,' we were a nobody," Koonce says. "We had Herbalife breathing down our necks. Streaming had not really become the norm. We were still trying to get it in theaters."

By 2021, "Gaming Wall Street" was a much easier sell. "What you have now is a very robust market for content," he says.

Stock stories

Analyzing stocks isn't much different from telling a business saga, according to Koonce, who is an investment strategist in the Raleigh office of Trust Company of the South, which is based in Greensboro.

"The whole reason John and I started doing this is we are both storytellers," says Koonce, who met Fichthorn while attending UNC Chapel Hill. "Every good investment is a good story."

The documentary on Herbalife started as an in-house research project on multilevel marketing companies while Koonce was running an investment research firm, Helicon Research. His client, Fichthorn, owns a firm called Dialectic Capital Management.

"[Fichtorn] asked me to look into...