The celebration had reached the family-phone-call stage. Daril Fannin had sold a television show to Netflix. Matt Damon was helping deliver the news to his parents. There was just one small problem with this otherwise excellent Hollywood scene: his mother did not know who Matt Damon was. Fannin has told the story with obvious amusement. Fame, it turns out, still needs an introduction in some households.
It is a useful place to begin with Fannin, now the CEO and co-founder of KINO. His career has involved recognizable names, an Army uniform, graduate school, television comedy, and independent horror. Yet the phone call catches something a résumé misses: the distance between the world he came from and the one he entered. For him, even watching a film had once required a little conspiracy.
The rental that got through
Fannin grew up in a strict religious community where movies and television were condemned. There were exceptions at his grandparents’ home, where Disney films on VHS and Saturday cartoons slipped through. But his immediate family had no television, and going to the movies was outside the rules. Entertainment arrived carrying an unusual amount of theological baggage.
At seventeen, he sneaked out to Blockbuster and rented The Matrix. The film’s premise found a particularly receptive viewer: someone discovering that the world he had been taught to accept might be open to question. He has repeatedly connected Neo’s awakening to his own. A science-fiction rental became a way to think about his circumstances, rather than simply an evening away from them.
That experience did not send him straight to a screenplay. He joined the Army. The distinction matters because his story can sound, in retrospect, suspiciously tidy: forbidden cinema, revelation, Hollywood. The actual route involved years of service before Los Angeles entered the picture. The movie supplied a question. Working out what to do with it took considerably longer.
An exit route with a chain of command
His military career began in October 2005. He served as an Army medic and later worked in administration, collecting experience in organizations where somebody has to know the objective, the available resources, and where everyone is supposed to be. His university biography records a regional Soldier of the Year distinction in 2008 and Tennessee’s Non-Commissioned Officer of the Year honor in 2011.
By the time he left, he had begun writing. Screenwriting offered a different use for the people, situations, and habits of observation he had accumulated. His account of military life includes an affectionate appreciation for its odd characters. He would later bring that material into comedy with a collaborator who had his own military background.
In 2014 he left the service and moved to Los Angeles to study screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University. The change required more than learning screenplay format. A military career offers recognizable ranks and measures of progress. A writing career asks you to invent your own evidence that you are getting somewhere. It is a rather less accommodating personnel system.
He found help through Veterans in Media & Entertainment, whose mentorship he has praised. At school, relationships mattered alongside the writing. An early internship at MUSA Media also brought him into military-oriented entertainment. Before long, he was writing and presenting material for All Warrior Network. In his telling, a missing actor helped turn the writer into the host. An unfilled job can be a persuasive casting director.
Matt Damon on the family phone
Fannin’s partnership with Shawn Vance joined two veterans with an interest in comedy. Their project, The Green Beret’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse, brought military knowledge into a television format built around survival. Damon and Peter Berg became executive producers. Fannin sold the project while still in his graduate screenwriting program; the Netflix order was publicly announced in 2017.
For an aspiring writer, that is a considerable change in the conversation. A school assignment can become an industry meeting. The people whose names appear on movie posters can become the people discussing your work. Fannin’s parents receiving a call from Damon gives that change a domestic scale. Someone still has to answer the phone, and recognition is never guaranteed.
The sale also illustrates how much of this career was collaborative. Vance brought his experience. Producers brought their support. School and veteran networks helped Fannin find his footing. A biography arranged entirely around individual determination would leave out much of the mechanism. Even a very personal story needs other people before it becomes a television project.
A pilot is a peculiar kind of promise
There was another project with Vance, this time alongside Jimmy Kimmel. The three wrote and executive produced Adopted, a comedy inspired by Vance’s family. Its premise involved a Green Beret returning to Texas and adjusting to a newly adopted younger brother. ABC ordered a pilot in February 2020. A network had said yes to the next step.
Then came the peculiar arithmetic of television development: a pilot order is an achievement with an unresolved ending. Production was delayed during the pandemic. The cast included Bruce Campbell and Wendie Malick. In May 2021, ABC declined to move forward. The project had attracted established collaborators and still stopped short of becoming a series at the network.
Those events belong beside the Netflix sale. Together they describe the business Fannin experienced before founding KINO: creative work could acquire momentum, partners, and a budget without acquiring a dependable future. His later interest in financing and production systems grew out of working inside that uncertainty. Hollywood had provided both an education and some rather expensive classroom materials.
The writer starts asking about the accounts
KINO began in 2022. Fannin has explained its origins through his frustration with how film and television workers were paid and how inefficiently the business operated. His public argument is direct: making the work and benefiting from the work ought to be more closely connected. A writer who starts studying the payment system may eventually decide to build a company.
The early company explored blockchain-based finance and ways for fans to participate in filmmaking. By 2024, its public pitch centered on interactive digital cinema: screenings, live events, and opportunities for audiences to encounter the people behind a film. That May, KINO announced an additional $2.35 million led by ARK Venture Fund, taking its announced pre-seed financing above $4.35 million.
The product emphasis continued to change. ScreenKey now covers secure viewing, production review, approvals, and feedback. Fannin works with his brother David, KINO’s CTO, and co-founder Brit MacRae, its CMO. Earlier announcements also identify Austin Worrell as a co-founder and COO. The company’s history has involved different responsibilities and an evolving answer to where its tools can help.
There is a writer’s concern inside the software: can the people discussing a film actually watch the relevant material and get their responses to the right place? The current tools address dailies, cuts, screening rooms, and other handoffs. Fannin has described using ScreenKey to review early versions of undertone. A founder’s own production becomes a place to use the product.
Secure review and collaboration for material moving through production.
Backing independent projects, including undertone.
A smaller film, a longer future
undertone makes that combination tangible. Written and directed by Ian Tuason and starring Nina Kiri, the horror film follows a paranormal podcaster confronting disturbing recordings. KINO Studios helped back it; A24 acquired it, and the film went on to Sundance before a March 13, 2026 theatrical release. For Fannin, its passage into theaters had a particular personal resonance.
He wrote about Sundance in terms of the childhood rules that had kept him away from cinemas. Helping put a horror film on that festival’s screen made for an unusual return to the subject of forbidden viewing. The irony needs little decoration. A child taught to worry about the influence of movies had become an adult helping finance one about a demonic presence.
His business argument concerns scale. In discussions of independent production, he emphasizes matching the concept to an achievable budget. A contained story can be designed around the resources available. The fund’s approach also considers incentives, exchange rates, and how a film might reach a buyer. These are practical subjects for someone who wants independent work to keep getting made.
“The concept needs to be small, and it needs to be executably small.”
Daril Fannin, on independent film budgets
In April 2026, he and MacRae discussed those decisions alongside secure screeners, feedback, and the gap between finishing a movie and releasing it. By August, KINO had announced a $4 million financing led by Staircase Ventures. The software business and the film fund give Fannin different jobs, each requiring attention to what happens outside the scene on screen.
The next meeting might need a paddle
There is still room in this biography for less contractual pleasures. Fannin’s suggested Los Angeles itinerary runs through Sidecar donuts, Venice people-watching, lunch on Melrose, Korean barbecue, and karaoke. He likes inventing little backstories for the people he sees. The screenwriter apparently remains on duty even when the official plan is to eat.
His professional gatherings have acquired a similarly social shape. A ScreenKey pickleball tournament brought people from film and technology onto a court, with trophies and actual pickles among the proceedings. He has written about the value of getting people away from Zoom and inboxes. For someone selling tools that connect people through screens, he seems to appreciate an afternoon without one.
That detail brings the story back to its human scale. Fannin has been a young minister, a soldier, a student, a writer, a producer, and a founder. The transitions have depended on encounters as much as intentions: a collaborator, a mentor, a film, an unexpected caller. His current work asks whether more people can have a workable place in the business that changed his own life. The next conversation may begin over a cut of a movie. It may also begin over a bad serve.