William Fay

Walk into Steric's space in Culver City and the headline product looks almost disappointingly ordinary: a stainless box, roughly the size of a kitchen refrigerator, humming quietly. Pump a spirit through it and nothing visible happens. The proof stays the same. The color stays the same. Nothing is added. Nothing is filtered out. There is no waste stream, no consumable, no cloud of marketing smoke. And yet what comes out the other side tastes different - smoother, rounder, with the alcohol burn pulled back and the flavor notes nudged into balance.

The trick is a dynamically adjusted electromagnetic field. The spirit flows through it, the energy rearranges many of the compounds at the molecular level, and by tuning the field's intensity and character, Steric can dial in a different result for each individual wine or spirit. The reactions happen almost instantly, which is why a single unit can process more than a thousand gallons an hour - and why a row of them can scale past six thousand.

Running all of this is William Fay, a man whose resume reads like a category error. For three decades he was one of the people Hollywood trusted with very large, very expensive things. He executive-produced Independence Day and The Patriot at Centropolis Entertainment. He co-founded Legendary Entertainment and, as President of Production, put his name on 300, Superman Returns, The Hangover and The Town. He knows how to take a wildly ambitious idea, wrangle the budget, and get it onto thousands of screens.

Then he pointed that same instinct at a distillery problem. The pitch he makes for Steric is not about explosions or applause. It is about margins and rescue. Producers use the technology to save flawed batches, to keep flavor consistent from barrel to barrel, and to push a premium product a notch higher. "From the start," Fay says, "our mission has been to put better products - and better margins - within reach for makers of every size." That last phrase is the whole thesis: not a luxury toy for the giants, but a leveler for the craft distiller and the global brand alike.

Long before he worried about ester chains and mouthfeel, Fay worried about whether a giant lizard would stomp Manhattan on schedule and on budget. He studied at Stanford and then enrolled at the UCLA Film School, where he won the school's Morrison Award for Best Student Film, directing a short adaptation of Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. The early lesson - that a story is just a set of constraints you make sing - never left him.

He learned the machinery of production from the inside, working as a production executive at New World Pictures and at Film Finances Limited, and crewing films as a unit production manager. Then, in 1995, he joined director Roland Emmerich and writer-producer Dean Devlin as President of Centropolis Entertainment. The timing was good. Independence Day landed in 1996 and became a cultural event; Godzilla followed in 1998 and The Patriot in 2000.

In 2005 he became a co-founder of Legendary Entertainment alongside Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, Larry Clark and Scott Mednick, taking the role of President of Production. Legendary's run in the late 2000s was the kind studios dream about, and Fay's executive-producer credit sits on a remarkable stretch of it: Superman Returns, 300, 10,000 BC, Ninja Assassin, Trick 'r Treat and The Town. By any reckoning, he had helped generate billions in enterprise value telling stories on screen.

What does any of that have to do with a smoother martini? More than it looks. A blockbuster and a beverage startup are both bets that a hard, technical thing can be made to work at scale, on a deadline, for an audience that will know instantly if it is fake. Fay simply moved the audience from the multiplex to the tasting room.

Fay never really left storytelling - he just stopped charging admission for it. A father of three, he has spent years on the board of SPIRIT SERIES, a nonprofit that uses story and performance to build character in young people, and in 2024 he became its Board President, succeeding John McPherson. Since 2017 he and his wife, Jody, have co-hosted the organization's annual fundraiser.

Ask him why a man who has greenlit explosions and stadium-sized battles cares about a classroom program and the answer comes back in the same register he uses for film: it is about the power of a narrative to move people. "Story can still unite us," he says. "There's not a person out there who wouldn't see SPIRIT SERIES as a great force for positive change and growth, focused on young people who desperately need it." Self-belief, integrity, teamwork, compassion, public speaking, critical thinking - the virtues he lists for kids are, not coincidentally, the same ones it takes to run an improbable startup.

At Steric he has been building a bench to match the ambition. The technology traces back to two inventors who, about a decade ago, experimented with electromagnetic energy in a Los Angeles innovation lab and founded the company to commercialize it. Co-inventor Steve Goldstein is a named inventor on 26 patents and a former Director of R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering and Chief Technologist at Sony - another bridge between the entertainment world and hard engineering. In 2026 Fay brought on Steve Sukman as COO to push global expansion in the beverage-processing market.

The win that put Steric on the industry map came in 2023, when Fay pitched the technology in a Shark Tank-style competition at the Distilled Spirits Council's annual conference - and took first place in the Innovation Showcase. It was a fitting venue for a producer: a room full of skeptics, a few minutes to make them believe, and a product that had to deliver the moment the lights came up.