Hell to Pay: The Legend of Robert Johnson

Giancarlo Fusi was born in the Dominican Republic, the country that seems to sprout as many Major League ball players as plantains. But he grew up in New Jersey on a steady diet of American sitcoms and horror flicks. A little league knee injury kept him from his first dream of being first baseman for the New York Yankees so he shifted his focus to the equally improbable dream of being a Hollywood movie director and moved to Los Angeles after being awarded the Phyllis Gebauer Scholarship in Writing for diverse writers from UCLA, where he had the opportunity to learn screenwriting from Philip Eisner, writer of the sci-fi/horror classic Event Horizon.

Shortly thereafter, he joined the first cohort of Mount Saint Mary University’s Master of Fine Arts in Film & Television program on the historic backlot of Sunset Las Palmas Studios, once home to Laurel & Hardy and I Love Lucy. While completing his M.F.A., he also earned a Certificate in TV Drama Writing from the UCLA Film & Television Summer Institute. He interned as a development assistant at RWSG, a top boutique literary agency in Beverly Hills. While there, he provided coverage and recommended the book that is now the Netflix documentary Blood Brothers: Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and will soon be adapted as a limited dramatic series.

He's been a mentor for the Young Storyteller Foundation’s Script-to-Stage program teaching screenwriting to 5th graders from underprivileged L.A. neighborhoods. For his commitment to social and environmental causes, he was awarded the Robert Sklar fellowship to join the first-of-its-kind certificate in Social Impact Filmmaking program at Stony Brook University. He learned about advocacy and activism from some New York’s top non-fiction filmmakers and is currently developing a feature-length documentary.

Giancarlo's previous short documentary subjects include a profile of the legendary patron of the arts Joan Quinn as she exhibits her personal collection of works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat along with an interview with her portrait artist, famed photographer and music video director Matthew Ralston. Another of his doc’s offers a raw insider's look at the private training camp of lightweight boxing champ John Molina Jr. as he prepares for a fight.

Giancarlo is the first Studio Manager for Headspace Studios, a multiplatform facility in Santa Monica that produces mental health and mindfulness content for the industry-leading Headspace meditation app and its streaming channels. He’s won numerous awards and accolades for his screenwriting, including an invite to the Writers Residency at the Bahamas International Film Festival where he was personally mentored by the late-great Roger Corman. In his spare time, Giancarlo enjoys binge-watching Netflix & purge-writing TV shows.