A birthday gift from Cameo turned into a feature film. Lance Oppenheim’s narrative debut, Primetime, is now in theaters, and the director says it all started with a forty-dollar video from To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen.

In March 2024, Oppenheim’s wife bought him a Cameo as a gag. Hansen congratulated him on his documentary SPERMWORLD, asked him to “have a seat,” then pitched his own streaming network. Oppenheim was hooked. He spent hours watching Hansen’s Cameo page, fascinated by how a crusading journalist had become a self-aware meme. “A man had become a meme. A person had become a persona,” Oppenheim says.

Two weeks later, he showed the video to Robert Pattinson during a meeting. Turns out Pattinson was also a Hansen fan. A month after that, Pattinson’s producing partner Brighton McCloskey showed Oppenheim a script titled TO CATCH A PREDATOR. He read it in his car. “Everything I’d felt watching those Cameos was there,” he says.

Primetime isn’t a biopic. Oppenheim calls it a fever dream and media collage, inspired by Ace in the Hole and Natural Born Killers. It follows Hansen, a TV producer, and a Hollywood dreamer during the show’s peak, exploring what happens when ambition consumes you.

For documentary filmmakers crossing into narrative, this one’s proof that inspiration lives in the strangest places.