Long before Jay Allen became a filmmaker and executive producer, he was E.T. At least, that’s what the kids at school called him. Allen, who grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, had no idea who E.T. was. He thought it was a nickname. When classmates asked for his autograph, he happily signed “E.T.”
“I came home and told my dad, and my dad wasn’t expecting it, and he laughed for like five minutes,” Allen recalled.
Allen can joke about it now. More importantly, he says those early experiences helped give him the humor and resilience he would eventually need in an industry not known for making things easy.
Today, Allen is putting both to work at SunnyBoy Entertainment, where he is helping build the company’s presence in Atlanta and developing the kind of authentic, deeply personal stories that have defined much of his career.
For Allen, bringing that work to the South carries personal significance. The region helped shape his perspective and, perhaps most importantly, first drew him to a career of telling stories.
“I believe that the greatest people in our lives are the storytellers,” Allen said.
He knew fairly early that film would somehow be part of his life. Allen attended college in Wilmington, North Carolina, when Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill were filming there. He studied film and worked as an extra, spending time on sets and, as he jokes, “I was on the set all the time, killing the crafty tables, you know, eating with Chad Michael Murray, or whoever those people were on One Tree Hill and Dawson’s Creek.”
But getting from film school to an actual career in the business proved considerably harder. After college, Allen moved into corporate sales before eventually finding his way back to the industry.
“The world aligned to pull me back into film,” he said.
That path eventually led him to Uncensored, TV One’s autobiographical series in which celebrities tell their stories in their own words. As showrunner and executive producer, Allen suddenly found himself interviewing people he had idolized growing up.
He says the experience changed his life.
It also reinforced something Allen believes about storytelling: The interesting stuff often begins when people stop presenting the version of themselves they think everyone wants to see.
“Every episode we challenge people to talk about things that they’ve never talked about before,” he said. “You don’t always get that, but that’s always the goal.”
Few episodes affected him more than the one featuring Tisha Campbell.
Campbell had previously declined to participate in the series, according to Allen, but eventually agreed. At the time, she was going through a period of personal transition, and some important relationships in her life had become distant. Then people began showing up for her.
Friends and former colleagues participated in interviews, including Martin Lawrence, Campbell’s longtime Martin co-star. Allen had grown up watching Lawrence and remembers being nervous about interviewing one of his childhood heroes. But something much larger was happening.
Campbell and Lawrence had been strained for years.
Watching those people come together for Campbell—and then watching Campbell experience the finished episode—made Allen realize that the work could have consequences far beyond making good television.
“It was just amazing for me to know that this episode was a domino effect of healing some of those relationships,” he said.
There were other moments.
When Lil Wayne was approached about Uncensored, Allen says the rapper wasn’t initially interested in doing that kind of program. But Wayne offered one tantalizing possibility: If the producers could get his favorite rapper, Missy Elliott, to interview him, he would do it.
They got Missy.
Niecy Nash’s episode took Allen somewhere else entirely, as Nash discussed traumatic experiences her mother had survived and producers were able to interview her mother as well.
Then there was Naturi Naughton. Allen became close with the Power actress after working on her episode. Years later, after Naughton’s father died, Allen was able to locate his complete interview footage and send it to her.
She had never seen the entire interview.
“It was almost like her father was speaking to her after he passed,” Allen said.
Those experiences help explain the kind of work Allen wants to make now. At a moment when audiences are surrounded by carefully manufactured images, AI-generated content and lives polished for social media, he remains interested in the messy parts.
“I think the reason why people love Atlanta is because of the authenticity,” Allen said, pointing to everything from its music to the popularity of shows built around the city.
SunnyBoy’s expansion there gives Allen an opportunity to develop stories outside the traditional Los Angeles and New York entertainment ecosystems while remaining in a region he understands personally.
And in some ways, Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told proved what could happen when those stories were given a larger platform.
Allen co-created the documentary about the legendary Atlanta spring break gathering, and he describes the project as an “avalanche” that grew out of relationships he had already been building through Uncensored. Jermaine Dupri, for example, had appeared on Uncensored before the Freaknik documentary, giving Allen an early connection to one of the figures most closely associated with Atlanta music and culture.
But Freaknik gave Allen something even more valuable than another successful credit.
“We don’t have to wait for permission to tell stories that we think matter,” he said.
At SunnyBoy, Allen says there are already projects taking shape in Atlanta and elsewhere around the country, including stories involving major artists he isn’t quite ready to name.
And when asked what he would make if there were no limitations, no budget constraints, no network notes and nobody telling him something couldn’t be done, Allen became noticeably cautious.
“I’m scared to say some of those things out loud because I don’t think anything is impossible,” he said. “I have some projects that are just, like, bigger than life. I still think can be done.”
Allen is also thinking about what storytelling itself may become.
He believes the next evolution may involve eliminating some of the distance between the audience and the story altogether. His fascination with immersive theater, virtual reality and wearable technology has led him to imagine documentaries audiences don’t merely watch but enter.
True crime, he believes, could be particularly ripe for that transformation. Allen imagines viewers virtually entering a crime scene, examining what is around them and perhaps even discovering something others missed.
“There are so many armchair detectives,” he said. “I think there’s a world where true crime goes directly into the crime scene and you’re able to be there.”
For someone who spends so much time thinking about other people’s stories, Allen also has someone in his life who continually challenges his own thinking: comedian and media personality Jessie Woo.
He describes his girlfriend as his greatest inspiration and cheerleader, someone who pushes him to approach his own craft more aggressively.
“She’s a journalist at heart,” he said. “She questions everything.”
The two, he hinted, also have some projects “bubbling” together. But perhaps the story Allen has not yet fully told is his own.
Allen describes his own story simply as that of someone who followed his dreams. He was a kid shaped by television—from Looney Tunes to In Living Color—who grew up wanting to make the kind of work that might shape somebody else.
“I was really raised by this medium,” he said, “to then go on in life and want to become the person that changes it. I’m excited to be able to cultivate the relationships I have that are in New York and L.A. and all these other places, and bring jobs and bring opportunity to a region of the United States that I just hold dearly because it raised me and informed how I see the world,” he said.
The kid who once unknowingly signed autographs as E.T. is still telling stories.
Only now, he knows exactly who he is.
Amy Pais-Richer is a published author, screenwriter, and former advertising creative director.
