Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Storytelling for the Screen: HIM
- Thursday, November 6, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (93 minutes)
- With Justin Tipping (filmmaker)
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Starring: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies
What would you sacrifice to become the greatest of all time? Directed by UCSB alumnus Justin Tipping and produced by Oscar winner Jordan Peele with Monkeypaw Productions, HIM (2025) is a chilling journey into the inner sanctum of fame, idolatry, and the pursuit of excellence at any cost. Co-written by Tipping from a Black List screenplay by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, the film features an electrifying dramatic turn from Marlon Wayans and a breakout performance by Tyriq Withers as Cameron Cade, a rising quarterback who has devoted his entire identity to football. On the eve of professional football’s annual scouting combine, Cam is brutally attacked by an obsessive fan, leaving him with a devastating brain injury. Just as his dreams seem shattered, Cam receives a lifeline when his hero Isaiah White (Wayans), a legendary eight-time championship quarterback and cultural megastar, offers to train Cam at the isolated compound that Isaiah shares with his celebrity influencer wife, Elsie White (Julia Fox). But as mentorship turns into manipulation, Isaiah’s charisma curdles into menace, sending his protégé down a disorienting rabbit hole that threatens far more than his career.
Filmmaker and UCSB alumnus Justin Tipping joined Carsey-Wolf Center interim director Ross Melnick (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of HIM.
Biographies
Justin Tipping (filmmaker)
Justin Tipping is a writer-director from Berkeley, California, whose work blends lyrical realism with bold, genre-bending storytelling. Known for his uncompromising aesthetic and emotional precision, Tipping explores masculinity, violence, and systemic injustice through intimate character studies carved into stark, meticulously composed visual worlds.
Tipping’s most recent feature film HIM was released in September of 2025. His feature debut Kicks (Focus Features) premiered to critical acclaim and established him as a singular new voice in American cinema. He has since built a reputation as a sought-after filmmaker across genres in both film and television, producing and directing pilots for series including Joe vs Carole (Peacock), Flatbush Misdemeanors (Showtime), and Lena Waithe’s Twenties (BET). His work on Showtime’s Black Monday, starring Don Cheadle and Regina Hall, earned him an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series. Additional credits include The Chi, Dear White People, Run the World, and Dare Me.
As a writer, Tipping has developed projects with FX, Showtime, UCP, TriStar, Columbia Pictures, Universal, and Paramount. His talent was recognized early when his short film Nani won the Student Academy Award while he was earning his MFA in Directing at the American Film Institute Conservatory. Prior to that, he graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a BA in Film and Media Studies. He currently resides in Los Angeles.
Moderator Ross Melnick (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Ross Melnick is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Interim Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2024 Culbert Family Book Prize from the International Association for Media and History and the 2023 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012)—recipient of the 2013 “Book of the Year” award from the Theatre Historical Society of America—co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004), inspired by the website (cinematreasures.org) he co-founded 25 years ago. His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections on film exhibition, media industries, silent cinema, broadcasting history, and film music.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.