At Feature Well Productions, it’s an article of faith that a truly great story has to be great when told across multiple media. So it was with FWP co-founder Alex Bhattacharji’s article about Sammy Davis Jr.’s Satanic faith: “Sammy Davis Jr.’s Dance With The Devil” ran as a print piece in Rolling Stone, but was conceived from the start as a story to be developed into documentary and scripted projects—which it is, in partnership Rolling Stone Films.

The creative spark is a starting point, but it will burn out quickly without a storytelling strategy. Oscar-nominated documentarian Eddie Schmidt approached Alex with the seed of an idea that was cinematic at its core, and the pair mapped a pathway for this story, starting with a magazine feature that had long-tail potential across various formats.

With the help of Rolling Stone editors Kate Storey and Sean Woods, Alex produced a vivid and engrossing narrative that traces Davis’s flirtation with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, a scene he first encountered on the Hollywood party circuit in the late ’60s. As Alex’s in-depth reporting revealed, Davis didn’t just dabble. He attended Satanist services and studied its tenets. He leveraged his star power to convince NBC to film a (failed) TV pilot called Poor Devil about life in the service of Lucifer. He was made an honorary warlock by LaVey and forged a deep bond with the Church of Satan’s founder and high priest. He practiced Satanic rituals until his dying days. It wasn’t about devil worship for Davis—it was about rebellion, reinvention, and grabbing hold of a narrative that had long been shaped by others.

In Alex’s hands, the bathos of this wild story is balanced with pathos, as he deftly shows how Davis’s lifelong search for belonging led to his immersion in the occult. Rich with world-building and revelatory details, the resulting story is an exploration of identity, performance, and the masks we wear when we want to be seen

Read the full feature HERE:

For over a decade, Wayne Simmons appeared on Fox News as a counterterrorism expert. He claimed to have spent 27 years as a covert operative for the CIA, leading high-stakes missions all over the globe: fighting narcoterrorists in South America; surveilling Persian defectors in the suburbs of Prince George’s County, Maryland; interrogating bad guys at Agency black sites. But when Simmons’s former mistress accused him of stealing her life savings, the FBI started digging and uncovered an incredible truth: Wayne Simmons was an impostor.

In 2016, The New York Times Magazine published “The Plot to Take Down a Fox News Analyst,” an investigation by Feature Well co-founder Alex French. The piece exposed how Simmons—armed with no more than a fake résumé, post-9/11 bluster, and a military haircut—conned his way into right-wing media. And from there, he used his bogus credentials and his primetime fame to cozy up with DC elites and score lucrative defense contracts. Simmons was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to 33 months in prison.

The story didn’t stop there. Shortly after publication, Alex was approached about adapting the article into a podcast. Gretta Cohn and Transmitter Media took the lead, pairing Alex with Lacy Jane Roberts and Shoshi Shmuluvitz—a murderer’s row of reporting and storytelling talent. With the case no longer in court, the trio convinced key players to open up. They uncovered a shadowy cabal of retired military officials with hawkish foreign policy goals who fueled Simmons’s ascent. They also discovered what Simmons had been up to for all of those years while he claimed to be doing the Agency’s dirty work.

The result was the hit podcast The Commander, Season 1 of Spotify’s "Imposters" series, which was released in 2021. For Alex, it was a career milestone: his first story to be developed as IP, his first foray into podcasting, and the start of creative partnerships with some of the best in the business. Today, Greta leads audio at Pushkin Industries, Shoshi is the Managing Producer at Campside Media, and Lacy produces ambitious hit series, such as The Big Dig, which won a Peabody in 2024.

“It was a serious piece of reporting on a serious topic,” Alex says. “My collaborations first with the New York Times and later with Greta, Shoshi, and Lacy showed me how far it was possible to push a story. They taught me lessons about storytelling and teamwork that are front and center every day at Feature Well.”

Read the original piece HERE.

Listen to the podcast HERE.

One night in 2015, Ava DuVernay, the activist and filmmaker behind Selma and 13th, came across a reply buried in her Twitter feed:

What’s your next film gonna be on? #thecentralparkfive maybe????

The tweet came from Raymond Santana Jr., one of five Harlem teenagers wrongly convicted in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case. DuVernay went on to ask Santana, Dr. Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, and Antron McCray to entrust her with the story of the so-called “Central Park Five”—now “the Exonerated Five.”

What does it take to become a private investigator? What kind of person signs up to chase secrets, obsess over cold cases, and risk their safety in pursuit of answers for a client?

Feature Well Productions co-founder Howie Kahn set out to answer the question: Could anyone, with the right training and mindset, become a professional snoop?

The result is Becoming a Private Investigator, part of Simon & Schuster’s acclaimed “Masters at Work” series.

Have you ever wondered about the first person diagnosed with autism? Who was that person—and what became of them?

In the autumn of 2021, the heads of production at iHeart Originals approached Feature Well Productions co-founder Alex French, then a Senior Staff Writer at iHeartMedia, with a unique challenge. Bob Pittman, iHeart Media’s CEO, had heard about a man in a small rural Mississippi town. That man, named Donald, was the first person found to have autism.

We're honored that the New York-based creative agency Flower Shop engaged Feature Well Productions to oversee the narrative storytelling around the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) naming and visual identity process.

In the Fall of 2019, Town & Country magazine dispatched Feature Well Productions co-founder Alex Bhattacharji to Santa Anita Park. The storied racetrack just northeast of Los Angeles had emerged as the epicenter of a crisis that shook the world of thoroughbred racing. Within six months, 34 horses died, prompting public outcry, governmental scrutiny, and a blame game among the warring members of the Stronach family, the track’s politically connected billionaire owners.

Somehow, Alex got inside all of it: The boardroom. The stables. The family conflict.

In March 2008, Feature Well Productions co-founder Howie Kahn published “The Wandering Chef” in GQ, an expansive profile of Jim Denevan, a nomadic chef, sand artist, and founder of the traveling culinary roadshow Outstanding in the Field.

A few months later, the James Beard Foundation handed Howie its top honor for magazine feature writing the piece. You can read it HERE.

At Feature Well Productions, we believe the best stories often start with a single, unforgettable detail.

For this one, it was a trail of Louis Vuitton bags.

One of the great things about Feature Well Productions is that we thrive on collaboration and support each other as individual creators. So shout-out, hat-tip, and big-ups to FWP co-founder Alex Bhattacharji on his Rolling Stone profile of Ike Barinholtz—star of Apple TV+'s The Studio, and the creator of both hard comedies (like Netflix's Running Point) and a truly Bodega-tastic chopped cheese. You can read it HERE.