Actress & Writer Kristina Denton talks about her new film “Hollywood Grit”, memoir and much more

YV Media: Share some of your writing journey with us. When did it become your profession? What advice would you give to someone seeking a career in writing?

Kristina: According to my mother, I announced that I wanted to be an actress at age two. I held this dream of storytelling my entire life until I finally moved to LA right after college with my car packed to the ceiling. I enrolled in Meisner training and that acting foundation gave me a superpower I didn’t know I was earning: an obsession with emotional truth. Eventually the writing started because I wanted to create the kinds of roles and stories I craved but wasn’t seeing, and I was tired of waiting for permission from someone else to do what I loved. First it was little sketches, short films, then a play I wrote and staged in a month to a sold-out crowd, then more shorts, a few web series, then features. Somewhere in there, I sold my car to finance my short film Bonded because the dream was louder than my attachment to a sedan. That film ran the festival circuit, put my comedic voice on the map, and taught me that sometimes writing the dumb idea you can’t shake can turn out to be the thing everyone remembers you by. You build the door and walk through it.

It became a profession in the most unglamorous way: I kept showing up. I wrote before work, after work, on lunch breaks, weekends, even in the notes app at red lights. I took gigs I wasn’t sure I was ready for and learned on my feet. I didn’t go to school for it, so it was a lot of trial and error. What started as getting paid to polish scripts, scenes for actor’s reels, and short form content for other actors, turned into my own projects. During the pandemic, I focused on writing because it’s what I could control. My co-writer Ryan Curtis and I would sit together on Zoom every day at 2:00 p.m. and work on something. We completed three different projects in the first six months, and our partnership was born. So naturally, when he approached me with a crazy deadline to co-write Hollywood Grit in under a wild three-weeks, I felt ready. I had no idea it would turn into our first theatrical release. In parallel, my memoir, You Don’t Know Dick, became the project that braided everything together: humor, grief, sex, shame, healing, and the complicated love I have for my dad. That book forced me to grow up as a writer and take a stand in the space as a writer who isn’t here just for fun, but that I’m trying to make an impact.

Advice? First, your voice is your currency; doubt is expensive. Become an expert on you - your obsessions, wounds, humor, and worldview. Second, treat writing like a job. Put your butt in the chair on a schedule that would make your boss proud. Word counts beat inspiration. You have to put in the reps. Third, study story structure like an athlete studies tape. Read produced scripts, reverse-outline your favorite movies, learn why a scene turns. Fourth, build your people: one brutally honest reader, one hype-friend, one practical producer brain, a writing group. Fifth, make things at the scale you can actually finish. Momentum is sexier than perfection. Finally, get resourced- therapy, movement, breathwork, whatever helps you metabolize life so you can put it on the page without burning out. You don’t need a plan B; you need a hundred ways to make plan A inevitable.

YVM: Tell us what you can about the film Hollywood Grit starring Max Martini, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Duffy, and Linda Purl. What’s the inspiration behind the film? Describe how it feels seeing it go from script to screen.

Kristina: Hollywood Grit is a modern noir set in Los Angeles - the city that sells you a dream by day and dares you to survive the night. We follow a bruised ex-cop, Grit Thorn (Max Martini), who is tearing through the underbelly of LA to find his missing daughter. On the surface, it’s mobsters, starlets, neon, and danger. Underneath, it’s a father trying to reckon with the cost of his choices. That duality, glitter and shadow, bravado and tenderness, is what drew me in. LA has a habit of holding both truths at once, and I wanted the movie to feel like the city I’ve known for nearly twenty years.

The origin story is very indie: before we had a script, we had puzzle pieces, a limited budget, a tight calendar, a few key cast, Los Angeles as our playground and about three weeks to write something worth making. My co-writer/director Ryan Curtis is a combat veteran and a deeply visual storyteller. He brought the world-building and the heat. My background is acting, so I came at it from the inside out: character, dialogue, emotional truth. That push-pull created the film’s DNA; grit plus heart. And then the cast elevated everything. Max brought a quiet intensity that lives in his bones; Tyrese brought steel and balance; Patrick Duffy and Linda Purl thread the movie with this old-Hollywood gravitas I’ve admired my whole life.

One of my favorite elements is the music. We didn’t just temp tracks, our team made original songs and a score that were inspired by the script and then, in turn, inspired the edit. As a writer, hearing lyrics and melodies born from a scene you typed at 2:00 a.m. is surreal. It makes the world feel complete. There are separate digital releases for the original songs and the score, which I love, because the movie’s sonic palette is a character of its own. 

Seeing it go from my laptop to a real deal Hollywood premiere was the emotional rollercoaster you’d expect. I watched the audience as much as the screen when they leaned forward, went silent, laughed on the off-beats and I cried more than once. Indie filmmaking is a contact sport, but when a room of strangers feels the heartbeat you tried to sew into the script, there’s nothing like it.

YVM: When and where can everyone watch Hollywood Grit?

Kristina: We opened in select AMC theatres across the U.S. on August 22nd, with a limited theatrical run. If you caught one of the Q&As on opening weekend, you probably saw the cast or filmmakers pop in to thank audiences; that grassroots rollout was deliberate — we wanted the film to meet people in real rooms first. 

As of now, the limited theatrical engagement has wrapped, and the film is headed to digital on Amazon Prime and Apple TV October 21st. The official site is the best single source of truth for rollout updates — it’s where we’ll announce the exact transactional platforms (rent/buy) and timing the minute they’re locked. There’s an email sign-up right on the page if you want a ping when Hollywood Grit lands at home. 

While you wait, you can live a little in the film’s world: the original songs album and the score are already out on major digital music services. It’s a fun way to feel the tone of the movie — smoky, propulsive, and a little dangerous — before you press play at home. If you’re the type who likes to enter a story through its sound, cue those up. 

YVM: Tell us a bit about your memoir, You Don’t Know Dick. Why did you choose to center the memoir on your time working at a men’s erectile dysfunction clinic? With it being a memoir, were there any difficult topics you covered? How did you push through while writing about those topics?

Kristina: On paper, You Don’t Know Dick sounds like a wild workplace comedy — a woman gets hired at a men’s erectile dysfunction clinic and learns way more about humanity than she bargained for. And yes, there’s plenty to laugh at. But the truth is, the book is about grief, shame, masculinity, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. I started the job around the time my father died, and the clinic became this unexpected spiritual classroom. Men walked in stripped of bravado — ashamed, scared, hopeful — and I sat with them at their most vulnerable. It cracked me open. I saw men differently. I saw myself differently and ultimately, I saw my dad differently and made peace with our complicated relationship.

I centered the memoir there because the clinic is a pressure cooker for everything we avoid discussing: sex, aging, identity, power, tenderness. It’s also where our cultural contradictions are loudest — we sexualize everything and then shame the people who struggle with sex. We celebrate stoicism in men and then wonder why intimacy collapses. Hovering over my clients, I watched humor function as a pressure valve. So, the book uses comedy to get us to the deeper conversation without drowning in it.

The difficult topics? So many. My father-daughter relationship and the complicated grief that followed his death. The moments I wasn’t proud of — my coping mechanisms, my ambition, the ways I disappeared in relationships. The ethics of writing about real people in a medical context. The unavoidable shame that threads through erectile dysfunction, and the tenderness that emerges when people are brave enough to name it. Writing those pages felt like open-heart surgery with a laugh track. There were days I had to put the laptop down and sob. There were others where I cackled at my own awkwardness and kept typing.

How did I push through? Ritual and honesty. I wrote on a deadline that didn’t care about my mood. I gave myself guardrails (change names, composite minor characters, protect privacy where appropriate). I worked with a therapist to metabolize the hard memories so they didn’t own me anymore. I let humor in on purpose — not to deflect, but to breathe. And I kept returning to the purpose: to humanize taboo topics, to build a bridge between what men are living and what women imagine, and to free the younger version of me who was doing her best with a very messy heart. If a reader laughs, cries, and then calls someone they love with a little more compassion — that’s the win.

YVM: What do you hope readers gain from reading your memoir?

Kristina: First, relief — the kind you feel when someone finally says the quiet part out loud and you realize you’re not broken, you’re human. We’ve built so much shame around sex, grief, and the bodies we live in that people carry these secret burdens for years. I want readers to exhale. If you’ve struggled with sexual function, if you’ve loved someone who did, if you’ve been flattened by grief or haunted by a complicated parent — welcome to the club. You’re not alone.

Second, a new lens on men. One of the biggest surprises of my clinic year was how often tenderness sat just beneath bravado. When sex “fails,” it doesn’t just rattle anatomy; it rattles identity. I hope women come away with more curiosity than conclusions, and men come away with permission — to talk, to feel, to ask for help. Vulnerability is not a violation of masculinity; it’s evidence of courage. If the book helps even one couple have a kinder conversation in the aftermath of a hard night, that matters to me.

Third, the power of laughing in dark rooms. Humor in the memoir isn’t decoration; it’s medicine. It’s how I survived that year and how the patients in those rooms often survived their appointments. When you can laugh, shame loosens its grip, and once shame loosens, truth can land. I want readers to experience that rhythm — the pressure building, the release, the clarity that follows — and try it on in their own lives.

Fourth, tools. Not homework, but breadcrumbs: the questions I asked myself, the conversations that unlocked stalemates, the boundaries that protected me, the rituals that helped me write about painful things without getting swallowed by them. I hope readers steal whatever’s useful and leave the rest.

Finally, an invitation. The book is my story, but it’s also a hand extended. I hope it invites a larger cultural conversation — in living rooms, group chats, podcasts, and wherever brave people gather — about how we love each other better across the gender divide. Less finger-pointing, more listening. Less performance, more presence. If a reader finishes You Don’t Know Dick feeling both lighter and braver — ready to tell the truth a little sooner and with more compassion — then I’ve done my job.

YVM: What impact do you hope to have on others through your career and storytelling?

Kristina: I want to be a door-opener — the person whose work makes it easier for you to talk about the thing you swore you’d never say out loud. My north star is disarming shame with humor and heart. If my films, TV projects, live shows, and books consistently make people feel seen in the messy middle — between grief and laughter, defense and tenderness — then I’m doing what I came here to do.

On a practical level, I want the work to build bridges: between men and women, parents and kids, public selves and private truths. We’ve gotten really good at shouting past each other. Story is one of the last communal spaces we still share. In a dark theater or on a page at 2:00 a.m., defenses drop. You can try on a different perspective without needing to be right. If I can create more of those spaces — where someone recognizes themselves in a character they thought they’d judge — that’s impact.

I also care about modeling a way of making things that’s sustainable and generous. Hollywood Grit was built resource-first — limited budget, tight schedule, big vision — and it still got to theaters. That’s partly craft and partly culture. I hope my path signals to other creators, especially women who write “provocative” material, that you don’t have to wait for the perfect yes. You can assemble the puzzle pieces you have, aim for excellence, and deliver something that punches above its weight. And then you can turn around and hold the door for the next voice coming up behind you.

Long-term, I see the memoir extending into a TV series and a podcast that convene conversations about masculinity, shame, and healing — not as a lecture, but as a hang that’s actually fun. I want to pair the laugh-out-loud with the lump-in-the-throat and leave people lighter, braver, and more connected. If my career adds up to millions of tiny, private moments where someone pauses and chooses compassion over judgment — in a marriage, in a family, in how they see themselves — that’s the legacy I’m after. The world doesn’t need more perfect people; it needs more honest ones. If my work nudges us in that direction, even a little, I’m grateful.

Kristina Denton Photo Credit:

Photographer: Matt Kallish @matt_kallish

Hair: Jenn Montoya Palmore @jenn_starr12

Makeup: Kristine Lisman @makeup_by_kristine_