Tony Tost doesn’t have the typical Hollywood success story. He was born in Southern Missouri, not on the East or West Coast. His parents weren’t involved in the entertainment industry; they were both custodians at his elementary school. Before realizing he was a talented writer, he worked in a pickle factory.
“I’m a small town guy even though I live in Los Angeles and work in Hollywood,” said Tost.
Tost received his undergraduate degree at the College of the Ozarks and an MFA from the University of Arkansas, where he met his wife, Leigh Tost, who is from Fort Smith. Leigh’s brother, and Tony’s brother-in-law, Jeff Plunkett, lives in Alexander. The couple has a home in Fayetteville, which they visit during the summers, and they plan to return to Arkansas full-time when their two teenage sons finish high school.
On August 22, 2025, Tost will release his first feature film, “Americana,” to theaters nationwide.
His picture boasts an all-star cast that includes Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Eric Dane, Simon Rex, Zahn McClarnon, and several other respected and talented actors.
While it’s difficult to summarize the plot of the ensemble modern western picture, Tost described it as a film about a “priceless Lakota Native American artifact that falls into the black market and gets stolen. This creates a chain of events where these characters, all of whom are in South Dakota, have fallen into this cat-and-mouse chase of this artifact.”
Tost is cognizant that an ensemble modern western is not typically what Hollywood producers look for today, but he remains committed to his vision and wants to tell stories that connect with people in America’s so-called “flyover country.”
“I can’t help it. I was born in the Missouri Ozarks and had an early childhood there before I moved to a small town in Washington state and moved back south,” he said. “Whenever I dream up stories, they aren’t in cities; they are in wide-open landscapes. I’m drawn to that because that’s who I am, but I’m also very conscious that there is an unintentional coastal bias because so many people in the industry are from the same networks of private schools, colleges, and social circles.”
He added that Hollywood has a blind spot for this part of the country and that he is purposefully trying to reach the overlooked audience.
“I was raised on Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, pro wrestling, and country music. That’s my DNA, and there’s not many people in Hollywood where that’s the case. It’s an unfortunate element of the industry, but in a weird way, it’s kind of good for me,” Tost said, as his background gives him a unique voice in the industry. “Taylor Sheridan is the more successful version of mining that vein. I have a different sensibility than his, but I think a lot of his success comes from tapping into those stories and that audience.”
Tost said his artistic sensibility differs from Sheridan’s not only because of his upbringing but also because of his influences.
“I have like two wolves inside of me. One is Clint Eastwood, and the other is Jim Jarmusch. My bedrock self is my trailer park self. I lived in very small towns; there were no books in the house – just westerns, crime films, MTV, and pro wrestling. That’s like the core of my being,” said Tost. “When I became a teenager and graduated high school, I was working at a pickle factory and started taking classes at a community college and discovered, to my surprise, that I was a good writer and had a passion for books, movies, and poetry,” Tost added.
Tost received a PhD in poetry at Duke and was offered a job as a professor.
“That’s when I realized I didn’t want to do that (a career in academia.) So really, my sensibility is trying to fuse these two things – this hyper-educated side of me with weird esoteric taste and the other side that loves the mythic stories I was raised on.”
This August, people will have the chance to see Tost’s artistic vision in cinemas all around the country through “Americana.”
Tost wrote the script on spec, which means he started without any upfront money or knowledge that it would ever become a film.
“I wrote it with the idea I would direct. I didn’t get paid upfront to write,” he said.
While “Americana” is Tost’s first feature film, he has a solid resume in the film industry. He was a writer on the TV shows “Longmire” and “The Terror: Infamy.” He created the TV series “Damnation” which premiered on the USA Network in 2017 and recently was the show runner for season two of at TV series created by Rian Johnson, “Poker Face.”
“I wrote it knowing I had spent a lot of time in TV – writing, prepping, filming, and editing TV episodes – I felt like I had acquired the skill set needed to direct my own film,” Tost said. “No one will tap you on the shoulder and say ‘it’s time,’ so basically I came off of a TV show which I worked on for a whole nine months. It was a good job, but it gave me time to write something for free. I knew I wanted to do a modern-day western.”
Tost said that producer Alex Saks was instrumental in getting the film made.
“There is no way this movie gets made without her. I would love to make a dozen movies with Alex,” said Tost. “I got on her radar for a movie I wrote, a film which hasn’t been made yet, “The Olympian,” and there was another project about a bare-knuckle boxer that her company was among the people interested in hiring me to write a script for.”
Tost met with Saks, and they clicked. He didn’t take the job for the bare-knuckle boxing film but wrote her a follow-up email about a script he was working on, “Americana.” He said he sent her the script, and she liked it.
The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, in 2023, with positive reviews and an audience reception that Tost was more than pleased with.
“The premiere was amazing. I was so terrified because I had no idea how it would be received and I was literally fine tuning the film just 24 hours before we screened it,” he said. “When I stepped into the theater in Austin, it was just about sold out, and from the opening 10 seconds, a huge sense of relief washed over me because I could tell people just got it right away. They were laughing, they were cheering at different spots of the movie.”
He said the reception felt amazing.
“You spend months in an empty room writing it. Then you go off, and we filmed it for over 26 days; that’s its own mountain climb. Then you spend months again in a room editing it, and you have no context for whether it will connect with people. Then, to be there surrounded by people delighted to be seeing it, and they have no reason to fake it. It was awesome. I came out of it knowing I want that feeling again and wanting to chase it for the rest of my career.”