Most storytellers choose between scale and intimacy.
Eric Garcia keeps trying to figure out why that has to be a choice.

Film and television have the reach — the ability to land in living rooms across 190 countries on the same night, to be felt by millions of people simultaneously. Live storytelling has something else: the immediate, physical, unrepeatable sense that this is happening to you, specifically, right now. There's a room where something is occurring and you are inside it. The gulf between these two experiences has always existed as a trade-off.

Eric doesn't accept that.

He started with a velociraptor detective. The Anonymous Rex series — a trilogy of novels about a dinosaur private eye operating in a Los Angeles full of prehistoric creatures hiding in plain sight — asked readers to accept an impossible premise on page one and then inhabit it completely. The books found readers in 22 countries and gave Eric an international audience, but something even more durable: a working theory about what it means to make something feel genuinely personal to the person on the other side of it.

The experiments got more precise. Matchstick Men, adapted into the Ridley Scott film starring Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell, was a con man story that conned its audience from page one — the trick landing differently for every reader depending on when they figured out they were being played. The structure was more than decorative; it was the mechanism.

The Repossession Mambo (and its film adaptation, Repo Men) took that instinct further, but this time inward. The novel's timeline is deliberately fractured, bouncing between periods of its narrator's life the way the body is made of separate organs: pieces that only cohere, only read as a whole, once you finally have all of them. Eric chose every cut, every jump, every gap. There was fragmentation, but it was entirely his to control.

That control was about to change.

Kaleidoscope — the Netflix series seen by more than 50 million viewers in its first month, reaching #1 in 190 countries — gave its viewers something television had never quite offered before: genuine agency over the sequence of the story. Eight episodes, each named for a color, delivered in different orders to different viewers. The heist at the center lands differently depending on what you already know when you arrive at it. Watch it one way, you feel one thing. Let the algorithm decide, something else. The order was no longer Eric's to control — it belonged to the viewer, or to chance. Eight episodes, forty thousand ways to watch, none of them wrong.

Live storytelling had been pulling at Eric for a long time. As a lifelong musical theater devotee, he came to Bad News Bears: A Musical — about to have its World Premiere at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in early 2027 — not as a disruptor but as a fan. Someone who understands that the form has been doing extraordinary things far longer than he's been around. What draws him isn't changing musical theater; it's finding new ways in that feel native to who he is, while getting to work inside a form that still does things emotionally to an audience that nothing else can.

All of this led, inevitably, to Parallax Immersive, the company that Eric co-founded which takes the question of scale versus intimacy and makes it physical: stories you walk through, environments that require your presence to exist, narrative where the distance between audience and participant doesn't just shrink — it disappears. You're not just choosing the structure and characters anymore; you are the structure and characters.

There's a restlessness that runs through his work, and to hear him tell it, that won't be ending any time soon. "Technology evolves. Formats multiply. Audiences grow more sophisticated and more willing to lean in. My interest is in staying ahead of all of that while holding onto the things that will never change: character, emotion, the feeling of being genuinely seen inside a story. Push the form as far as it will go, and that's still what's waiting at the center."