Got Your Back

Phoenix improv didn't happen by accident.

It was built in borrowed rooms. In coffee shops with extension cords running to makeshift stages. In Chinese restaurants where punk bands started setting up halfway through your show. In late-night Denny's conversations where two friends decided to stop waiting for permission.

"A scene that didn't wait for permission. People who showed up anyway. And thirty years of something that mattered, finally written down."

Got Your Back is the full story — from the earliest improv groups in Phoenix in the early 1990s through the founding of the Torch Theatre, the collapse, the rebuilding, and the thriving community that exists today across Second Beat, NCT, The Bridge, the Collaboratory, and SAVI Fest.

It is also a story about mistakes. About harm. About a community that fractured and found ways to keep going anyway.

And it is a love letter — to the people who built something in a desert city that wasn't supposed to have a scene like this. And to a son named Archie, who will understand it someday.