Interview by Paul Salfen, Text by Christine Thompson for AMFM Magazine
In a candlelit studio pulsing with bass and shouted affirmations, boutique fitness once promised transformation of body, mind, and soul. But behind the empowering playlists and $30+ classes lurked a powder keg of ambition, blurred boundaries, fat-shaming, racism, sexual misconduct, and cutthroat betrayals that turned three pioneering women’s vision into a multi-billion-dollar empire of sweat and scandal. Spin Wars, director Philip Byron’s propulsive new documentary premiering at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, rips the curtain back on how Marion Roaman and Ruth Zuckerman helped birth the indoor-cycling revolution—only to watch SoulCycle, Flywheel, and Peloton scale past them on waves of corporate drama and “toxic positivity.” In an exclusive, wide-ranging conversation with AMFM Magazine’s Paul Salfen, Byron—former SpringHill producer and onetime spin instructor—reveals why this story of getting “fucked over” in partnerships feels so painfully relatable, and why the film almost died five times before it finally hit the screen.
The numbers alone tell a wild story: what began with a handful of New York studios in the mid-2000s exploded into a cultural phenomenon that had riders setting phone alarms at midnight to book bikes and literally fighting strangers for their favorite spot in the room. “It was exactly 20 years since the first SoulCycle opened its doors on the Upper West Side,” Byron notes. “All three of these companies were founded there. The success… was by feeding into this kind of exclusive, higher-income woman of a certain age that lived in New York.” Theaters at Tribeca were packed with those same devotees—now older, wiser, and ready to laugh, gasp, and cringe at the nostalgia trip.
But Byron and his team (including producer Jillian A. Goldstein) weren’t interested in a glossy hagiography. They wanted the delicate, often muddy line “between rider and instructor and then also instructor and corporate.” As Byron tells Salfen, “having a job where you go and you wear a tank top and shorts in general is not normal for most people.” That inherent intimacy—combined with clients paying premium prices for an “experience”—created a volatile mix. “Some people… if a teacher comes up and squeezes their arms and says, ‘Look at you,’ others might be like, ‘Don’t touch my body.’” The exclusivity itself became “another added ingredient to the powder keg that was cycling world.”
The four-year journey from first interviews to Tribeca premiere gave the filmmakers rare perspective. “A lot of stuff was still going down in 2020 and 2021 in these businesses,” Byron explains. The extra “bake time” let the story breathe and capture the moment when COVID forced everyone to ask: What do I actually want to pay for? Many returned to the studios; many discovered they didn’t need to.
Byron’s own background made him the perfect guide. A nonfiction producer who spent nearly a decade at LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill company, he was also teaching indoor cycling three days a week. When a colleague floated a SoulCycle documentary, Byron’s immediate response was: “Do you know the story of Ruth Zuckerman?” That question became the film’s emotional core. Positioning Roaman and Zuckerman as the true “godmothers of spin,” Spin Wars shows how their foundational work was gradually eclipsed by bigger money, bigger egos, and darker cultural currents.
The access is exceptional. Insiders with scores to settle deliver the kind of candid, deliciously uncomfortable testimony that makes great documentaries sing. As one review put it: “Spin Wars is exactly what a great industry documentary should be: colorful, propulsive and fueled by subjects who have scores to settle and stories to tell. The access is exceptional, the revelations are shocking, and the film crackles with the kinetic energy of the world it is documenting.”
Salfen presses Byron on why something marketed as pure positivity curdled so dramatically. Byron’s answer is both simple and profound: the very nature of the boutique model—high touch, high price, high emotion—blurred every professional and personal line. Add a clientele that expected (and paid for) exclusivity, and the conditions for toxicity were baked in.
The conversation turns personal when Salfen asks about Byron’s own “Hail Mary” moment. Leaving a previous production company to run unscripted and docs at SpringHill, Byron admits he felt wildly underqualified. A friend’s advice changed everything: “Why are you trying? Why are you, like, writing yourself out of the job before you’ve even thrown yourself in the mix?” He got the role, ultimately produced more than 50 movies and series, and learned that imposter syndrome can be rocket fuel—“when you come into something where you’re not sure if you’re the right person, you work even harder.”
His mantra for surviving the brutal indie-film process? “Kindness and finding people who are all kind of marching to the same beat and all have the same goal, which is just making something great.” That philosophy kept Spin Wars alive through multiple near-deaths. “This film should have probably died four or five times over the years, but I just never wanted to let it go.”
What does Byron hope audiences take away? Partnerships—business, creative, romantic. “The thing that really always stuck out to me was just… getting fucked over, which I think is very relatable to anyone in work, in personal life and romance. Like it just—we’ve all done it, or had it done to us… And it’s a good just like lesson in partnership. And you know who you kind of lock arms with.”
By the end of the interview, even the host is intrigued. Salfen confesses he’s never taken a proper indoor-cycling class (“I just look in the rooms and I see all the people yelling—no, not real”). Byron grins: “Now, are you more intrigued?” Salfen laughs: “Yeah. I’m curious. I kind of want to do it. I’ll report back to you.” Byron’s parting shot is perfect: “Maybe it’s a better time to do it now.”
Spin Wars arrives at exactly the right cultural moment—when audiences are ravenous for the next great toxic-startup exposé and when the wellness industry itself is reckoning with what “mind, body, soul” actually costs. It’s funny, infuriating, nostalgic, and strangely cathartic. Whether you ever clipped into a bike or not, you’ll recognize the universal human drama: who you trust when the music’s blasting, the lights are low, and everyone’s pretending everything is fine.
