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Obsession is officially Focus Features’ highest grossing film. And Backrooms is A24’s. There have been a million pieces reporting or musing on Hollywood’s hunt to find the next wunderYouTubekind. It certainly helps to have a loyal internet fanbase to tap into when it comes time to roll out a feature. But given how much Obsession in particular has grown week over week, I’m skeptical that these directors’ online followings are truly powering these phenomenons. (That seems more the case with Iron Lung, which grossed a fraction of the Obsession and Backrooms box offices.)

Earlier this year, I investigated how cinematic sensations happen, publishing a series of Q&As plus a longer article for Esquire (salacious headlines not mine). It was both an illuminating and frustrating reporting process. Lots of people had smart insights but ultimately it seemed like everyone was mostly grasping at straws. It was easy to draw through lines connecting different successes. But plenty of failures seemed to follow similar playbooks, and yet just never took off.

In that way, I’d think more companies would employ some version of a spray-and-pray strategy, producing a bunch of bold, low budget efforts, seeing what produces the most visceral audience reactions, and then sinking lots of marketing into a few of those films. Easier said than done, sure. And you’d probably need more capital than most of these companies have, yeah. But on the flip side, it seems like so many companies are just treading water. Big company consolidation is obviously a disaster for the business. But I do wonder if there would be benefits to some of the smaller companies joining forces. What do you think?

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Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Apply for Film Independent Fast Track by EOD today.

• Apply for SFFilm documentary film fund by tmrw.

• Sundance documentary fund deadline is also tmrw.

• NYC/Upstate folk horror feature Blood Shine finishes a long festival run this month at Chattanooga Film Festival on June 21st. Directed by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, this twisted love story releases later this year. The film stars Brenden Sexton III (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Session 9), David Call (Insidious: The Red Door), Larry Fessenden (Killers of the Flower Moon), Toby Poser (Hellbender) and Bennett herself (Shelby Oaks).

• On June 13, at 7:00 PM, join DarkRoom at the Film-Makers’ Coop for rarely screened 16mm experimental films. The program will end with a live score by Hollywood Extras. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased here.

• Slamdance screenplay competition deadline is June 22.

• Ten states are considering blocking the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. Keep encouraging them!

• So far at Tribeca, I’ve seen Human Theories and She Keeps Me Young. What’s the best thing you’ve seen at the festival so far apart from those films? Email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with recs.

• Week one of film friends pick-up soccer in the park was a blast. Sign up here to play this week and in future weeks.

• If you live in a city outside of NY/LA, please fill out this survey! Especially if you live in (or have lived in) MIAMI!!!

• The Knicks are a movie! New York hasn’t felt like this since Biden’s election.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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STRIKE THE CAMERA

Is the Stage the Best Place to Develop a Feature?

When Allie Avital adapted her unproduced feature as a play, the benefits went beyond her expectations.

by Allie Avital

Adapting my upcoming feature film The Naked Woman into a stage play has felt a little like discovering a cheat code. When I first decided to do it, I thought of the play primarily as a way to introduce audiences to the world of the film. What I didn’t expect was how much it would teach me about the film itself. Days before opening night, I already feel like I’ve cracked open the world of the film and lived inside it.

A bit about the show itself: The Naked Woman unfolds over a winter holiday in an Upstate New York country house, where a family of Soviet immigrants gathers to celebrate Misha, a man who has built a life on achievement, intelligence, and survival, until a single moment shatters the illusion. As the incident seeps into the house, the lively family gathering turns into a Chekhovian moral reckoning. It was inspired by a similar incident that occurred in my family, which sparked a decade-long writing process and brought us to this moment.

The stage is great for distilling a piece to its essence. Anything redundant, false, or extraneous quickly gets exposed. Something either breathes or it doesn’t. The merciless dark void of theatre demands truth and meaning, with no close-up shot or elaborate camera move to seduce you away from the heart of the story.

Growing up with a set designer father, I spent much of my childhood in theaters around New York City. On the surface, coming back to theatre after fifteen years in film comes with a learning curve. The language of aspect ratios, apple boxes, and bro-y film slang has given way to the endless mystery of stage left versus stage right, upstage versus downstage, and constantly reminding myself not to say “action” when we begin a run-through, or worse, “cut.” But as far as I’m concerned, the assignment is the same: create a compelling, cohesive structure of actions and feelings, and communicate them to an audience.

A few weeks ago in play rehearsals, an actor looked up from a scene and said, “I don’t feel it.” My cowriter, Alia Azamat Ashkenazi, and I stared at the page for a moment, cut a few lines, and suddenly the scene worked. That has happened over and over again. Entire scenes that survived draft after draft have collapsed within seconds once they’re on their feet. Tiny moments we barely noticed while writing have suddenly become the center of the story. A gesture. A glance. A hesitation before a line. Things that seemed insignificant on the page have revealed themselves to be essential. Since rehearsals began, we’ve revised both scripts in tandem, moving back and forth between screenplay and stage script.

To have actors not just reading our lines (as in a table read) but embodying them fully has been like a built-in bullshit-ometer. The immediacy of theater doesn’t allow for spackling. If a song cue fails, the audience sits in silence. If a moment isn’t landing, everyone in the room knows it. There’s beauty and terror in that.

In theater, rehearsal is the medium — the living raw material, not merely a path toward a finished product. It’s a completely different philosophy: the process is god.

That mindset will be something I carry with me into the film, when we make it, no matter how much rehearsal we get. The exploratory process in film is of course a huge luxury, but what I’ve learned is that all the physical and emotional exercises reap enormous rewards. Having our characters embody aspects of their natures (“sensitive,” “passionate,” “mischievous,” “impulsive,” “ruthless”), instructing them to stare into one another’s eyes for many uncomfortable minutes, having them act out their back story (“how you would play as 5 year olds”and then “the moment in high school you first first slept together”) all add depth, dimension, and subtle nuance to the scenes. Even if I’m only able to spend half an hour on these sorts of exercises during film prep, it will be an invaluable tool in my repertoire.

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The blocking, which is of course more exaggerated and designed for the scale and perspective of a stage, is similarly helping create shapes for the film. Just today in rehearsal, seeing how our mother character held her daughter sent chills down my spine. I know I’ll recreate that physicality eventually on camera, and I know it will work.

Everyone who has made a film knows that when you’re locked in, when you’re in the world of the story, the themes of your film start showing up all around you: on set, in your personal life, amongst the actors and crew. In theatre, this has felt even more acute. In our particular story, the themes of death, blind devotion, and cross-cultural divides have played out amongst all of us in tangible ways, day to day. The feelings of shame, abandonment, and rage have surfaced amongst cast and crew. Lines of dialogue have been uttered, almost verbatim, completely unconsciously between us.

As a director, I find myself confronting many of the same questions as the characters. My anxieties about what kind of actress should play the lead (who is vaguely based on me), my shame around not spending enough time with my toddler while I’m in full-day rehearsals, even my nervousness about my father seeing a play loosely inspired by my family, all seem to echo emotional currents already present in the script. In a way, I’m getting a preview of this disorienting, all-consuming, existential rupture that all real artmaking seems to bring up in us all.

By the time we shoot the film, it won’t feel like I’m entering the world of the story. I’ll already have been living there. I can see what works, what parts make people laugh, and what dialogue still needs refinement. Obviously, not every film can — or should — be adapted first into a play. As a pre-production exercise, it’s certainly inefficient. But if you want to become a better film director — and if you want to learn new things about the piece and directing — I’d highly recommend it.

Director and writer Allie Avital is a prolific New York City filmmaker who has collaborated with global icons ranging from Lionel Messi and Dolly Parton to Olivia Rodrigo, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Caroline Polachek. A nine-time Vimeo Staff Pick alumnus, Avital’s work has screened at Sundance, SXSW, and BAM. She previously directed the second unit on the MGM/Amazon film Holland starring Nicole Kidman, and co-wrote the 2026 ballet thriller Prima starring Faye Dunaway and Mira Sorvino. Her short film The Naked Woman won the Audience Award on Short of the Week, and the feature iteration is in early preproduction.

The Naked Woman runs from June 3-14th at Theatre 154 in the West Village. Tickets here.

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There should be a German word for the mix of excitement, envy, and cynicism produced when a couple of wildly young first-time feature directors come out of the gates with absolute cultural sensations. Are you sick of hearing about Obsession and Backrooms? Well, lucky for you, I don’t have much to add to the discourse, except that I wonder if this sort of thing would be possible in a genre other than horror. And I wish someone (ie, a studio) would try it! These sorts of successes are obviously rare and difficult to engineer. But what they prove to me is that A) audiences are hungry for new voices, and B) that small bets can pay off big with the right amount of marketing and distribution support.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• A Bunch of Savages, a Filipino-led filmmaking initiative, is hosting a screening on Sat, 6/6 from 4-8 PM at Planet X Studios in Brooklyn. They’ll be screening American Baby, a new short doc by Raymond Knudsen, and then there will be an after-party. RSVP here.

• Tribeca Film Festival begins this week (June 3 - 14). Among the films screening is friend of the newsletter Jess Zeidman’s Human Theories. Tickets here.

• Strawberry Mansion and Sylvio co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney recently started a substack documenting their present and past creative process. Check it out here.

• This Friday, Rooftop Films will be hosting its annual Cemetery Shorts block at Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn. Tickets here.

• Apply for the Locarno Residency by June 5.

• If you live in a city outside of NY/LA, please fill out this survey!

• I took the paywall off of Daisy Zhou (Bunnylovr) and Maya Bankovic’s (Blue Heron) excellent conversation about cinematography. Read it here!

• All three Reveries films are now streaming on Mubi. Nice.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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DIRECTORS ON DIRECTORS

Oscar Boyson and Alice Maio Mackay on Connecting with Fans

The directors of Our Hero, Balthazar and Serpent’s Skin have taken two very different paths, but are asking some of the same questions.

Oscar Boyson and Alice Maio Mackay met late last year at the Brisbane Film Festival, where Boyson was showing his first directorial feature, Our Hero, Balthazar, and Maio Mackay was showing with her sixth, Serpent’s Skin. Their paths there could hardly have been more different. Boyson, who is in his early 40s, began his career producing celebrated indies like Frances Ha, Good Time, and Funny Pages. He’d long had aspirations of directing, but it took forsaking industry gatekeepers to finally get one of his own projects off the ground. Maio Mackay, meanwhile, is 21, and has been cranking out ultra-DIY microbudget projects in her native Australia since she was 16.

The two directors’ latest projects are set on opposite ends of the world, operate in different genres, and take on different themes. But what they do share is an interest in young people traveling far from home and contending with evil forces — gun culture and the internet in Balthazar, and supernatural demonic tattoos in Serpent’s Skin. This week, Boyson and Maio Mackay reunite to discuss their films and how they’re thinking about forming lasting bonds with audiences.

Nothing Bogus: To kick you guys off, I’d love to know why you made these specific projects at the moment you made them.

Oscar Boyson: I really wanted to make my first movie. And I had some failures I took very personally in trying to make other movies. I think because I was so determined to not fail on this film, that may have made it more a movie of the moment. Ricky Camilleri and I started writing in the wake of Uvalde. And especially at that moment there was this collective feeling of, “Oh wow, nothing is going to change.” We had Sandy Hook, we had the Parkland kids who were paraded around the country and started the most successful protest movement in American history, and then nothing changed. The pandemic happened and Uvalde happened, and again it’s like, “Wow, we’re all just not going to talk about this and nothing is going to change.” The movie grew out of what Eleanor (Pippa Knowles’s character) calls the “annihilation mentality” that develops among kids growing up through this.

Alice Maio Mackay: I’ve made a few films now, and coming at it from such a small scale, it’s still quite hard to make a movie. Every time I make something I put every bit of myself into it. And I’m not really listening to a lot of outside voices, especially when it comes to writing. There’s not a lot of big producer interventional things. It’s mainly what my co-writer and I are feeling in that moment. I think I just got to a point where I wanted to make something that I hadn’t necessarily seen done with a trans leading actress, which is central to a lot of my work. I grew up with the supernatural romance boom, with things like Twilight and Beautiful Creatures. And I always found solace and escape in those worlds, whether it be literature or film and television. With the political state of the world and what was going on in the media concerning trans women and how they’re portrayed — especially trans violence within intimate relationships — I wanted to make a romantic horror film with trans representation where the love was safe and earnest. And I wanted to do it on my own terms with no censorship or pandering to any kind of audience.

OB: When I talk about those other projects that I wasn’t able to get made, looking back at them I was trying to get the industry to validate my idea. I was really writing for them and then feeling disappointed that no one wanted to do it. Which is the worst, because you are pandering, and you know you’re pandering, and then they don’t want it. The difference with Our Hero, Balthazar was this time I knew it was good, I knew it was a movie I wanted to see. And when nobody in the industry wants it, that makes me feel like I have to do it. That means it’s going to hit different than everything else. That was a big step for me confidence-wise — to own it, and then it became more my thing. Did you end up feeling like Serpent’s Skin was your most personal work to date?

AMM: It’s hard to say. Because I started making films when I was very young — my first feature was when I was 16 — all of them have elements of my life. Not necessarily in an autobiographical way. But in terms of how I feel about a certain thing. I guess a lot of my earlier work is very political — not to say this film isn’t political — but I wasn’t really setting out to make a statement. It was more so just people living and doing things, and I guess that makes it inherently political in some people’s eyes. It is personal, but on some level when you’re making independent films, they’re all personal because you have to put your whole soul into getting them made.

OB: And you don’t necessarily have the push and pull of art and commerce where whoever’s paying for it is also expecting to mold it into their idea of what a movie should or shouldn’t be.

AMM: This has been my biggest theatrically released film to date, and it’s also the rawest, most vulnerable and explicit. Not to say that’s why it’s so successful. But I didn’t hold back and I included elements I hadn’t necessarily seen in this genre.

OB: There’s this mantra that if you go as personal and specific as possible, it’ll ring true in a universal way. I think that is true. But with independent films, the relationship with the audience has changed. And sometimes auteur films or indie films are asking so much of the audience. And a lot of times that audience is a younger audience that couldn’t go to movie theaters during those formative years, so it might be asking a lot of them and their attention span to have them sit through something that may be the filmmaker’s most personal film.

AMM: For my earlier films, I crowdfunded. So while I didn’t think there would be a huge commercial audience, I was connected to some people who wanted to see that work that I was doing and the way I was making it come to fruition. And especially having Shudder come on from my first feature, I knew there was an audience. My co-writer and I, we write with the microbudget in mind but we don’t want to sacrifice anything either. It helped with Serpent’s Skin, that we knew aesthetically we wanted it to feel like you were watching a ‘90s two-parter episode. So these visual effects may seem crazy if you’re trying to get them at a Marvel level, but we don’t have to sacrifice it when this is the aesthetic intention of what we’re trying to achieve.

More than anything, I’m inspired a lot by theatre. To me, that’s one of the most sacred and vulnerable forms of art. So a lot of my work is people hanging out or talking. And within that, I’m trying to make that the most interesting thing possible. And then working with Vera Drew, who edited my last films, she’s able to reshape the footage through my inspirations and my vision, because she knows me so well.

OB: If you can write a scene of two people in a room talking that isn’t boring, you’re all set. So many people are trying to do anything but that because they’re afraid of that. But all you need for that is some good actors and a good script. And usually, compromising gives way to something that’s better. There’s a lot of driving in Balthazar. And I remember pitching financiers that we’d shoot in Texas, and because it’s less regulated down there we’d be able to do process trailer work. And we couldn’t. We realized it wouldn’t be affordable. So instead, you do the driving shots with every conceivable angle without a process trailer. And I love the driving shots in the movie. It feels much more real and much closer to what it’s like to drive around Texas with these two boys.

AMM: I know we’ve both done different versions of tours, and it’s been interesting and beautiful to see more of the reactions in person and what people project from their own lives and experiences onto the film. In different cities and countries, it’s interesting how people will interpret your art and put deeper meanings on elements that you didn’t necessarily think were as personal or meaningful to you. Has this process impacted how you view things in your movie or how you would approach your next one?

OB: Yeah. That’s been the best part of traveling around with the movie — seeing that it has real fans. People want to buy shirts, they want to come back multiple times to see the movie, they’ve started making fan art and Instagram accounts. All that stuff makes me so happy. Having had a foot in the industry, it was hard to not make my film the way I’d made other people’s films. So to be face to face with fans was a reminder that the people who are going to make your movie into something bigger are your fans. They’re not the production companies or the studios or the gatekeepers. Are you thinking about your fans as you conceive your next project?

AMM: Yes and no. I’ve never really thought about the reaction when writing my next project. I’ve made films I genuinely thought would not resonate with anyone — especially one of my early films, T-Blockers — which have then been the most successful to date. Especially because I’m doing things on such a small scale, I’m just going in trusting my gut and what I want to see. What about you?

OB: Ricky and I have a few different projects we’re excited about and I’ve had a lot of enthusiasm from people in the industry who have seen Balthazar and are curious what I’m doing next. And I do feel like the energy of a small number of hardcore fans of a movie you’ve made is more exciting for me to tap into than a film financier that wants to cut a check. That’s been a revelation of the process. You can see this model emerging. It’s already there with podcasters and YouTubers. I’m excited about movies getting to a place where it’s more like those models and you have less and less distance between the filmmaker and the fans.

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Good news! As it turns out, not that many re…

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Look, I know there are a lot of substantive problems in the world and I don’t want to take any time, energy, or political power away from addressing them… BUTTTTT it’s way past time someone said it: The popcorn is too damn expensive. A small bag for $10? A large for $13!?! This isn’t what Nicole Kidman meant when she said “Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” If we’re all going to be out here beating the drum for the communal cinematic experience, the theaters have to meet us halfway. Price gauging is for airlines, not independent rep houses. $6. I will accept $6 as the price of a small bag of popcorn. [BANGS GAVEL]. Thank you for hearing me out, I hope this message finds the right people…

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• On May 15, IFC will premiere a 55th anniversary 4K restoration of Elaine May’s wonderful offbeat romantic comedy, A New Leaf.

• On May 19 at 8:30 pm, Eddy Frumkin and and William George-Louis’ third screening of All-Starrs at Starr Bar in Bushwick. They’ll be screening films from Kristian Mecado Figueroa (Peacock’s If You Were the Last), Jay Giampietro, Olivia Erlanger with Callie Hernandez (Invention), and 2026 Tribeca Filmmakers Doron Max Hagay (She Keeps Me Young, Liza Mandelup (Grandmasters), and Jess Zeidman and Camille Casmier (Human Theories)

  Tickets are $10.

• A Bunch of Savages, a Filipino-led filmmaking initiative, is seeking volunteers to work a screening on Sat, 6/6 from 3-8 PM at Planet X Studios in Brooklyn. They’ll be screening American Baby, a new short doc by Raymond Knudsen, along with hosting an after-party. Any capacity is helpful, even a few hours. If interested, please email: info@abunchofsavages.com.

• Apply for the Locarno residency by June 5.

• Cannes begins Tuesday and runs through May 23. My three most anticipated films in the main competition are 1. Paper Tiger, from James Gray, 2. Fjord, from Cristian Mungiu, and 3. Hope, from Na Hong-jin. Outside of the main competition, there’s A LOT out of France, but also new work from American indie scenesters Jane Schoenbrun (and edited by Graham Mason) and Jordan Firstman (co-produced by Pete McClellan).

• A big study from Eventive found that festival “attendance rebounded from the pandemic and stabilized at a higher baseline. Average attendance per festival is up roughly 34 percent since 2021, while revenue per ticket reached its highest level on record.” Indiewire EIC Dana Harris-Bridson analyzes the disconnect between festival popularity and sales, arguing that something’s gotta give if festivals want to continue to attract filmmakers.

• Thanks to everyone who came out to the 3:00 PM screening of The Python Hunt on Sunday afternoon. I had fun moderating the Q&A with director Xander Robin. Read our conversation in last week’s newsletter if you missed it. And if you’re in Texas next week, catch Xander at the Dallas Angelica.

• brought to Substack last week.

• And Film Comment has a nice new website and a great new article from Blair McClendon.

• Please give some love to your favorite actor the world doesn’t know about yet.

• What are your favorite filmmaking tools? As a documentarian, recommends ReMarkable, Canva, and Trello.

• My friend Pete McClellan invented a fantasy casting game — like fantasy football but for actors. Points are awarded for box office and awards. Fifteen people met up to do an auction draft yesterday, and the most money ($75 out of a $100 budget) was shelled out for Zendaya, followed by Robert Pattinson ($70) and Sandra Huller ($58). I’ll keep you updated on how this goes.

• Purchase tickets for Screen Slate’s benefit gala June 3, featuring an all-star lineup of hosts and guests.

• For those wanting to play pick-up soccer this June, sign up here!

• Right on!

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

How Frank Mosley Came to Know Everyone and Be in Everything

On mentorship, collaboration, and balancing art with a day job.

by Julian Sol Jordan

As a character actor, there’s no role that’s too strange or different for Frank Mosley. He’s portrayed a 1930s coal miner, an anthropomorphized television, a cannabis farmer, an Appalachian farmhand, and a time-traveling outlaw, just to name a few. And similarly, as a writer-director, he’s drawn to abstract worlds that are minimalist and experimental — psychological chamber pieces that explore identity and memory. But beyond being a risk-taking artist, Frank Mosley is a kind person and generous collaborator. Anyone who knows him will say the same, which sometimes feels like… everyone! He is the current indie scene’s Kevin Bacon: everyone is just a few degrees of connection away from him.

Last year, I edited a feature called, El Tonto Por Cristo, in which Frank played an ex-circus clown turned monk. And I witnessed first-hand how thoughtful and humble he is, while also being fierce and risk-taking. The performance was haunting, and the experience was inspiring. Since then, Frank has grown to be a great friend and mentor. While completing my solo essay film in college, an experimental doc I made about being in one’s early twenties, Frank helped guide me through the process, sending long, voice memos that were always highly insightful.

And yet, somehow I still had more questions for him! I was curious about some of his recent projects like Albert Birney’s Obex and Jessica Barr’s upcoming The Plan; what excites him most about the current and ever-evolving world of independent film; and how we as artists can support each other on “this crazy ship.”

Julian Sol Jordan: I’ve been a big fan of the films you’ve been working on recently, and I wanted to know, what makes you say “yes” to a specific project?

Frank Mosley: Lots of things, but first and foremost: Is it a good script and/or a director whose vision or body of work I admire? Other considerations include: Are there other actors in it I get to work with who I’ve always wanted to do that with? Will it require learning a trade or craft that I’ve always been interested in anyway? Does it mean traveling somewhere I’ve always wanted to go, or push me outside my comfort zone in a way that would be interesting?

I always look for something new or fresh that pushes me to a new place internally or externally — even if it feels scary. In fact, if it’s really scary, it probably means I should do it, as long as it’s safe on a logistical level.

The work can feel wonderfully dangerous, but the parameters for making the film should feel safe. I think the safer the environment, the more you’re able to incite an internal chaos.

JSJ: How do you see the independent film landscape evolving right now? What excites you? And how do you think it’s changed since you started out?

FM: In some ways, it feels the same. I do think true “indie” films aren’t recognized at festivals as much anymore. Like, the truly low budget work of Sundance of 1992 is not the fare that people would show now. To seek out that type of work now, you have to look at the steady regional film festivals like FilmFort, New/Next, Slamdance, and others that program films that aren’t already pre-sold or ones that don’t have recognizable faces in them.

But we have more options to shoot things and show things. There are so many platforms for streaming. I feel sorry for burgeoning filmmakers because you could easily get lost amidst it all. But it’s also an exciting time because of all these options. I love working with younger filmmakers who have such an energy and verve in their work. It’s inspiring.

I’ve been lucky to work with and become great friends with some immensely talented filmmakers — people like Fernando Andres on Rent Free and Jessica Barr on The Plan — who are so tenacious and so daring. It makes me want to keep exploring and kicking in my own way. There’s always electricity in the air; some people just know how to bottle it. And some of us, as we age, can simply forget.

JSJ: What has your thinking been throughout your life and creative career in terms of not just chasing your passions and building something creatively fulfilling but healthily sustaining it over the years?

FM: You gotta know your priorities, but those change over time, too. I’m now 42, and I am finally wanting to have a family. And because of that, I am thinking of being more picky about projects that would take me away from that. Do I really want to go out of state for three days? Does the project mean that much to me? When I was younger, I was hungry to do any and everything to build a resume, garner experiences, and to push myself. So right now, the idea of a more stable job is enticing, and yet that doesn’t mean the art has to go away. Time is just allocated in a different way.

My dad always pushed me to follow my dreams, but to always be able to take care of myself and survive. He said, “Get a degree in something that you can always fall back on if/when you need it.” I have an English literature degree because of that. I love English literature, I love teaching. It’s not a subject I can only tolerate, it’s something I’m in love with.

I think you have to listen to your needs and self-evaluate every so often in your career: Am I still not losing sight of my other priorities? Of my own health? There’s no right way to do anything. Your path, and which moments in time you face these questions, will be different from mine. We’re all following the tunes on our own radio, so the road is different for everybody.

JSJ: Me and many of my younger creative friends have started to come face-to-face with different crossroads in our journey. Was there ever a moment you seriously questioned your path as a filmmaker and actor? And what helped you keep walking?

FM: Yes, there have been moments that I questioned it as a professional career. But I always knew I would make films and act until I’m old and dead. It helps when you have a supportive spouse or partner in the thick of it — one who has your back and you have theirs. It’s good for accountability too.

There was a moment in my twenties when I imagined forgoing all film and doing a nine-to-five job in my hometown and I got physically ill. That’s how I knew I would never give it up. But what I’ve gone through — and am going through now — is questioning just how much I can do it. Should it be more of a hobby for now instead of my profession? Remember, it can always swing back the other direction too. Never say never.

Everybody should listen to their gut in the moment. I just think they should always keep the door open. Never shut it. I find it so courageous and beautiful when people in their fifties and sixties start acting after wanting to for so long.

JSJ: What gives you creative energy and inspiration right now, for yourself and for the work?

FM: I look for characters I’ve always wanted to play, or themes I’ve always wanted to explore. My wife and frequent creative partner, Joslyn Jensen, is so inspiring. She is a disciplined writer, and it’s amazing that we can bounce ideas off each other all the time.

I am driven, also, by how I feel politically. The feelings I have as a friend, husband, teacher, artist, as a son. Those things can spool out into characters and interests that you want to see on film or on stage. My biggest hurdle is learning to let go of certain projects that I’ve always wanted to do but haven’t. Realizing that maybe they weren’t meant to be made. They were meant to inspire me at this next step, after having not made it. The negation of it spurs creation of something else in its stead. I’m always learning to let things go and to listen to the new thing that’s exciting to me rather than clinging to an idea because it’s been sitting around for so long.

JSJ: You are such a strong advocate and supporter for other actors and filmmakers. It’s inspiring. Everyone seems to know who you are! I’ve always wondered what motivates you to offer this support. And how can others adopt this practice?

FM: I guess when you’ve been floating around long enough, people start to remember you. This is an industry of who you know. I mean, the work should speak for itself, but it doesn’t always. It’s tricky. I’ve had people cold-write me before and say: “Can you hook me up with this festival?” or “Can you give me some advice?” or “Can you read my script and give me feedback?” I used to write everybody back because I admire their directness. I simply have that teacher in me (I’ve been a substitute public school teacher since 2018 and have mentored/advised young filmmakers at USC, Brooklyn College, Northwestern, etc.). I also know what it feels like to need help. I like to pass the ladder back down — though, I prefer ladder across, actually.

But that kind of mentorship takes time and energy, too. For that reason, I started Script Eater with Joslyn, a company to provide screenplay feedback. I also started paid mentoring through Sidetime. If enough people are writing you with these questions, it’s because there’s a need. And in order to not stretch yourself thin and to value your time and experience, it can feel right to transition a lot of this into a professional sphere instead. But I do think kindness and transparency is key in this business. Some people don’t want to share stories or advice because of some competitive bullshit — and fuck that shit. We’re all on this crazy ship together. We gotta hang on tight and hold on to each other. The truth is, nobody’s knocking on your door. You gotta get after it. Go to the festival, go to the micro cinema, go to the Vimeo Staff Pick screening, go to the play. My career has been built on relationships and not being afraid to reach out to people.

This is a business of transactions, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes you can do it because you simply believe in someone. Just remember, it doesn’t always circle back.

JSJ: What are you working on now? Where do you want to go creatively next?

FM: I’m venturing back into using my Hi-8 camera that I made movies on growing up! I have a few no budget short ideas I want to do. Joslyn is writing a script that she will star in with our friend Anthony Oberbeck, which I’ll direct, and hopefully that’ll be later this year. I’m also slated to appear in a feature or two by some friends over this summer. Otherwise I am full steam ahead with Required Reading, and I am waiting for some of last year’s projects to finally come out! This Sundance feature by my buddy Albert Birney, Obex, is finally out on VOD, and Jess’s film, The Plan, is playing the fest circuit now.

I also just had my first L.A. retrospective of my directing work, and it was surreal. It put some things into perspective and showed me certain patterns. And it also just got me itching to make something new. I’m going to inch toward making a new feature very soon, but seeing those films gave me the push to set pen to paper again. First step, after all!

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It’s easy to sneer at the Hollywood’s craven tendency to endlessly try to replicate a hit. But if you want to get something made, finding a smart spin on a hot subject is a pretty good way to do it. Today’s newsletter features a long conversation with The Python Hunt director Xander Robin and editor Max Allman. We talked extensively about their excellent new documentary and their approach to nonfiction generally. But I was also fascinated that the film was part of a wave of ambitious nonfiction projects that leveraged the post-Tiger King doc boom to tell stories that scrutinize contemporary America in deeper ways than everyone’s favorite lockdown guilty pleasure. It’s possible to find a hit and not recycle or replicate it, but rather locate the seed of its appeal and advance or subvert it with a story you actually, genuinely want to tell.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• On Saturday, I had a great time at the Lower East Side Film Festival seeing Ethan Fuirst’s feature debut, Can’t Go Over It.

• The Lone Screen, a new one-night-only online film premiere experience, launches on May 7 at 9:30 PM with a screening of Something Casual from director Brandon Buczek. The service features discussion forums, director Q&As, and merch, and screenings happen at one time, with no pausing or rewinding. To buy tickets and learn more, go here.

• In Indiewire, Darren Smith has a theory for attracting a sufficiently big audience for your little film.

  • And Sarah Shachat has some paths to funding.

• What does a documentary director actually do? has some thoughts.

• has a great look at look books in the most recent issue of his newsletter.

• Gotham Week Project Market extended its submission deadline.

• And the Sundance 2027 Development Track application is open through May 12.

• Sophia Coppola is offering $20K for a short film plus mentorship to one lucky filmmaker.

• This Wednesday, Pete Ohs will be at BAM doing a Nia Dacosta-moderated Q&A following a screening of Erupjca.

• Do you live in New York and like to play soccer? Email nothingbogus1@gmail.com if you’d like to play pick-up games as the nights get warmer.

• Please give some love to your favorite actor the world doesn’t know about yet.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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REPTILE KING

The Python Hunt Was Xander Robin’s Chinatown

Director Xander Robin and editor Max Allman on the search for meaning and answers in the Everglades.

In the summer of 2022, as Xander Robin was struggling to get funding for a narrative feature he’d written about illegal reptile trading, his friend Lance Oppenheim suggested he make a different sort of reptile movie: a documentary, in the vein of Hands on on a Hard Body, about Florida’s Python Hunt Challenge. The 10-day challenge, in which participants flock to the Everglades to catch and kill as many Burmese pythons as they can, began in 2013 as a way to address the region’s growing issues with the invasive species. Robin wondered about the competition’s effectiveness and the snake’s culpability in the destruction of the Everglades — but also, he was keen to capture the area’s sounds and textures and the people who would enter the event.

The timing for such a film couldn’t have been better. The success of a certain other wild animal documentary was still fresh in investors’ minds. And as a Florida native whose previous work had mostly dealt with animals and nature, he was an obvious fit for the project. He put together a small team and headed to the Everglades to shoot a self-financed sizzle that the team could bring to market. Throughout the process, he was in constant communication with Max Allman, his friend and former FSU roommate, who would edit and co-produce the film. At the time, Allman was on set of Oppenheim’s Ren Faire, which he also edited. Allman is quickly becoming one of the most sought-out creatives in nonfiction — in addition to Ren Faire and The Python Hunt, he has worked on Neighbors, Soul Patrol, and Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy — and he recently served as an additional editor on Marty Supreme. I was eager to chat with both of them about the process of making The Python Hunt, the film’s depiction of Florida, and why Robin is so drawn to reptiles.

Tell me about how you guys got funding and got this project off the ground.

Max Allman: The first indie feature I cut was a hybridized documentary, and the financing process was like 18 months long. We basically got 80% of our financing after we got into a major film festival. It just always felt impossible to get people to give you money. And doing this, we went through the financing process right after Ren Faire got properly sold. Xander and I worked on the sizzle together, right after Lance Oppenheim and I had done the sizzle for Ren Faire, and it was the first time I had seen a sustainable model. It was at a time when people were lining up with nonfiction to give you money in hopes you might be the next Tiger King.

What do you mean by sustainable?

MA: Well, sustainable is certainly a relative term. But Lance had this idea that David Herbert had found, and basically went to a production company and convinced them to give them a little bit of money to make a sizzle, which tends to be about five or six minutes and include glimpses of full scenes to give people a sense of the movie. And then they went down to Texas, shot that sizzle, we cut it, and within a month they were bringing it out to the market and pitching it. Then Lance brought this Python Hunt idea to Xander, they made a sizzle together, Xander and I cut it, and they were pitching it within a month.

This is something that’s well known knowledge for every production company in the world: You find an interesting idea, maybe you shoot it for a couple days, you sense the promise of it, you cut it into a slick thing, and you take it out to the market, and hopefully someone with money comes on board. If you’re able to find this intersection of something that’s a very fun world, that feels relevant to where we’re at right now, that has amazing characters, and you can shoot it in a vibrant way, there was a moment when there was a real appetite from the buyer side. It’s been easier to finance narrative than nonfiction for like 90% of filmmaking history, and then there was this one weird little sliver from like 2019 to 2023 where it actually flipped.

Xander Robin: That’s what I was responding to. Sometimes when I was writing my scripted film I was like, Man, in some ways the documentary aspect is worth leaning into because obviously Tiger King was very successful, but mostly because when you involve animals it becomes really chaotic and you need all these different permits. Directing animals, there’s a sleight-of-hand and I was excited to try. And I was excited to film with real reptile enthusiasts after being in research mode for so long. With Ren Faire, I think they tested the limits on what an audience is willing to accept as real. With this, we weren’t trying to make anything seem fake. The subjects we were working with, they were like, “What kind of documentary is this? This isn’t like a documentary I’ve seen.”

MA: To me, the overlap is the relationship you build with the subjects. And the attitude becomes, How do you collaborate with the subjects to express their felt reality in cinematic terms? This was much more of a tone poem that is about a predator and prey, and maybe a misunderstood predator and misunderstood prey. So we were a little more hands off. But every documentary employs some degree of manipulation.

XR: Once you turn the camera on, people are performing for you. So directing becomes, how do you get the person who’s performing for you to stop performing and just be themselves?

And how do you get people to stop performing for you and be themselves?

MA: Weirdly, that does come down to directing. A lot of people become less self-conscious when they feel directed and when they have someone giving them the confidence to get back to that organic quality.

So what did that look like for you, Xander?

XR: It’s different with different people. But sometimes someone is so honest and pure the first time you film with them, and then as you go on it starts to feel like they’re acting or maybe they get self-conscious or maybe someone gets in their ear. And then it’s almost like on a narrative film when an actor is having a performance issue. You stop filming, hang out with them, have lunch, talk about things, and then be honest about what you want and try to figure out a way for them to be honest with you. And then in the edit it’s up to us to try and find the truth and remove the artifice. Audiences can tell when something is false. When we would do test screenings, we’d ask people watching it, “What don’t you buy?” And it goes beyond aesthetics and how something is framed. It’s a performance thing.

MA: I was finishing Ren when Xander was shooting this. And we would talk basically every night for the ten days of the competition. And then with our co-editor Byron Leon, we were continuing to build out some ideas so we could get ahead of future shoots if we needed to supplement narratively. In a post-Tiger King world, subjects, especially in regional places that have a history of being depicted in a way that’s not always fair or a little reductive, which I think Florida is certainly a victim of—

XR: People were nervous about that. A lot of animal people really don’t like Tiger King. People would want to know what the title was going to be, thinking it would be something more salacious.

MA: But Xander, as a person from South Florida, who’s a part of the community — and weirdly as a narrative filmmaker — had more apprehension to ask a subject to do something that did not feel natural to them at all. He was always forthcoming about the intentions of how he was depicting them.

XR: Going from a scripted film to documentary, you’re like, Why would I ask someone to act in this way? Let’s lean into the things that make this medium beautiful. But I was also interested in making it heightened and expressive. A lot of that came from the animal shots. And it’s a naturally cinematic structure to the competition.

MA: There’s this idea that subjectivity is not truth. But I find subjectivity to be far more truthful than objectivity most of the time. Nobody really has a shared idea of what is real or not anymore. And I love a lot of documentaries that put the camera down and allow everything to wash over you almost on an ethnographic level. But if you’re on hour eight of an overnight drive of not having found any snakes on the sixth night in a row, if you just film it how it is and have a character be like, “I’m pretty tired right now,” to me that doesn’t aspire to the immediacy of what that feels like. And that’s the most exciting thing nonfiction filmmaking can do — use the tools of cinema to try to replicate how big something feels inside of us as it’s happening rather than just observe it through some cold POV.

Was there a primary question you had going into this that you wanted to answer for yourself?

XR: The year before we filmed most of this movie, the first several nights I went out and I didn’t see a single python. I was wondering if this was all overblown or if the pythons were really out there in the way the media said they were. I had heard there was a professional python hunter who lived out in the Everglades in a place called the Holey Lands, and his name was Jimbo, and he had an interesting reputation. So I was asking around and I was introduced to him and we had a meeting at a Bass Pro Shops, and he drank three vodka cranberries and he said that everything I was seeing on the news about the pythons was a lie. And he was getting into a bunch of other things. I thought maybe he was a conspiracy theorist, but I read one of his crazy theories and found a scientific paper that proved it was true. He lived out in the Everglades. And I was willing to hear out a lot of things he had to say about anything involving the Everglades. I’d been saying for years that I wanted to make Chinatown in the Everglades. And I remember I called Lance after and I said, “Lance, it’s Chinatown in the Everglades! It exists. It’s real.”

MA: There’s definitely one scene in the movie that is our Chinatown, where he goes to the council meeting and meets the out-there guy at the bar.

XR: Those were the questions. And also, what’s the best way to find these snakes? And then, how much of the destruction of the Everglades is the fault of the snakes? The thing is, it’s really hard to answer those questions. All you can do is show they’re not the only source of the problem. The only thing we could prove was how people felt about it. And then the question is: How do we thread this larger story within the story of these characters? And are we going to find really compelling characters who are interesting and can catch a snake? And that’s where Toby came in.

These questions almost sound technical to me. But were they personal to you?

MA: I moved to South Florida in middle school and Xander and I went to film school together. Lance is a Broward County guy. There’s a lot of people for whom Florida is very personal. And I think the experience of being from Florida is always a deeply conflicted one. You’re always overwhelmed by its beauty and its weirdness and the specificity of all these people coming from different places who have colliding ideas about what is right and wrong. And then, you’re dealing with some of the small, lower case-c corruption that exists within the structures that have built Florida. Which is to say, for me, it could never be as simple as all of our problems could be placed onto one other thing. That sort of liberates us from having to come to terms with the way we’ve wrought destruction on our most abundant resource. All of these people come like flies to a light for this event in search of a feeling of contribution. And then, does that contribution have meaning? I don’t think anyone who has attended the Python Hunt has helped the python problem in Florida. But I do think they have within themselves felt like they were part of something that was at least trying to contribute to the betterment of something. That’s always the interesting question of activism too: Is that enough?

You mentioned that Tiger King’s success helped you get this made. And it feels like you then almost subvert the expectations of someone looking for that kind of doc about Florida python hunting.

MA: You know, there’s what, three kinds of stories? Man vs God, Man vs Man, Man vs Self. I think because this movie became a documentary about futility for everybody, it became more about a Man vs Self kind of thing. Everyone’s individual stories became about what does it mean if the reason I came here I can’t perform? But everyone is undergirded by this deep love of the land they’re on, and so they’re able to rationalize their own failure through the experience they’re having. So many documentaries we talked about when we were thinking about this were like the Les Blank thing, too — documentaries that are portraiture in nature or regional kind of vibe pieces. Garlic as Good as Ten Mothers and The Blues According to Lightning Hopkins. These docs that were more about capturing a moment in time and a people in place. I think as documentary has gotten commercialized over the past ten years, there’s been this big desire to infuse it with some of the traditions of reality television. And sometimes I think it’s really brilliant. The difference is when you can sense there’s a storyline that is in the undercurrent, how do you not make it subterranean? I think once we really landed on who the characters are, it became about what their relationships reveal about themselves throughout the process. And what this whole event reveals about Florida as a constantly evolving place.

XR: I’m sure a different director would’ve created reality TV type situations and conflicts. It felt like there was an opportunity for us to not do that and get away with it.

That’s what I like about the film. It’s a refreshing choice. And one that ends up being much deeper in the portrait it’s painting.

XR: My favorite sequence in the movie is this moment Max thought would be ten seconds long. It’s the whole barbecue where they grill the snake and are just hanging out. I remember filming it and thinking, this is what the movie feels like. There is some tension, but it’s all pretty lowkey. People are misunderstanding each other, but it’s OK, and that’s what life feels like. That felt so honest to me. There were definitely some people who wanted to speed that sequence up. But then we’d watch it with people and it would actually feel like — sorry to go Quentin Tarantino mode — that’s when the movie starts becoming the movie.

MA: It had an Altmanesque quality, too. You have this weird, final intersection of all these characters who have been in each other’s worlds but have also been in their own private worlds. And then there’s just this shaggy dog quality to it. People are coming out here to have an experience that’s mostly been denied to them. And this is actually the moment when there is some level of actually getting to experience it.

I always find that people I interview are bad at talking about their own talents but good at talking about the talents of people they’ve worked with. So I wonder if both of you could give the insider view of what each other is really strong at?

XR: I’m trying to get better at telling a story. That’s not the number one reason I like to make movies. It’s all these other things — characters, places, sounds, textures, feelings. And Max has such an instinctual great story sense. It’s such a joy to collaborate with him. And we have a shared musicality, so when it comes to bouncing edits off each other there’s a shared rhythm. And he has an amazing instinct for when to take a breath, when to speed up.

Max, is that all intuitive? Or are there influences you’re frequently thinking about and applying to different films?

MA: I came to editing in an interesting way, which is that I was editing commercials for a long time, and it was depressing me and I felt spiritually bankrupt and I sought out the sorts of movies that I wanted to be a part of when I moved to New York. And I think what really helped is the first two movies I worked on were these very hybridized, weird nonfiction films that taught me that every movie speaks its own language and has its own creative value system for what you need to give an audience narratively to keep them engaged. And then, once you’ve bought a level of credibility with the audience, you can kind of enter into vibe mode. The more you watch movies with people and feel their physical reaction in the moment, you understand when you have spent too much in one direction and when you have starved the movie in the other direction.

Working in creative nonfiction, a lot of that is invented and manipulated in the edit. And a lot of it happens in response to fishing expeditions during production. And then the very magical thing about nonfiction filmmaking is you get to go back if you have the money. You cut and understand where you’re at and also understand what is your north star narratively, and then you get to seek those things out in future production. With documentary, you’re aspiring to an emotional account of reality. And sometimes that requires playing with time. I always try to operate with emotional logic as the driving force for how you construct something.

And Max, what’s Xander great at?

MA: Xander always has a left-of-center way to shoot something, frame something. He’s a real filmmaker in the sense that when he directs, he directs with extreme intention, he knows how he wants it to feel. But also, he has no problem getting his hands dirty, getting on the keys, showing me how to express his language better through the edit. And he always has a jagged edge in his editing that cuts out before you think it should or hits you hard in a way I’m envious of.

Since film school, Xander’s films have just had this effortless cool. He has so much style, a deep library of references, an intuitive filmmaking sense that was really easy to be insanely jealous of. But what was so special about watching him make this movie was the level of humanity he brought to it and seeing the responsibility he felt depicting a place and a people that mean a lot to him. Never in a way that was navel-gazing or patronizing. And never in a way that sacrificed the exciting ways to make it cinematic.

Lastly, Xander, where does your interest in reptiles come from?

XR: I grew up in South Florida and there would always be these brown anoles that would get into the house. We never really had pets in the house so those are the animals that would come in. Then I moved to New York, lived there for a while, and came back to Florida, and it’s crazy how the reptiles have changed. There are dozens more invasive reptiles that are around the house I grew up in that are larger and more varied. And it’s interesting to see how all this has affected everyone. You see 1-800-GOT-IGUANAS. Iguanas are legal to shoot outside of your house. People are shooting them with air rifles. So it’s just an unavoidable thing.

I also identify with reptiles in that they’re this maligned, misunderstood species. They’re seen as creepy by a lot of people but a lot of people are really obsessed with them. And I always found it really interesting that the people who are most obsessed with them are the ones who are either called to remove them and kill them or they’re doing fucked up things like smuggling them. So in 2016 I made this short Lance Lizardi, about this guy trying to get on Conan O’Brien’s show. And reptiles are the easiest way. Basically the least famous person that would ever get on Conan would be a guy with a bunch of monitor lizards. But I realized I had this instinctual appreciation for these creatures. I like to identify with the freaks of society.

MA: I made the hip-hop beats on Lance Lizardi.

Is there something about them aesthetically too?

XR: For sure! I’m aesthetically inspired by Florida, and the reptile is the mascot in a way. There’s a lot of cinematic power there. I don’t want to do it over and over. But I’ve got at least one more reptile movie.

Catch The Python Hunt in select theaters starting May 8.

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Hello! Quick programming question: If Nothing Bogus published twice weekly with a second edition that featured film essays like this or this or reported pieces like this, is that something people would want? What about a podcast where you could access these interviews in audio form? What would push you to upgrade your subscription? Please respond to the following poll and share additional feedback at nothingbogus1@gmail.com.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Emily May Jampel offers script notes & creative consultations for filmmakers. Jampel previously worked as a full-time development executive at an Oscar-nominated indie production company. She offers detailed written notes & feedback on screenplays + optional call or zoom talking through notes/follow-up questions. Email emilyjampel@gmail.com for rates and to schedule.

• NYFF is accepting short film submissions through May 4.

• Screen Slate is hosting a benefit gala June 3 at Artists Space.

• Jersey is quietly becoming one of the nation’s top production destinations. I wrote about how it happened and why the state has become so appealing for ’s new issue. Read it here.

  • And in the same issue: Natalia Keogan reports on how Ridgewood is becoming one of the city’s top cinephile communities.

• Over at Hope For Film, has a new piece from offering lessons from 100 film distribution case studies.

• Head to Spectacle on Wednesday for New York on the Verge: Four Films by Michael and Christian Blackwood. More here.

• MoMI’s First Look festival runs through May 3. More here.

• Lower East Side Film Festival will run April 30– May 4, 2026. I’m excited to catch Can’t Go Over It.

• Rooftop Films presents the New York premiere of Andrew Bujalski’s multichannel video installation There There on Thursday. More here.

• Inconceivable! A Wallace Shawn film festival is coming to New York. May 8 - 15 at Metrograph.

• What’s with so many modern movies looking so bad?

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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A New, Kaleidoscopic Reveries Mind Journey: Niiice.

Who are these guys?

Several years ago, I saw two drifters get up on a stage and trade mind-blowing musings like “I think it’s cool when people get married to someone they met in high school. I think it’s important to find your soulmate in high school, within the boundaries drawn by the school district” and “I’ve had a Tom Petty song stuck in my head for the past 18 years. [Which one?] I don’t know. It’s not on any of his albums and nobody else has ever heard it before. But I know it’s him. He’s got that voice.” Ever since, I’ve wondered, Who are those guys?

Those guys just released their third film, Reveries: The Mind Prison1 (which follows 2018’s Reveries and 2020’s Reveries: Going Deeper), and while I still don’t know their names, I do feel like watching so much of them has expanded — or, well, done something — to my consciousness. Their third film is their longest and most ambitious, sending them out to the desert and deeper into their minds and memories. Desperate to learn more about their whole deal, I called up director Graham Mason and writer-stars Matt Barats and Anthony Oberbeck. We went deep.

How did Reveries start?

Matt Barats: Anthony and I knew each other and had performed together in various ways for five or so years. And Reveries was born out of this idea of a few references of late night radio programs or weird British radio shows Anthony and I were into.

Anthony Oberbeck: One night me and Matt were walking home from the Annoyance Theater. We both lived in East Williamsburg. Matt mentioned he had gotten into Joe Frank and Ken Nordine, these old ‘70s, ‘80s surrealist radio guys. They would do ambient music with weird surreal monologues. And I had coincidentally been listening to a lot of Jam and Blue Jam by Chris Morris, which is a similar thing from the ‘90s — ambient music with weird snatches of monologues or strange stories he would tell. And Matt was like, “I want to do something like that.” And I’d been thinking a similar thing. And Matt was like, “I think I’m going to ask Ana Fabrega if she wants to do this with me.” And I was like, “I want to do that.” So I replaced Ana Fabrega.

MB: I do have an email from like 2015 where I sent Ana some loose ideas. And then I think I sent the same document to Anthony. But it made a lot more sense with Anthony.

AO: It was almost the other one of Inspector Ike’s deputies.

MB: We have these early emails, and it’s interesting seeing how we’re kind of finding what a Reveries joke might even feel like. It’s always been a thing where we wrote our own and then were checking in with the other. Anyways, we made this three minute video, this original sample. It’s just camcorder footage. That was before we ever performed live or anything.

We posted it on Facebook on International Women’s Day, an internet blackout thing they were doing. It was March 8th of 2017 when we put the video up.

Graham Mason: Did you know it was International Women’s Day when you posted the video?

MB: No. And you could like native upload to Facebook at that time. That was kind of the thing to do. And nobody watched it so it got kicked down the line a bit. And then it was shown at a video show at C’mon Everybody later in the year, and Anthony and I both went, and it went really well watching it. So we were like, “Maybe we should start doing this live.”

AO: And we thought we’d make more. It was like a three minute track and we just did back and forth little jokes and monologues. We didn’t know how to release an audio-only comedy thing, so we thought, “What if we just make weird, random footage to put over it?” That gave us an excuse to put it on Youtube. And then that evolved to this fake artistic footage, like a video art collage. And while we were filming that, we realized that Matt sitting in those sunglasses looks really funny, so we’d include shots of us just sitting, looking cool, in sunglasses to cut into it. At the time, everyone was like, “A comedy video has to be under a minute.” So we were like, “This is going to be really insane but what if we made a twenty minute video?” And then in early 2018, I met Graham, and he asked me to be in a short he was making called Visualization Exercise: Walking Your Dog in the Park, and I think just having met him and wanting to work with him again and us talking about how to expand this project, we were like, “What if there’s an intro where you see the characters and we get Graham to film it?” And as we all started working on it, it ballooned and we realized you can follow their story between the montages.

MB: When we realized we were going to have these interstitials and break up the chapters, we were like, “OK, when we go into their minds, the texture is camcorder. When we come out, it’s these narrative, cinematic interludes.” And obviously those grew throughout the trilogy, but they’ve always been the same idea basically.

Where did that interest in weird, late night radio shows come from for you guys?

MB: We previously lived in Chicago. And I just remember it was like 1:00 AM one night and on this radio station they’d play old episodes of Word Jazz by Ken Nordine, and I was like, “This is so insane to hear this on the radio. It feels like something that might’ve happened on the radio all the time when people were listening to it more.” We were part of all these different comedy collectives and part of this show where we were trying out new material every week, so we were just pretty open to experiment with anything.

AO: Also, you figure out how you fit amidst the people you come up with and then play into that. We started out performing with Carmen Christopher and Conner O’Malley and a lot of very loud guys acting completely unhinged onstage. Me and Matt weren’t going to out-scream those guys. So you find your niche as the cerebral, verbal guy. And you find yourself always doing bits as that guy.

MB: The programs that I was obsessed with are from the ‘90s and early 2000s. Joe Frank has a program called Somewhere Out There and then The Other Side. And he’s always sampling these trip-hop beats, which was just perfect for us. So we always went back to that well. It felt like this kind of urban slow motion thing — very self-serious, cool, city people. So we got a lot of mileage off that. But yeah, I would just go running and pound out these hour-long episodes. But I want to make clear that we were already writing stuff before I went deep into that. We weren’t trying to imitate it. We’d already found our version, and a lot of the jokes we used were things we’d written years prior in Chicago.

Graham, do you remember your first Reveries viewing experience?

GM: I became a fan of the project when they brought the idea of shooting these video interludes to me. I was a fan of Matt and Anthony’s comedy already, and it seemed like a cool project to work on. At the time, I had this studio space that I shared with a few other filmmakers. It was this really big room, and some of the other filmmakers were also photographers and they had lights and C-stands and big, colored rolls of paper. And I would really make use of those big rolls of paper a lot. We shot the first Reveries thing against these big rolls of white paper, and I kind of imagined it like an ‘80s downtown art movie. A reference for me was the Spalding Grey movie Jonathan Demme directed Swimming to Cambodia, which uses projections and is very theatrical. Reveries for me sort of taps into this fantasy New York where everyone is an artist who does stage monologues.

How did you guys find the characters?

MB: I think it was a mix of figuring out the sunglasses and jacket. We both realized we had these tan jackets. And at some point, the Ana Fabrega monologue from the first one was how we thought about who these guys are: “Who are these guys? I always see them at coffee shops. They’re writing in their notebooks.” Anthony and I would always point out Reveries-type guys, and it would be some guy who was a little too old, in the coffee shop, with no laptop, just writing and drinking coffees. And we eventually got to the point where we realized the jokes are what they’re writing down. They’re writing all their thoughts and memories. So it just has this open cradle where we can dump any idea in.

AO: I was looking at the very first notes when we were like, “What’s this intro going to be?” And there was a little more Bukowski. I had thought that one of us would open a bottle of whiskey and set it down. Almost like a Jack Kerouac type.

MB: I remember setting it up where Anthony’s guy is the more cerebral, literary guy with the typewriter and venetian blinds and then I’m a little more worldly. I’ve got the globes and the orb and some incense. I don’t know if we ever dove into distinguishing the two that hard.

AO: We realized it’s maybe funnier if it’s family friendly and there’s an innocence. It’s almost how a kid would think of what a cool older guy is. Alcohol and drugs don’t enter into our world. It’s coffee and cigarettes and eating as many pancakes as you want at a diner.

GM: Another aspect of the characters is that they’re hyper verbal in the Reveries jokes sections, and then they’re basically non-verbal in the vignettes. If they open their mouth and make a sound, it’s almost like they’re an alien, and they behave in a deadpan, almost silent comedy style. Anthony and I were both fans of these Aki Kurismaki Leningrad Cowboys movies - his whole body of work, really - but those movies have these weird Finnish guys who are fish out of water, and they don’t talk very much. They just act cool in deadpan reverse shots.

AO: We talked a lot about Brother From Another Planet early on. And Being There. These movies where there’s a character who appears human but is from another world and doesn’t really speak. But they become a savior.

MB: For a while, we were really into this idea that they both think they’re so important that they’re freeing people from their problems. But the reality is their memories are absolutely insane.

Graham, what does directing actually look like on these?

GM: It’s a mix of planning and playing around and working intuitively. But I do shot-list. I even storyboard. It’s also super collaborative though. There’s no AD or producer. We’re kind of just playing around and making a lot of room for everyone to have ideas for shots and stuff. And then because all the sound is post, I can talk the whole time and be like, “OK, turn. And now look at each other.”

AO: We sort of do the outline for what the movie’s going to look like together and then we usually can get like 80% of what we planned. But then there’s other stuff along the way that starts to piece together.

MB: Going from the first Reveries, we were always trying to get it to a place where we could balance the montage joke sections and the interstitial narrative sections more evenly, and it grew naturally in that direction. There are so many sections where Graham knew exactly what the plan was and we didn’t have to worry about that stuff. In the second film, I don’t know if we ever had a plan of what the radio call-in section was going to look like. We had an idea at some point that we wanted an audio wave form. We wanted it to mimic people calling into the radio. But Graham does all these liquid oils and had this really cool wave form that curved around and matched the dial. There are so many instances like that. We had the idea that we would be doing a ‘snake dance’ interlude at the end of a chapter, and Graham built that and found this amazing CGI snake to slither around — and it’s one of my favorite moments in the trilogy.

AO: All of us have locked in on every aspect of it where we all contribute, but I feel like the feel of all the interstitial stuff is definitely Graham. And the Miles Davis-John Coltrane bit in the first Reveries is 100% Graham. That cartoon sensibility unlocked something for all of us with the interstitial stuff.

How do you guys write for it? Do these jokes just come to you? Or do you sit down together and say “We’re going to write for Reveries today”?

AO: Me and Matt each write our Reveries sets on our own. And only recently we realized that we’re both people who wake up and write in a notebook first thing in the morning. It was years of every day I would wake up and just write these.

Intentionally for this character?

AO: From 2019-2022, I think my brain was so in the groove that I could not not write reveries every morning.

MB: Occasionally when we’re deeper in the process and we know the outline or know that this chapter is going to skew more in a certain direction. But for the most part they’re just coming up and you bank them and wait until they’re needed.

AO: There’s one reverie where Matt had half an idea and I had half an idea and we put it together.

MB: That was about a math professor who thought of a number so big his head exploded.

Do you each have a favorite reverie that the other has done?

AO: The Miles Davis-John Coltrane thing is my favorite thing Graham has written. And in the new one I like Matt’s “I worked in a think tank, but in the accounting department, so they didn’t use any of my thoughts.” I love that because I convinced Matt to keep it in, and I haven’t seen it get a bit laugh. But it makes me laugh.

MB: I remember in the 11th hour of finishing the second film, Going Deeper, Anthony brought in this reverie about kicking a hyena in the head and becoming a town hero — that was a good one.

GM: The difference between Matt and Anthony’s reveries is always really fascinating. I feel like Matt’s have a cultural criticism aspect to them. And he has a lot of characters who are planning elaborate schemes. And then Anthony has kind of a body horror thread — miniature men or miniature body parts. And I think you both do daddy issue jokes.

Tell me about making this third Reveries film. You went to the desert to shoot it.

AO: We’d had some time off, and we’d always planned on doing a third one. We maybe started working on it a year before we shot it. The desert idea came up. It felt like the right next thing. Reveries: Going Deeper felt claustrophobic, all in one dark space. And this one is in the brightest, most wide open space possible.

MB: We went to a few areas near the eastern Sierras, some down by like Salton Sea.

AO: We left on a Monday, drove three hours, shot all evening and into the night in Wonder Valley, stayed there, woke up the next day, drove three or four hours south, through Joshua Tree national park, shooting the whole time, and then the canyon stuff with Robby Rackleff is Painted Canyon. And then the next day we drove five hours to Ridgecrest with all the red sand and the salt flats and us on the big spires. It was all over. And it was just the three of us and our DP packed into an SUV. Drive, stop somewhere, unload, set up a shot, me and Matt walk around the desert a bunch, and then cram back into the SUV.

GM: I had never seen Joshua Tree and was excited to see it. But we were just racing through. It looked great as it was whipping past the window, though. And it was a nice contrast from the second film, which was shot in a one-car garage.

AO: We were vaguely talking about, “Could this one go somewhere else and evolve what the project is?” And it got more thoughtful and less funny. We got the right music from Tim Joyce, who does all our music, and we put it under the childhood montage, with our home movie footage. That was initially supposed to be a joke, but it did eventually shift tones in a cool way.

And what did the editing process look like?

GM: Anthony edits the camcorder footage and the silent montages.

AO: I don’t know how to use Adobe Premiere that well. So at first out of necessity, and then realizing that it fits perfectly, I’d just find anything I can in the edit bar in terms of VFX and see what happens.

GM: There’s this playful, outsider art feeling to it. And then I edit the more cinematic interstitial things and just follow my intuition with those. But with the new one being feature length, we did talk a lot about the structure. We did some restructuring to make it feel like you’re going on a journey. And we talked about it like you would with a narrative film. We knew if it was just free form, at 79 minutes, it would get kind of tiring. So we tried to give it a sense of a build to a climactic feeling.

AO: There’s a lot of reverse engineering in Graham’s editing. Matt and I do what we can and then Graham does a lot to basically edit the script, but with the footage. The whole project is kind of backwards. Tim Joyce gives us all our music before we’ve shot anything. And a lot is editing to the music, or taking all the songs he’s sent and arranging them so they feel like a score with a musical build and the right moments at the right times.

Do drugs ever come into the process?

AO: Matt and Graham are not big drug guys. The first two Reveries I did smoke tons of weed when I was editing. The third one, I had quit smoking weed and I realized I could do the same thing but faster if I’m not high.

MB: But sometimes it’s for the greater good because we know these are for drug-induced viewing. And sometimes it takes a sober mind to produce drug art.

GM: I love psychedelic art, and I also like the idea of being a pretty square person making things people enjoy watching while they’re on drugs.

MB: We all have these little easter eggs and lore we’ve thought about with Reveries. Sometimes they don’t play super narratively but it’s fun for the people going really deep.

AO: I really like reading into things. And I like the idea of making things and finding there’s more than you realized. I realized that the whole trilogy is: You present us, and then the second is us diving into the darkness, and then at the end of that we die. In Buddhism when you die, you go to a space where you’re confronted with the demon version of the life you’ve lived and if you can make it through without being consumed by those demons, you’re reborn into a better life. So the third one is us in that state, after we die at the end of ​Going Deeper​.

Reveries: The Mind Prison is available for purchase on blu-ray through Vinegar Syndrome now. It will be available to stream on NoBudge on May 15 and through Mubi on June 1.

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Today’s newsletter is about the need — or lack thereof? — to cast stars in small to small-ish indies. Of course, it’s not easy to land a megawatt star, and when you do they can elevate your movie in a big way. But for me, the most thrilling bits of casting are the star-making turns — when a relatively unknown, gifted actor is perfectly cast in a meaty role for the first time and you leave the theater going, “Who was that?” Have you witnessed an incredible actor who the world should know about? Add them to this form.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Jenny Ward is looking to attach Executive Producers to her upcoming feature film, Happy Accidents, shooting this August in NYC. It’s a dark comedy about powerlessness, our desire for connection—and car insurance. Learn more here, and if you want to get involved email jennyward09@gmail.com.

• I caught Maddie’s Secret at New Directors / New Films last week, and the crowd was so in the bag for John Early, Kate Berlant, and co. that it was hard to tell if the movie was truly as funny as it seemed in the room. Regardless, I had a great time and was very impressed with Early’s direction and command of tone.

• Submissions are open for the Future of Film Is Female short film fund spring 2026 cycle. Submit and learn more here.

• The early deadline for the Gothams Project Market is April 23. More here.

• Life World is hosting a free community dinner and tea and spring art party for the migrant resource collective La Mif on 4/26 at 7:00 PM. Including artworks for sale, live music, and two short doc screenings. More here.

• Come see Barry Lyndon with me at Village East on Wednesday at 7:00 PM?

• Tribeca announced its lineup last week. It will run June 3 - 14.

  • Congrats to Human Theories, which will premiere at Tribeca in June. Read writer-director Jess Zeidman’s production diaries from Chunk 1, 2, 3, and 4 before seeing the film!

• Lower East Side Film Festival announced its lineup last week. It will run April 30– May 4, 2026.

• What a loser.

• I have a very important question for you…

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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CASTING QUESTIONS

Does a Small Indie Need a Big Star?

And who even qualifies?

Every movie requires its own casting strategy, based on the director’s strengths, the production’s resources, the film’s genre, and the team’s goals. When in doubt, my personal inclination is pretty simple: cast the person for each role who inspires the most passion (meaning: the person whose tape you watch over and over, or who makes you laugh/smile/cry when you picture them reciting a specific line).

But there are all sorts of other worthwhile casting considerations: How does a given actor’s price tag fit into a budget? What value will their presence provide when the film hits the market? How do they fit within the larger ensemble? How reliable are they as a professional? How are they as a collaborator? Can the production adequately satisfy their expectations? Will they enthusiastically promote the movie?

All of these questions matter if you’re invested in any form of a movie’s success. After recent conversations with festival programmers, distributors, and directors, and in observing the current landscape, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role stars play and who qualifies as a star. Here’s where I’m at:

Do you need a star?

Undertone, the low budget, ultra-contained podcast horror movie from first-time director Ian Tuason, is on its way to making $20 million at the box office. The film’s lead, Nina Kiri, had a prominent supporting role on The Handmaid’s Tale. And its next-billed cast member, Adam DiMarco, will be recognizable to anyone who watched Season 2 of The White Lotus — though, maybe not in Undertone, since you only hear his voice. The film’s box office revenue is only a few million shy of The Bride, which stars Oscar winners Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale and cost a reported $90 million to make, and is twice that of Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, which stars Will Arnett, Laura Dern, and Cooper. I’m cherrypicking a few examples to make a point, but it’s one I believe: With a handful of exceptions1, audiences come out more for a film’s concept, marketing, and word of mouth buzz than its cast2.

But, it’s not that simple

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A few weeks ago, I talked to Brandon Daley about his debut feature, the ultra-adrenalized Midwestern crypto comedy, $POSITIONS. Today I’m talking to Amy Zimmer about her work acting in Sophy Romvari’s quiet family drama, Blue Heron. These two films could not be more different. But to me, they represent the north stars of what a low budget indie can be. One is unrelentingly entertaining and the other is precise and profound. And yet, both feel honest and personal; both take big swings; both are carefully constructed, with an audience’s experience and the limits of their own budget in mind; and both feel fresh and imaginative, never falling back on what is trendy or cool.

I don’t know how either of these films will perform at the box office, or whether they’ll earn their makers bigger budgets (or even a green light) on future projects. And notably, neither film played Sundance. Which is all to say that even when you hit the bull’s eye, it might not make all your dreams come true. But I hope that these films inspire other up-and-coming filmmakers in the scene to aim that much higher. And I hope that the powers that be take note and recalibrate some of their own preferences. Fuck all the noise. This is what it’s all about.

Here’s what else is happening this week:

• Over 1,000 writers, actors, and directors released a letter today opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not too late to add your name.

• Is a $100 million investment worth losing 200,000 subscribers? Ask Mubi.

• Someone give Hannah Crane the John Wilson slot at HBO. A work-in-progress cut of her new short, Smart Girl, brought the house down at Film Noir Cinema on Sunday.

• Whether or not you liked The Drama, it’s unquestionably inspired a lot of great writing and discourse. Unsurprisingly, one of the best pieces I’ve read is from , whose newsletter, That Final Scene, you should really be reading if you’re not.

• In addition to Blue Heron (the subject of today’s newsletter), I very much recommend catching Exit 8 and Mother Mary this week.

• Last week, Cannes unveiled its lineups for its main competition and Un Certain Regard. This morning, Critic’s Week was announced.

  • I liked ’s Natalia Keoghan’s initial assessment of the 2026 lineup: “…the Competition titles still feel relatively tame. Sure, there are several globally renowned directors making anticipated returns—Paweł Pawlikowski, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, Cristian Mungiu, and Ira Sachs (the only American among them)—but it all just feels so conventional.”

• If you prefer to see movies with a canine companion, you’re in luck. CANNES DOGS is returning to Los Angeles’ Lumiere Cinema at 1:00 PM on Sunday May 3rd, 2026 for a premiere of the new zine: CANNES DOGS 2: THE POO EDITION along with a zine signing, soiree and screening of the 2003 cult-dog-classic Quigley, plus the LA premiere of STUPID CO’s new short film, French Lessons.

• On 4/14 at 8:30 PM, check out Eddy Frumkin and William George-Louis’ sophomore screening of All-Starrs at Starr Bar in Bushwick. Will feature films from Oscar-shortlisted Union producer Mars Verrone, Peter Hujar’s Day DP Alex Ashe, Mad Bills to Pay director Joel Alfonso Vargas, recent NYU graduate Manya Glassman, comedian Corey Popowski, and Adam and Grant Conversano. More here.

• Head to Roxy Cinema on 4/17 or 4/18 for WHY DO I LIVE LIKE THIS, a survey of new American filmmaking at a time when the way people have lived the past 40 years is in the midst of breaking down, making way for something new. There will be four shorts and one web series. Curated by Clay Mills and in partnership with Sara’s. Featuring work by Jesse Zhou, Clay Mills, Asher Bentley, Creston Brown, and Taylor Ervin. More here.

• The early deadline for the Gothams Project Market is April 23. More here.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

‘Blue Heron’ Pushed Amy Zimmer in New Ways

But her character in director Sophy Romvari’s debut feature also shares some crucial DNA with past comedic roles.

Blue Heron, the stunning feature debut from director Sophy Romvari, is full of small surprises that make perfect sense in hindsight. One of those surprises is who Romvari cast to play the adult version of the film’s POV character, Sasha: Amy Zimmer. If you know Zimmer, you probably know her as a Brooklyn alt-comedy mainstay — someone who might deadpan about her friendship with Santana or play against herself in an absurd melodrama about being infected by scrunchies. Over the past decade, Zimmer has found increasing work as a screen actor, but in that too she has mostly played characters who are slightly off beat or exist in comedic worlds. Blue Heron, by contrast, is a drama through and through — a touching and earnest story about family, memory, and the impossibility of fully understanding other people.

Zimmer, though, turns out to be a perfect fit for Sasha. She pulls off the tough task of expressing the complex internal workings in the character’s search for answers about her past. Zimmer was chosen in part for her ability to improvise — a requirement for scenes in which the film blends fiction with documentary. But when you look back at Zimmer’s past film roles, you might also notice that she frequently plays characters who, like Sasha, are charging at something. Still, the role was intimidating and the process was difficult. In the following interview, Zimmer discusses how Romvari helped her feel comfortable and confident, how the two of them went about making such an internal character compelling, and she delves into her background in comedy and the work she’s interested in making next.

How did you first connect with Sophy?

Amy Zimmer: It was late winter, 2024. I was having a pretty brutal winter and I was performing in my friend’s show where I read a monologue. It was one of these weird days where I felt so dogged out. I was like, “I’m so cold, I’m so tired.” I’d been sick. I was feeling low. The high point of it was doing that show. And Ryan Bobkin, our producer, was in the crowd, and I think he also performed. They were still casting the role of adult Sasha. And he saw me, and was like, “What about her?” Sophy looked me up and realized she’d seen me in India Donaldson’s short, Hannahs. She liked that. She was in town and we met up for breakfast. She told me about the project. And then we had a lot of meetings and conversations and an audition.

What was your awareness of Sophy’s work?

I had not seen a ton of her work yet. But I binged a bunch of her shorts, which were on Criterion at the time. And I was amazed by what an established and precise and patient voice she had as a filmmaker. And then when we talked about the project it was amazing how much I responded and related to it.

What was the audition process like?

We talked a lot about the project. I think Sophy responded to the background I had in comedy, because I could improvise. She thought that could help because a big part of the character would be having live, improvised conversations with social workers. She asked if I would be comfortable with that and if I’d want to do it. I was like, “Well, sure.”

She had a really clear vision of what that process would be like, and she walked me through it. So as a preliminary audition, I got on a Zoom and one of the producers played a social worker and I had to improvise trying to get access to case studies that she may or may not give me about my family. So it was like a 30 minute improvisation that was really intense.

And I guess it went well.

Yeah, it did. I had no idea what the response was when I finished because I as the character didn’t get what I wanted. And I had no way to know if that was correct or incorrect. So there was an unfinished quality to when I finished the audition, which is indicative of the film. But afterwards Sophy had really nice things to say.

How did you get into comedy?

I started in comedy almost ten years ago now. I had been writing a lot of different things. I had this play that I wrote that was never produced. I really wanted to make a comedy. And I would show it to people who had experience in theater, and they were like, “First off, this seems really expensive.” And they were also like, “You should probably tell a joke onstage to see how you feel with comedy and get that experience to know what it would be like for an actor to tell a joke and if these jokes work.”

So I started doing really, really by the books open mics in the East Village. Eventually, I had a group of friends I did open mics with that went to this alternative mic called No Jokes Allowed. And my friends threw my name in and told me I couldn’t do stand-up or I’d be kicked out. I panicked, because I didn’t have anything. So I improvised this crazy set. And it went well enough that I met people there and started performing at more and more different shows in alt circles and also not.

There were all these other really funny, creative people in the scene at the same time. How did those people rub off on you?

There were so many people — Julio Torres was at that mic. And there was this huge influx from Chicago. There was this crew of these Annoyance guys — Conner O’Malley, John Reynolds, Carmen Christopher, Gary Richardson, Matt Barats, Annie Donley — plus Patti Harrison had just moved to New York and Ana Fabrega had just started. It was all these people whose point of view on comedy was so different from what you found in New York. It was very individualized. It didn’t depend on this prescribed structure. And as an audience member it’s so inspiring to see people do things that are so unique and so unbelievably funny. I think that rubbed off on me so much. It felt like a rare moment where you were pushed not just to be funny but to do something expressive and singular.

How did that change what you were doing?

I think I felt way less self conscious about doing something out of the box. I never really felt completely out of the box or strange or alternative, especially in that little pocket of people. And I think the further along I went in the industry, I’d get feedback that I was weird. But I never intended to be weird, and I don’t prioritize that. I prioritize things that feel really important to me. Things that make me laugh and that feel really artistically meaningful.

If there was this process of pushing yourself to be the purest form of your own voice, what did that look like?

Oh my god. It’s funny, because I’ll think back on jokes I had that were barely even jokes. I had a really early joke just talking about being friends with Santana. But when you start out you’re just clinging to stuff that works. You’re not even asking what it means. You get a response and you keep some things and lose some things. I actually love highly structured jokes. And what I love to write is lots of dense jokes. Sometimes they’re written very traditionally but they’re within a surreal circumstance or not delivered in a way that’s traditional. And I think the details and specifics you cling to help define your individualized voice. At the time, I had a lot of goofy one-liners and high concept bits and tech cues. But other times I would do really straight up stand-up. And all of that’s evolved I think into my writing now, which is a bit more straightforward and is a little more intentional about when things are surreal or not. I like when characters and people speak with a rapport that I find in real life.

I feel like you’ve played a lot of characters who are… slightly off.

I’ve played a lot of weird writers at this point. I also enjoy characters who are really determined for unknown reasons to themselves. That is really funny to me — when a person is so headstrong about something and then they reach a certain destination and they have nothing for the destination. That’s really funny to me.

When I watched Hannahs, it felt a bit like Hannah was someone who can only look directly in front of herself.

That character is like a shark. If she doesn’t keep moving, she’ll drown. I think about that short all the time because I went into it with a real Buster Keaton kind of feeling. I was like, “It would be so fun to do all these comedic flourishes.” I’m not sure if that ever translated, but the end result makes it so creepy. I’m trying to be like, “Just doing me!” and it has such a sinister undercurrent to it. When we’d screen it at festivals, people were so scared of me in it. They would gasp! That makes me laugh because I came into it every day feeling this lightheartedness, and always wanting to goof off. I think it informs the short that I wasn’t thinking I was weird.

Does your comedic sensibility come from your upbringing?

I’m a huge Al Brooks fan. My mom’s favorite movie is Defending Your Life. That sensibility is in my blood really hard. And as we speak, I’m looking at this blu-ray of The Last Unicorn, which is a good juxtaposition of me because it’s a bizarre ‘70s animated movie that is strange and heartbreaking. I really admire the way Albert Brooks’s comedy is all a function of character and their flaws.

I think a lot of what I like to do is satirize deep emotion. Not because the emotions themselves are worth satirizing, but because sometimes you just feel so much, and if you pull back for just a second, you can observe that intensity and it can really make you laugh. And for a moment, everything’s less dire. I guess I’m a pretty sensitive person and I feel things pretty intensely and there’s something pretty funny about that.

Blue Heron is kind of the opposite of that.

Yeah. It’s crazy. It felt useful to be sensitive, which was a rewarding process.

Sophy told me there was a unique pre-production process. What did that entail?

It started with those early Zooms. We were working on it before I knew I had the part. There was a moment where production wasn’t sure they could bring me on as an American. And I was kind of cool with that because there was such a gravity to the movie at the time where Sophy and I had connected synchronistically on a lot of things. I thought, if it happens, it happens, and if it can’t, then it won’t.

In collaborative conversations, we talked a lot about the tricky task of this character being an observer to a situation who synthesizes a lot of information. How do you make a character like that a compelling person to watch? And how do you prioritize a character like that in service to the film and the story? We were interested in this type of woman and the position this woman found herself in. So it’s like, how do you pay attention to this person and recognize that the lens of her memory is the thing we’re interrogating? That can come off passively in another movie. So how do you artistically balance it so it’s a thing you want to watch?

And how did you do it?

I don’t know how we did it. [Laughs.] But we talked so in depth about the goals we had as people working on this film together, and what could be done between a director and actor. We talked about a lot of different movies. I came out early to spend time with the family, while they were shooting the ‘90s half. And even that process was informative because I had been doing my adult Sasha process alone. And then I flew over in the middle of their halcyon days of summer with all of my character’s moodiness. That was crazy. And getting to know all the amazing actors was a process I’ll never forget. They’re tremendous people and actors.

How did Sophy work as a director?

Sophy was such a deft director, and a lot of the time it was very intuitive. She kind of just let me do my thing, and she would steer me one way or the other. She was very generous about it. There were these heavy scenes we were going to do, and coming from comedy I was terrified of those scenes. She did a lot to make me feel the least amount of pressure. She was like, “Some of these scenes are meant to be heavy. I’m not going to demand or ask that a certain thing happens on the day. It would be wonderful if it happens. But if it doesn’t, we’re going to be OK.” And that was very freeing on the day. It made me feel like the work and my experience and my ways of getting there were not incorrect. Which I needed at the time, because I didn’t want to let the movie down.

I’ll frequently hear that a director told an actor that the stakes are low. But I imagine it’s one thing to say it and another to actually feel it.

I’ve had experiences in the past where there’s pressure to deliver this thing on the day and it may or may not occur and as an actor you’re in this default position where you just want to make your director happy. So you walk away some days like, “Did we get it?” And it’s pretty hard to divorce your experience performing. But it’s an interesting quality Sophy has — and it’s something I felt with India Donaldson as well — where she’s very sure of her vision. So in my mind, the director’s made enough assessments of what you can do. And their job is to believe in you wholeheartedly. And their job is to make you understand that, so that when you take a big risk or do something very strange it’s within the loving gaze of the creator. And then when it comes to those high pressure days, it feels like we’re in this together. This feeling that someone’s accepting what you do wholeheartedly allows a lot more risk and provides a lot more reward.

I wonder if it’s the confidence of the director, and if that’s something actors can sniff out.

Absolutely. I’ve been lucky to feel that with a lot of directors I’ve worked with. Julio Torres and Theda Hammel and India Donaldson and Joanna Arnow are all pretty clear about their vision. And if you know what you want, that confidence inspires much more adaptability.

Was Sophy steering you in one particular direction? Were there recurring themes in terms of the feelings she was steering you towards?

The nature of my character is to steer myself towards a shocking conclusion in that there is no conclusion. I begin as a kind of investigator and I end as something else. Something that’s a little more in acceptance of the incongruence of knowledge and my character’s life. That life can’t be spent in search of understanding of this moment, and instead only in search for some kind of personal acceptance and understanding. And how brutal that is. Sophy and I talked a lot about that. And about the themes in the movie — the usefulness or uselessness of documentation. Memory. Documentary. The things we hold onto to make sense of a really life-altering event. We hold onto information that’s proven to have happened and be true as some semblance of our sanity. And your sanity is for you to wield, unfortunately. That’s what’s really hard and devastating about life. And also just knowing that the drive for the search would change over time.

Do you still feel like a writer first and foremost?

I do.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on my own feature that I’ve been developing for a while now. I’m making more of my own work, which is a nice return. I feel like I took a step away. I did all this acting, and it was a big change for me. And I think the more I realized acting is kind of like writing using your voice and body, I was like, “OK, that’s a way for me to understand what from the outside seems like a very elusive, mysterious process.” And I just want to synthesize that into my own work. And synthesize what I’ve learned from all of these great filmmakers.

What does that look like? And how has what you’re interested in doing evolved?

When we were talking about this really dada surrealist stuff that I come from, over the years and through my experience with filmmaking, I feel very passionately about synthesizing those two worlds. I want to write and create comedy that feels like it still comes from where I come from but is also part of a filmmaking language. Sometimes things get experimental and you sacrifice things for the formal concerns of the medium. And I want the things I make to be very felt. I want to make things on my terms and have them feel emotionally resonant and funny and formally interesting. And I don’t want one thing to be sacrificed for another.

Albert Brooks.

Yeah!

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Hello! The past few years, April has been feeling like the prime festival season for discovering weird, daring up-and-coming directors — at least if you live in NY or LA. Los Angeles Festival of Movies begins this Thursday and runs through Sunday. Nitehawk Shorts Festival is this Wednesday through Sunday. And New Directors / New Films begins this Wednesday and runs through April 19. I’m hoping to catch a few screenings at ND/NF. I’m most anticipating Leviticus, Maddie’s Secret, Chronovisor, Strange River, and Erupcja. And today in the newsletter, Pete Ohs will provide a little preview of that last one, in a discussion with his Obex collaborator and fellow filmmaker Paul Oh.

Here’s what else is happening this week:

• Grand Views, a bi-monthly shorts screening at The Windjammer via Footlight Presents in Ridgewood, is 4/7 at 7:30 PM, featuring films by Adam Bruynesteyn, Eddy Frumkin, Sam Hanh, Allie Viti, Travis Wood, Nate Wilson/Dozzy Chroma/Lea Rose, Sebatianis/Friends&, Adam Kelleher, Matt York, Tempest Creation, Max Tullo, Claire Fogarty. Event link here.

• On 4/14 at 8:30 PM, check out Eddy Frumkin and William George-Louis’ sophomore screening of All-Starrs at Starr Bar in Bushwick. Will feature films from Oscar-shortlisted Union producer Mars Verrone, Peter Hujar’s Day DP Alex Ashe, Mad Bills to Pay director Joel Alfonso Vargas, recent NYU graduate Manya Glassman, comedian Corey Popowski, and Adam and Grant Conversano. More here.

• Head to Roxy Cinema on 4/17 or 4/18 for WHY DO I LIVE LIKE THIS, a survey of new American filmmaking at a time when the way people have lived the past 40 years is in the midst of breaking down, making way for something new. There will be four shorts and one web series. Curated by Clay Mills and in partnership with Sara’s. Featuring work by Jesse Zhou, Clay Mills, Asher Bentley, Creston Brown, and Taylor Ervin. More here.

• The early deadline for the Gothams Project Market is April 23. More here.

• If you catch Bunnylovr this week, go back and read producer Roger Mancusi’s 2025 Sundance diary and my interview with the film’s other producer, Ani Schroeter.

• And if you catch Travel Companion, maybe you’ll enjoy directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis breaking down different frames from the film.

• I enjoyed Brian Cox’s most recent diss track. But leave Ian McKellen alone! Gandalf is great in The Christophers. (Michaela Coel, too!)

• I agree with this.

• And this.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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ADVENTURES IN BROKE WAVE

Micro Budget, with a Major Star: Directing Charli XCX in Erupcja

In a conversation with Obex collaborator and fellow filmmaker Paul Oh, Pete Ohs discusses bringing new actors into the fold, bringing his process to Europe, and why his newest film was his most challenging. .

by Paul Oh

I first met Pete Ohs at Filmfort, a great regional festival in Boise, Idaho put on by Ian Clark. It was 2022, and Pete had his new feature, Jethica, at the festival. It was the second film he’d made in what’s become his trademark style: Pete brings a few actors to a location, devises a story with them day-by-day, and acts as a one-man crew. I was impressed by the film itself, which is so distinct in the ghost stalker sub genre. And I admired how he’d made something so lean and tight with so little in the way of resources.

Not long after that first meeting, I helped Albert Birney with Obex, which he shot in Baltimore, near where I live. Pete was the DP, and Albert made use of his minimalist production style. I was able to see the best of both Albert and Pete — Albert’s creativity through Pete’s lens. They both worked so hard and the process wasn’t easy, but it was joyous most of the time. 

Pete’s new film, Erupcja, was made in the same fashion that he’d made his previous ones — only this time, he was shooting in Europe and Charli xcx was starring! It was so interesting to see Pete make a foreign film. And there’s a certain lighthearted magic to Erupja that is very much a Pete Ohs product — only this time, grander and more assured. The film will play New Directors / New Films this week and then get a wider release April 17. I was excited to chat with Pete about bringing his process overseas, honing his approach, and what he was pulling from his own life.

Paul Oh: First off, congratulations on everything, Pete, especially the recent news that the film will play in New Directors / New Films this month. Let me start open-ended: If Paris is the city of love, Warsaw is…?

Pete Ohs: Paris being the “city of love” probably comes from some branding long ago that we now just accept as truth. But really, any city can be a city of love.

If you asked people, they might say Warsaw is the city of war — partly because of the name, partly because of history. But after living there and meeting Polish people, I realized how often Western cinema reduces Poland to war stories.

I didn’t want to make a Warsaw movie about war. It was exciting to reframe it — as another city of love.

You made Erupcja in 2024, right after Obex and Tick. What did you bring from those films to this one?

It was my fifth feature in this “Table of Bubbles” process. Making these films is like going to the gym — filmmaking as exercise. Most directors don’t get to direct a feature every year, so I started building muscle memory.

That helped because Erupcja was the most challenging. I was shooting in another country where I didn’t speak the language, working with an international pop star, and doing it shortly after my father passed away. It was an intense situation.

There’s this element of competitive diving — the degree of difficulty. A messy, difficult dive can score higher than a perfect simple one. That’s how Erupcja felt. The difficulty was high, but completing it mattered.

I’ve been experimenting with how little I need to make a film. Earlier it was a full outline, then less, then almost nothing. By this film, I felt like I was entering with nothing at all. But because I had been “going to the gym” with these films, I trusted the process.

How do you approach working with both new and returning collaborators?

I always mix both intentionally. New collaborators bring fresh energy and perspective, while returning collaborators already understand the process and help guide the new people.

During a shoot, especially early on, things can feel chaotic. People like Jeremy O. Harris and Will Madden can reassure newer collaborators that this is normal and that it will all come together. In post-production, working with John Bowers and Danny Madden is essential. They’re both incredibly skilled and efficient, and I value that they can hold multiple parts of the process in their heads.

Filmmaking isn’t just the shoot. More ideas come later, especially when new collaborators enter the process. That’s part of why I feel comfortable starting with so little — because I know the film will keep evolving.

There’s also something exciting about bringing in new people like Charli and Lena and watching them navigate unfamiliar creative territory. It’s like watching someone move through darkness with night vision — you can see they’ll be fine, but they have to discover it themselves. That growth is part of what makes it meaningful.

What drew you to certain neighborhoods in Warsaw?

I was living in Mokotów, south of the city center, and Lena and the flower shop were in Praga, across the river. Those became the two anchor points of the story.

Once those were set, everything else naturally fell in between. The trams, the streets, the walking paths — it’s literally how you would travel between those two places. You could follow the geography of the film in real life.

There’s also a kind of playful rivalry between those neighborhoods, which I found charming.

The film has a light, playful tone. Was that intentional?

Not really. People always ask what the tone will be, and I never know. We discover it as we go.

At first we weren’t explicitly talking about French New Wave. We were more focused on how Warsaw feels. There’s something about it that feels like the 1970s, probably tied to the architecture.

A lot of the tone came from practical decisions. I chose to shoot handheld because I was moving quickly through the city, getting on and off trams, and working in a place where I didn’t speak the language. That naturally created a looseness and lightness. In editing, that evolved into something playful.

There’s a rainy night sequence that feels very immersive. How did that come together?

I think of these films as documentaries of my own life as much as they are narratives.

That rain sequence happened because it suddenly started raining at the end of a shoot. Everyone wanted to go home, but I knew we had to use it. I sent Will out into the rain and filmed him, then shot additional footage myself without really knowing what it would become.

Later, in editing, it found its place — paired with voicemail, it became this emotional sequence. But for me, it’s also just a memory of being cold and wet, walking through Warsaw.

Tell me about the editing process. How did the film become such a tight 72 minutes?

The process didn’t necessarily take longer, but it took longer for the film to reach its final form.

The first cut was actually longer, around 76 or 77 minutes. We gradually tightened it, following what the film seemed to want. This one wanted to move quickly, to feel fun and energetic.

The biggest breakthrough came late in the process with the voiceover. We tried other ideas that didn’t work, and then Albert [Birney] suggested something like Jules and Jim. That opened everything up.

The voiceover allowed me to bring in humor, add ideas, and keep the film from taking itself too seriously. Movies always feel bad at first. You just have to keep working until they don’t.

What’s the international reception been like?

Different audiences respond to different things. In Norway, people focused on small behavioral details like bathroom etiquette. In Saudi Arabia, younger audiences — especially women — really connected with the characters and wanted to talk about their decisions.

In Poland, it’s more complicated. I don’t speak the language, so I don’t fully know how it feels to watch the film there. That was part of the experiment — making a film in a language I don’t understand and seeing what gets lost or transformed.

Have you ever been stuck somewhere like the characters in this film?

I had a strange experience in the Moscow airport during COVID. My test result was inexplicably misplaced, and suddenly I couldn’t board my flight. I was escorted through back hallways without my passport. It was surreal. I eventually got out after about 12 hours.

What’s next?

This film feels like a culmination of the previous ones, but I’m not stopping. I might make two more films this year using the same process.

I also wrote a script recently, just to see if I could apply what I’ve learned. I’ve never needed one before, but I was curious. I’m still not interested in doing things the conventional way, though.

Anything else you want to add?

I don’t make these films alone. Collaborators are essential, and who you share your work with really matters.

When I visited Albert in Baltimore, we ended up spending days working on the narration together. That kind of collaboration gives me energy. We do this because we love it. It’s about the joy of making something together.

Paul Oh is a Korean American filmmaker based in Maryland. His work has screened at Florida Film Festival, Nashville Film Festival, New/Next Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival, Filmfort, and more.

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I asked, you answered! Here’s the list of up-and-coming filmmakers Nothing Bogus readers would give a blank check to if they ran a studio.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Head to Spectacle this month for New York on the Verge: Four Films by Michael and Christian Blackwood. The four films in the series about NY have never been screened theatrically in the city. First up is Empire City on April 2 at 7:30 PM. More on the series and show times here.

• The final Life World Microbudget March screening will be this Sunday, April(!?!?) 5 at 7:00 PM. Ryan Martin Brown’s Free Time. More here.

• Nitehawk Shorts Fest begins 4/8 and runs through 4/12. Screenings at both Nitehawk locations. More here.

• New Directors / New Films begins 4/8 and runs through 4/19. More here.

• LA Festival of Movies begins 4/9 and runs through 4/12. More here.

• If you’ll be in London this April, check out DOUBLE WONDERFUL PRESENTS: 24 Hour Cinema, a continuous, drop-in moving-image program running for a full day and night, April 10-11. Free. More here.

• A great group turned out for the first Nothing Bogus X ride-and-watch outing last week. We saw Kiki’s Delivery Service, which is both a terrific cycling movie and a terrific movie about creativity. Hoping to do more of these this summer when the ride will be less frigid.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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RISING STOCKS

Safdie Energy Meets ‘90s Dumb Guy Comedy in $POSITIONS

Director Brandon Daley gets real on the bleak distribution landscape, indie film issues, and how he approached fusing nonstop tension and raunchy humor in his feature debut.

Throughout the 2010s, Brandon Daley was a NoBudge mainstay, cranking out absurd comedic shorts like Savasana, Chicken Tuesdays, and Technology Lake: Meditations on Death and Sex. His shorts found fans and notable collaborators (Savasana stars Sarah Sherman), but he was having trouble getting a feature off the ground. By the end of the decade, though, one project he’d written had momentum, with some high level producers attached. And then the pandemic happened, and the project fell through. “I was like, ‘I’m going to try this one more time,’” Daley recalls thinking. “‘I’m going to write one more script, and if I can’t find money for it, I’m going to write it so I can make it myself for like $50,000.’”

At the time, Daley was closely following the stock market. He was early on r/WallStreetBets, and made about $25,000 from putting $5,000 into GameStop. He rolled that into a “random ass coin” in crypto and grew the $25,000 to $65,000. “And then that got rubbed and I lost [just about] it all,” Daley says. “I felt very stupid when I lost all that money. And it all felt very ripe for something I could make a movie about.”

There were plenty of talking head docs on Netflix about crypto and stock trading, but Daley hadn’t seen a narrative movie about the highly anxious, dopamine-filled rollercoaster experience of crypto investing. Daley grew up in Salina, Kansas, and he learned that various friends he’d grown up with had had similar experiences with crypto. He thought, “What if you were growing up in lower class Kansas, like my family was, and also dealing with this retail investing crypto thing?”

Initially, Daley thought he would self-fund the movie, cast his actual family, and shoot in real locations in his hometown. But he was fortunate enough to find investors who’d liked his shorts, affording him a budget to cast some tremendous theater actors and shoot for 22 days. The film that resulted, $POSITIONS, is riotously funny and excruciatingly tense, but it paints an honest, nuanced portrait of its middle America setting and the people who reside there. It premiered at SXSW, and was all anyone could talk about when I caught it at New/Next this past fall. Despite being a rollicking crowd pleaser about buzzy contemporary issues, finding distribution was no picnic for Daley and team. It’s the most recent example of a low budget indie that should be a breakout hit, but that faces an uncertain future in the bleak current film landscape. In the following conversation Daley speaks very honestly about his experience with festivals and distribution — as well as his approach to casting, creating tension, and the inspiration he took from ‘90s dumb guy comedies. ($POSITIONS begins its theatrical run this Friday.)

The protagonist of $POSITIONS, Mike (played by Michael Kunicki) is this highly strung gambling addict, and the whole story runs through him. How did you think about that character and writing through him?

Brandon Daley: Mike was very much the one character that was just based on dumb guy comedy stuff. I was raised on ‘90s comedies, and I love making dumb guy — and dumb girl — comedies, where the lead character is just a stupid person. Like Billy Madison or the Chris Farley movies or Jim Carrey movies. But I think those comedies fall short in the third act, because we don’t care about the character’s personal journey or growth or anything. I did want to put these more realistic touch points about addiction, things myself and my family struggle with. And the thing I like about Mike Kunicki was that he’s not a comedic actor. He’s a dramatic actor. And that makes the comedy work so much better in the film.

Mike Kunicki is such a good fit for the character and he feels like someone who would be in one of those ‘90s comedy movies.

Honestly, I had some issues where my cast fell through two weeks before production, so I was frantically trying to find a new cast that was local. I met Mike because he had read for some other roles, and then I had found Vinny Kress, who plays his brother Vinny, through Craigslist. And I thought they were a cool combo together. On my birthday that year, which is August 31, I met with them in a park and did a screen test to see if it would work. (We started production September 16.) And I didn’t realize how crazy Mike could go. He can just scream at the top of his lungs, and Vinny was so chill about it. We did a shot, reverse shot with Mike screaming as loud as possible and then we cleared Mike and had Vinny just reacting to whatever prompts we were giving him, and I cut it together and was like, “Damn, this feels like Freddy Got Fingered. He looks and is acting like Tom Green. It’s my dream to make a movie with Tom Green, and now I get the opportunity to do it!”

Michael and Vinny are both amazing. But I’ll admit that Trevor Dawkins, as Mike’s cousin Travis, is the standout to me. He’s unbelievable. How did you find him? And what was it like working with him?

Trevor was a guy who I was aware of because I edited this film for Spencer Parsons called Bite Radius, which is this 30 minute horror film. I edited that in like 2014, and Trevor is the lead in it. I thought he was extremely good. And it’s rare to find guys in the theater scene who are well trained actors who can play these kinds of sensitive meathead characters. He was involved in one of my earlier screen tests when I was trying to raise money for the film. And I didn’t think I was going to have him be the guy in the full movie. But then it ended up working out. When you’re casting people, you’re kind of taking a leap of faith. You can’t really know what performance they’re going to give. You just have to follow your intuition. Trevor’s performance in the final film was so different than his read in the screen test. It really came to life on set. Especially when we got him in costume and got tattoos on him.

How did it change?

I think in the screen test he was more of a guy who had just gotten out of prison who was wearing a button up shirt up to the collar and he was trying to get a corporate job or something. The character is based on my cousin, and my cousin has changed a lot versus what I wrote. But there’s this kind of guy who’s cool and you want to be their bud and nothing fazes them. And I think we got more of that through in the production. There’s such shit being piled on, but Trevor keeps a pretty cool head the whole time. And I like that. I like the idea of Mike spiraling for the first time and Trevor is like, “Oh, we’ve been here before dude. This is just how it is.” He’s almost like a trip-sitter for him.

I could see how, if some of these characters are based off of family members, you’d have a specific vision for the performances. But it sounds like you were pretty open to following the actors where they wanted to go.

I think it’s really rare to find an actor who can actually transform and be a character that’s not themselves. And I think as a director, especially with these sub-million dollar movies, you’re better off following your intuition and having a good read on people and pushing the character towards what their real life persona is as much as you can. And once I cast people, I’m changing things about the script and we’re changing things on set so that they can act less and they can just embody whoever they are in real life while performing.

Are you then trying to get a bunch of really different options or push further and further in one direction?

I give a lot of freedom to the actors to do whatever they want to do. And if it’s working on camera, I’m down with it. The only thing I’ll get picky with is jokes and the timing of jokes, and knowing how the coverage and performance and the timing of the joke need to work in synchronicity to sell the joke as it reads in the script. I’ll jump in for that stuff.

The tension is nonstop throughout. How did you go about achieving that?

I’m an anxious guy, so I knew I wanted to make an anxiety comedy. In the same way a comedy makes people laugh at the same time, I wanted people to feel panicky at the same time.

The way we approached it was having a very loose shooting style for a lot of scenes where it was a roaming handheld camera. Andrea Arnold was a huge reference point for the look of the movie. And then you’re just building these chaotic scenes and following things and trusting you have enough coverage to build it out in the edit.

And obviously the final tension comes from how it’s cut. Daniel Johnson, our editor, is incredible and my good bud and writing partner. We’ve worked together a long time. We found that tension together, and then Brian Berger, our sound designer, helped elevate it. The formula is: Shoot handheld, follow your instincts in terms of these non-actors playing with actors, and just see where the camera moves, and have enough coverage where you know you can build the scene in post.

You’re combining these disparate things — Andrea Arnold style, this Safdie energy, and ‘90s comedies. Were you nervous that that would work?

No. I was so confident that if I could pull those things off, that’s the exact movie I want to watch as an audience member. I was confident in the formula. I didn’t know for sure if it would work until we were on set, in production. And then you see the monitor and it’s like, “Oh, this will work.” A large part of that too is the screenplay, and just thinking about how the stakes are constantly elevated, and making sure you have these moments of breathing room in between — timing the tension with the breathing room. And facilitating the ride the audience goes on in the same way you do the jokes or drama in a movie.

I think a lot of times with sub-million dollar movies people are a little loosey goosey with the script. It sounds like you went the opposite way, honing the hell out of it.

I think my strongest suits as a director are being a writer and editor. I’m good at coverage on set and I’m good at writing scenes that are entertaining. I care a lot about entertainment. And I’m comfortable editing once everything is in the can. I think a lot of people really want to make a movie. And then they go out with no script and their life savings in the bank account and their friends and they run-and-gun a movie. But I don’t really want to make movies like that. Not to hate on those movies — I like a lot of movies that are like that — but I don’t think they’re as mindful of the audience as you need to be. I’m thinking a lot about what parts will be fun to watch in a theater.

One standout scene that’s indicative of you caring about entertaining the audience is the piss beer bong scene. I don’t want to spoil it, so people who haven’t seen the movie should skip this and come back to it. But the scene involves Mike drinking for the first time at a party… and what he’s drinking not being beer. How did you come up with that?

The idea of the joke was really funny to me. Not just Mike drinking piss. But him thinking he was drunk after drinking the piss. And then having him overshare about his life. That’s the real selling point of the joke. That was the biggest scene I wanted to film when I wrote the script. The script was even more graphic. I had them shitting in the beer bong and stuff. My actors were like, “I don’t know, man. I don’t think you should do that.” I was going to shoot it. I wanted to shoot a shot of someone’s asshole shitting into the beer bong while someone else pissed on the shit, because I knew the joke needed to be elevated. But then once it came to production, I was like, “Well, maybe two penises and then a cut to slo-mo is enough to elevate it. That’s a nice button.” So we settled for two penises peeing at the same time, cut into the slo-mo shot of Mike drinking the piss. And I think it’s enough. I don’t know if we needed to see someone shit on camera. But maybe one day I’ll be able to do that.

That scene was so crazy because we were going to shoot it on a Friday. We had Wednesday and Thursday off. On Wednesday we realized it was going to rain on Friday. So that Wednesday night I was like, “Can we move to Thursday? Can we get 50 extras to this house on Thursday?” In the course of like 14 hours, we moved everything, got all the extras out. And then we get to set and the owner of the house shows up. I thought everything was clear. But he was like, “Who are all these people in my yard?” We had 50 extras out there. He said, “You guys have to get the hell out of here!” I talked to him. I told him we had insurance. But he had no idea we were going to piss off his roof and drink it. So that was really intense.

I also know that some people were uncomfortable that we were peeing for real. A lot of people thought we weren’t going to pee for real. So we had to wait until most of our crew and cast had left. And then the very last shots we did that night were the penises peeing into the funnel at like 4:00 AM or something like that. This was like day 19 of 22, so we’d already been to hell and back. But that was the craziest day for the shoot. My AD was gone, one of my producers was gone. It was chaos.

What was it like watching that scene with a real audience for the first time?

It was so sick. For the screen test, we rented the little theater in the Music Box. We packed it with like 60 people. I do remember hearing all the gasps. I think someone yelled “Hell no!” They didn’t know what they were coming to see.

Twenty-two days isn’t nothing, but it’s a pretty tight schedule considering how many company moves you have and how much cast. I guess shooting handheld helps. But how the hell did you do it?

We structured the production by starting in one location. We’re in Aunt Barb’s house for the first four days. And then we weren’t in one location for more than two days. We were ping-ponging around. I don’t know how we did it. We had a crazy schedule. We’d do four on, two off, three on, one off. A lot of times on my days off, we were finding the locations we were going to shoot at in the next two or three days. Many times I’m shooting a scene and then our producer and locations manager, Jake Bloom, would be showing me options for places that he got to agree to shoot the next day. There were times when I was like, “I don’t think these are right. I think we can do better.” And I think the locations are incredible for it. A lot of that is Jake, and also Drew Angle, my DP, being willing to go on location scouts on his off days. It took a village, and everyone was down. It helped that people liked the script and had confidence in the project. That was the most useful thing for people trusting you when you say a location won’t work and we need to keep looking.

Tell me about the experience with festivals and finding distribution.

[Sighs.] When we got into SXSW, I felt like my prayers were answered. Everyone watched the movie. We got Neon to see it. You get no’s from cool people. Dark Star, the distributor we went with, was out of SXSW. They gave us an offer. They were so sweet. They were like, “I like the movie. Go and find other offers. Our offer stands if you ever want to come back to us.” And then I met with high profile distributors, and they had the opposite approach. They were giving us bad offers that were not great for my investors and with ultimatums of needing to answer by the end of the week. I didn’t like that. Dark Star, meanwhile, was so optimistic about the performance of the movie. They thought it would do well for them and they could do well for us. So that all played into our decision to go with them.

The thing that’s gutting is, when I was in production I thought we’d get an MG of $500K. I thought I’d sell it for $500K out of Sundance or SXSW. Then you get there and you’re talking to filmmakers who have made things at a similar budget and who have played those festivals. Literally all of the offers most people are getting — if you’re lucky enough to get an offer — is a zero to $30K MG. And then a split. I hesitate to talk about this because I don’t want to deter people from investing in indie films, and I don’t want to deter people from making indie films. But the reality is there’s such an over saturation on the market of people who will work for free and compete down the costs of the inputs on an indie film. And they want their movie to be seen, so that competes down the value to distributors. If these companies are able to get movies for $0, why should they be offering money out of SXSW? It’s really a distributors’ market right now — though, a lot of them are struggling as well.

It’s been incredible to work with Dark Star and have them take a lot off my plate. I don’t want to do that shit on my own. But a potential structure going forward would be to raise enough money so you can build in your own distribution and you’re not reliant on selling to get it in front of an audience. But it’s a bleak time. As an indie filmmaker, you think if you can make a feature and get into a big festival and sell it, you’re good. But even then a lot of people are leaving feeling like failures or holding onto their movies for too long. It’s extremely tough.

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Last week, I experienced the distinct pleasure (and, yes, displeasure) of seeing Dead Lover in stink-o-vision. As an olfactory experience, it was excruciating. As a theatrical experience, it was… a lot of fun! Though the movie is more comedy than horror, the scratch-and-stink card added the sort of collective dread you get with a truly scary movie. It’s a great reminder that you can make small movies feel like exciting events with small, creative strokes. There are more options than the standard post-screening Q&A. The film’s theatrical run has only just begun, and I’ll be paying close attention to how it fares.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Tuesday March 24, join Nothing Bogus and Daniel Varghese’s on a ride-and-watch-and-hang. We’ll be meeting at Grand Army Plaza at 6:00 PM, riding to Anjelica Village East at 6:15 PM, and catching the 7:00 PM screening of Kiki’s Delivery Service. (Tickets are half price for members; being a member is free.) And then we’ll ride to Three’s Brewing for a post movie hang. If you have trouble finding us at any point, hit the Nothing Bogus chat.

• I don’t want to steer anyone away from an event I’m hosting, but if Kiki’s isn’t your thing, Anjelica Film Center will be hosting a sneak-peek of Xander Robin’s Python Hunt on the 24th at 6:00 PM.

• Cole Jackson (a publicity veteran who has worked on Marty Supreme, F1, as well as indies from Betsey Brown and Peter Vack) is launching an independent consulting and freelance publicity business. He will be working closely with filmmakers and smaller distributors. Filmmakers looking for PR consultation can email cole@cj-projects.net.

• announced last week that Chloe Lizotte, formerly of Mubi Notebook, will be its new Content Director. Congrats to Chloe and Filmmaker!

• Team Dry Leaf beat Miroirs No. 3 in a soccer match hosted by Screen Slate and 1-2 Special this past weekend. More here.

• There’s a Film Diary Closing Party @ LIC Warehouse on Saturday, Mar 28.

• I really do not understand the overwhelmingly positive response to this 2.5 hour black hole slog of an escapist magical thinking fantasy. Just because a movie’s not based on blatantly corporate IP doesn’t mean it’s original. And just because Ryan Gosling stars doesn’t mean it’s not a Ryan Reynolds movie.

• SURVEY: If you ran a studio and could offer one up-and-coming filmmaker (someone mostly unknown) a blank check, who would you give it to? (You are NOT allowed to say yourself!) Respond here.

• Some spring grants, contests, and awards to apply for here.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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BEYOND CENTRAL CASTING

The Joys and Challenges of Casting ‘Neighbors’

Casting Director Harleigh Shaw on learning from Jennifer Venditti, navigating hurdles, and gaining trust in a nudist community.

Throughout the first season of Neighbors — Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford’s dizzying look at the wars different Americans are waging in their own yards, stoops, and beaches — I was continuously astounded. Not by the obsessive passion and childish pettiness with which people in this country are approaching local conflict. But rather, with the twists and turns each episode would take. Almost every person in the show at some point surprised me — often with some odd tangent or revealing hobby. If ever there was a show that proves the truism that reality is wilder than fiction it’s this one. As I watched, I kept wondering, How did the show find all these fascinating oddballs?

A big piece of the puzzle is casting director Harleigh Shaw. Shaw, who grew up in South Florida, met Fishman and Redford in the summer of 2019, at Borscht’s film fellowship. Redford led the program, and Fishman was another fellow there. “That program was amazing,” Shaw says. “I was working this marketing job at a tech startup at the time. And Borscht gave me the confidence that I could make films.”

Shaw was primarily working with 3D modeling and animation back then. “And then part of getting into casting was that I was so sick of being on my computer all the time,” she says. Another part was Jennifer Venditti, whose work, especially on her 2007 film Billy the Kid, “presented a potential of what casting could look like.”

In addition to casting some of Fishman’s films and doing commercial work, Shaw gained experience working under Kate Antognini on How to With John Wilson — an experience that made her realize “it was what I wanted to be doing.” Recently, I spoke with Shaw about her work on Neighbors, Xander Robin’s upcoming The Python Hunt, and her own short film.

What attracted you to the Jennifer Venditti method and the actors she was finding?

The documentary aspect of things. That’s what my main focus is now. It’s so special to have this kind of access and enter someone’s life, or a world, that you never would’ve found yourself in.

When you’re first reaching out to someone, how do you go about it? What do you say?

It’s different for every situation and every project. But I like approaching people with intention. This is what I see in you and this is what I’m working on and this is how I see you fitting into it. Is that something you’d be open to?

How do you go about making sure that people you cast, especially in documentary, don’t end up getting exploited?

With something like Neighbors, or any of the documentaries I’ve worked on, there’s a long process of hours and hours of phone calls, Zooms, and in-person visits. There’s so much trust building between all of us before we even starting filming. Not only with me, but also with the directors and producers as well. We’ve all built close relationships with the people on the show. The star of the finale was just saying the other day that the whole process was like therapy for him.

Are there one or two casting moments that stand out from Neighbors?

There was one person we cast in NYC who didn’t have a phone, so we had to pick spots to meet at a set time to talk about the show and just hope he’d show up. Also, the time in the Pasco County nudist communities with Harrison was pretty unforgettable. We spent two weeks just hanging out naked in different communities, learning about the varied dynamics at play in each. There was one story in a nudist HOA community that we really wanted to have on the show. One side of the dispute was down, but we had to try to convince the HOA board to participate. They spoke with us and then debated participating for about a week. Each day that week, they kept inviting us to play nude volleyball with them. We would go play and check in each time about whether they wanted to do the show. I think they delayed telling us they wouldn’t participate because they just really liked hanging with us and having us on their volleyball team.

On a show like Neighbors, does the job of Casting Director end at casting someone? Or are you on set and coordinating with that person as the shoot goes?

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If you were following Pete’s picks, you had an alright night. He picked right on Best Actor, International Feature, Production Design, Hair & Makeup, Costumes, Animated Feature, Sound, Score, and Original Song. And he missed on Cinematography, Supporting Actress, VFX, and Documentary Feature. Pete tells me he came out up $20 on his own bets. Remember, if you won money based off his picks you’re legally obligated to invest in a paid subscription to Nothing Bogus. It’s the law.

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Here’s what’s happening this week:

• If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably like movies. But do you also like bicycling??? If you do, and if you live in NYC, join Nothing Bogus and Daniel Varghese’s cycling newsletter on March 24 for a ride from Grand Army Plaza to Anjelica Village East to see Kiki’s Delivery Service. Ride starts at 6:15 PM, movie starts at 7:00. Tickets are half price on Tuesdays! Drinks at Threes Brewing afterwards. It’ll be fun!

• Kabir Chibber is hosting a film club meetup in a space called Verci, next to Union Square, for filmmakers and aspiring filmmakers. Thursday March 19, 7:00 PM. RSVP here.

• After SXSW, Boots Riley is taking his new film, I Love Boosters, on a college tour, which will be followed by a May 22 release. Seems like a good way to build word of mouth from festival to release. Anyone have experience doing the same they want to share?

• LA Festival of Movies and New Directors New Films both released their lineups this past week.

• Video Store.Age has new live events in LA on March 18 and 19.

• Sabrina Greco is looking to borrow a comtek March 21 - April 5. DM @sabgrex on IG.

• Lily Cunningham Perini is looking for VFX artist recs. DM @chilicunningham on IG.

• SURVEY: If you ran a studio and could offer one up-and-coming filmmaker (someone mostly unknown) a blank check, who would you give it to? (You are NOT allowed to say yourself!) Respond here.

• Some spring grants, contests, and awards to apply for here.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

IMPOSSIBLE QUESTIONS

What Makes a Cinematic Sensation?

You can’t reverse engineer a hit. But what can we learn from some recent original films that have broken through in a big way?

For a while, I’ve been thinking about what audiences are responding to, both in terms of films themselves and their marketing. And last week, a series of interviews on the subject (with Sev Ohanian, Celine Song, and Adam Faze) — plus a bigger piece where I attempted to synthesize everything I was hearing and observing — went live on Esquire.com. The TLDR is, to quote William Goldman, “nobody knows anything.” But there are a lot of interesting tidbits in each piece. I think the Adam Faze interview will be of particular interest to readers of this newsletter — you may get some ideas for how to reach lots of people online with a small marketing budget.

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

How Grace Glowicki Brought Dead Lover to Life

A conversation between Glowicki and filmmaker Marissa Goldman touches on Save the Cat, imaginative studio sets, shooting on film, and, yes, stink-o-vision...

In Dead Lover, Grace Glowicki plays a lonely gravedigger who becomes determined to resurrect her dream lover after he drowns at sea. If the film’s premise is reminiscent of Frankenstein, its experimental-theater-meets-DIY-horror aesthetics make it a creation thoroughly its own. Glowicki, who directed the film, worked with a puppeteer, a theater maker, and a clown to develop the material, but also snagged some techniques from the most conventional of sources (more on that below). Friend of the newsletter Becca Brooks Morrin, who was the film’s production designer, went wild, creating expressive handmade sets that bring the whole macabre saga to vivid life. The film is at once wacky, tactile, and sincere, with inventive form, strong world building, and audacity to pursue something singular. All of which was what drew fellow filmmaker Marissa Goldman to the film when she saw it at SXSW last year. Goldman was there with her own short film, Max Distance. Recently, the two chatted about how a conventional structure can enable risk taking, their feelings about gothic literature, and Dead Lover’s use of stink-o-vision during select screenings. Dead Lover hits select theaters — including every US Alamo Drafthouse — on Wednesday.

Marissa Goldman: The film is so unique and inspiring. It reminds me that a film can be anything.

Grace Glowicki: It’s nice you say that because the 1966 Czech film Daisies is a big inspiration, and that poster hangs above my desk, and every time I look at that poster it reminds me that a movie can be anything. I pushed myself to remember that. You can get so lost in thinking you need to make a conventional movie. And it’s interesting, there’s a lot of experimental stuff in Dead Lover, but we also used Save the Cat as a way to write the screenplay. I sometimes say it’s an “arthouse trojan horse.” The structure and accessibility of the story is actually pretty stupid and dulled down, ‘screenplays for dummies’ vibes. Which I kind of love, because it’s so simple and rudimentary that you know it can work. And within that you can be fearless and experimental and make some wacky decisions. So I think I’m a balance of your film can be anything and Save the Cat.

I think it’s important when you’re experimenting a lot to hold the audience’s hand in some way. But tell me more about how Save the Cat influenced the screenplay.

We used the whole structure of the book. And right now, Mary Dauterman and Jenny Donheiser and I are writing another movie together and we’re using it, too. Basically, Save the Cat is a moment in this kind of story structure, but the book Save the Cat also gives you a full four-act structure. It’s super basic stuff. But it outlines how to tell a perfectly symmetrical, predictable, conventional story in a way that audiences expect.

One thing that’s bothered me with indie films is that on Letterboxd the criticism will be “nothing happened in this movie” or “this should’ve been a short film.” For my film Tito, I didn’t follow any kind of story structure and all the criticisms of the movie were that “nothing happened.” I heard that so many times. So I was like, “Maybe I don’t know story structure yet and I’m being kind of cocky and trying to break it before I know it.” So I was interested in proving to myself that I could tell a story that made sense and was accessible and entertaining. Who knows, maybe next time I’ll try and subvert it more.

It’s nice that the story’s still fun. But it doesn’t feel conventional. It felt very form-forward. Did the form — the black box theater — come before the story, or vice versa?

I think the story came first. I was just talking to friends over the course of two years, spitballing and world-building characters, doing an oral storytelling, world-building thing. So the story of a grave digger who’s really lonely and trying to re-animate her dead lover with only his finger came from those conversations. And then I just tried to pair each step of the development with, if I was being brutally honest with myself, what did I actually like? And I really like rehearsal and being in a studio, I really like theater people, I like clowning. So I took that oral story to a group of a puppeteer, a theater maker, and a clown in a rehearsal studio in Toronto, and we just dicked around and spitballed on our feet.

We developed the next phase of the story physically, just by improving together and exploring movement. And I think because I was in the studio space with these theater people, that’s when the aesthetics of the film started to formalize in my head. So the aesthetics came after. And for some reason, when I’m writing I do little collages on photoshop of characters as a way to communicate to department heads and also inspire myself. And a lot of those collages were photos of Iggy Pop in the ‘70s when he’s onstage in a spotlight with like one silver glove. These really expressive photos of him in spotlight. Because of the nature of a stage it falls to black around him. So because of my love of theater and these Iggy Pop photos, I leaned into minimalism visually. And I wanted to shoot on film, so I knew I’d have to pare it back so much to accomplish such a long film, so that encouraged the minimalism as well.

Also, I love Becca Brooks Morrin, the production designer. What was the process like in building the world?

I worked with Becca on Strawberry Mansion and watched her create these fantasy worlds out of cardboard and garbage and all this shit. And I worked with her on Booger as well, where she was making shit out of garbage bags and hair extensions. Knowing Becca, I figured that she’d be able to do this with whatever I’m able to give her. And of course, she nailed it.

It feels like it had to be in that style.

Totally. And it really had to be on film. For a while we thought we couldn’t afford it. And then I was like, “Guys, I don’t think this movie works if it’s not on film.” There’s not a lot going on in the backgrounds, so it needed to be this tactile, analog thing in order for it to work visually.

And you made this with friends, right?

Yeah. Ben Petrie is my husband. And then Lowen Morrow I didn’t know before. I’d just seen them in theater shows in Toronto and was obsessed with them. And Leah Doz and I were friends but didn’t know each other that well. I knew some department heads before, but it was in the spirit of friendship — we picked people we wanted to be friends with.

Are you a gothic literature fan?

I’m probably severely under-read. But I’m a fan of that era. I haven’t seen Wuthering Heights yet. What did you think?

I’m probably one of the only people who liked it. They shouldn’t have cast Heathcliff as white. But the film was an interesting homage to gothic literature in its style. I think a lot of people are saying it didn’t stick to the plot or themes. But I really enjoyed it.

Do you feel like there’s a resurgence of romantic movies?

What else?

Materialists, The Drama, this one... I feel like people want the escapist romance right now.

Another theory I have is that we’re very much in the age of irony and I wonder if we’re coming to the end of that, and romance is hard to do ironically.

It’s true. You need to be lame.

I love lame. I love sincerity. I like vulnerability in art, personally. Even though Dead Lover is very goofy, there’s a lot of love behind it that made it feel sincere.

I like trying to ground all the comedy in actual emotions, in longing. I’m kind of obsessed with lonely characters who feel ostracized who just want love and are in their own way. That’s so human and relatable. So hopefully some of the big comedy swings in the movie don’t just feel absurd for absurdity’s sake, but are coming from a true emotional core of exploring something somewhat emotionally relatable.

What was the accent?

In rehearsal one day, someone was like “What about a Cockney accent?” I don’t know how to do any accent properly, but I just started trying to do it. And we were all laughing, but they were like “There’s no way.” And I was like “No, I think we’re going to do this.” And I just dug my heels in. I intentionally didn’t want to study an accent or be consistent because it’s true to the spirit of the piece — that there are a lot of cracks and imperfections in it. It’s more about performance and character than the illusion of realism. The other day, Ben was watching My Fair Lady, with Eliza Doolittle, and he was like, “Oh my god, this is Gravedigger.” And I grew up on that movie, so maybe a part of it was from that. I love a bad accent. I love a bad singing voice.

Do you want to explore this style more?

People say you make the same movie again and again, and unfortunately that’s sort of what happens to me when I go to write. Exploring lonely characters looking for connection. So it’ll probably be another movie around that theme. But I think I’m going to try to make something that looks a little more conventional but lean into prosthetics and genre more. I fell in love with comedy making Dead Lover and I’m pretty much over drama completely. So I think I’m going to try to make a comedy horror again, but maybe not the aesthetic form. And I want to shoot with film again.

Do you think there will be more scares?

I’m not so much interested in the classical horror stuff of scaring people. I’m more interested in the grotesque humor of being a person. That’s why I like the midnight space of programming.

Do you have some favorite comedy horrors?

Young Frankenstein is obviously a big one. Rocky Horror, of course. There’s one on my shelf called Dead Alive. Frankenhooker is amazing. And the Crispin Glover film, Willard.

What’s been inspiring you for the next one?

The people I’ve been writing with and I have been reading Sam Sheppard plays. I’ve been watching Lina Wertmüller movies. She’s great for heightened comedic characters, but it’s all grounded in emotion. And the Coen brothers are great at going theatrical, with big characters, not following classic plot structure, and doing elements of genre, and being funny and emotionally grounded. They’re the kings of the kind of stuff I’d like to do. What’s been inspiring you?

Nirvanna the Band the Show​, which Ben was in. That was so good. The way they did VFX was inspiring.

We worked with their VFX people on ​Dead Lover​.

You guys have been doing screenings with stink-o-vision. I feel like having the film feel more like an event is the key to bringing movies back.

One of the guys who’s working with Cartuna-Dweck is Kurt Ravenwood, one of the producers of Hundreds of Beavers. That movie did so well theatrically because A) the movie rocks, and B) they had this live performance element to the screenings. People would take pictures and they’d circulate online and the screenings would sell out. And it remains this theatrical indie film phenomenon that’s still playing theaters years later, with this live component. Learning from him has been cool.

People just want to have a tactile, communal experience. And they want to participate. I feel like audiences want to be acknowledged. It’s cool that that desire is making itself known. It’s challenging as indie filmmakers to almost think more punk rock about distributing our films. It’s breaking the hierarchy between the screen and the audience. It’s hard to think of good eventized things that don’t just feel gimmicky though.

Marissa Goldman is an LA/NY based filmmaker. Her work has played at SXSW Aspen Shortsfest, Palm Springs Shortsfest and more. She has made work for Adult Swim, Vice, Complex, and more.

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Last week, I finally got around to watching Rebecca Miller’s five-part Martin Scorsese documentary, Mr. Scorsese. At the end of the series’ first episode, which mostly focuses on Scorsese’s childhood and intro to filmmaking, Miller gets to the making of Mean Streets. I could describe how she pays tribute to the film by cueing up “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and teasing Scorsese’s collaboration with Robert De Niro, but to get the full effect you really have to see it (apologies for the video of a video)…

When I saw that, I cackled and then… became a little emotional. Part of the reason it hit me so hard is that these two extraordinary artists are in the final stretch of their careers and won’t be around forever. But more so, I just found it so beautiful that they came together to begin with. Our culture is obviously ultra-individualistic, and it feels like things are only becoming more siloed. But so far as I’m concerned, the most special things happen when two powerful forces bring out the best in each other.

Separately, I was struck by Scorsese describing the reception to Boxcar Bertha, his first feature, made within the Roger Corman system. After the film premiered, John Cassavetes, who’d become a mentor figure after taking a liking to Scorsese’s NYU short films, gave Scorsese a warm hug and then told him, “Marty, you just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit.” To hear Scorsese describe it, Cassavetes said it with love. The point was that Scorsese should be applying his immense talents to more personal work. Scorsese took that to heart, and it led him to Mean Streets. It got me thinking about how honest friends should be with each other about their work. There’s obviously a time, place, type of relationship, and level of credibility that allows someone to offer hard truths. But it did make me think that doing so can sometimes be kind and beneficial. What do you think?

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Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Adult Film will present Moonshiner by playwright Lillian Mottern, directed by Danica Selem, at a Private Studio Space in Ridgewood (address released upon RSVP). Running from March 12 - April 4. Previews begin March 12 for a March 14 opening. More here.

• NoBudge Chicago is tonight.

• Tomorrow, Mubi Notebook is presenting Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (2009) at BAM featuring an intro by Alison Roman and Elissa Suh, and I’m planning to attend.

• Lily Cunningham Perini is looking for titles and/or poster designers for a short film. DM @chilicunningham on IG.

• Maggie Ambrose is looking for good, smart, charismatic, hard-working PAs (little experience OK) in NY and LA. Email penny@penny.world.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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OSCARS TAKES

Nothing Bogus Readers’ Ideas for a Better Oscars

Snubs, scheduling, and complete overhauls…

The Oscars Happen Too Late in the Year!

My hottest Oscar take is that they should happen earlier. We’re not meant to talk about a handful of movies for this long! Wrap it up by mid February and let us focus on new releases. - Ezgi Eren, author of 11am Saturday

Overhaul the Short Films Branch!

The short film branch is in need of major overhaul, especially for the Live Action Short. They always nominate issue-driven works or projects with big stars, never touching the experimental works that (imo) are best digested in a shorter package. - Andrew Truong, critic

Best Picture? More Like Best Producing

My hot Oscar take is that the Best Picture award needs to be renamed Best Producing. The top award is synonymous with Best Film, but most people don’t realize that the award actually goes to the producer(s) and not to the director. For example, some people think that Kleber Mendonça Filho is nominated for The Secret Agent this year, as well as Jon M. Chu for Wicked and Walter Salles for I’m Still Here last year when their producers are the ones that are the award’s recipients. - Eddy Frumkin, critic

Give Mary Bronstein Her Flowers!

Mary Bronstein should have gotten one of the best director spots. She and Eva Victor should both be up for original screenplay. Victor should have Emma Stone’s best actress slot. If I Had Legs, Sorry Baby, and Blue Moon should have gotten a BP noms over F1 or Train Dreams of Bugonia. - Marya E. Gates, critic

Justice for Pavements!

Pavements snubbed in all categories. - Kyle Greenberg, Head of Marketing & Distribution at Pavements distributor Utopia

LINE PRODUCER? MORE LIKE GAMBLING EXPERT

How to Definitely Win Lots of $$ Betting on this Year’s Oscars

The second edition of Pete’s Picks.

by Pete McClellan

Well folks, we’re less than one week away from the Oscars, which means it’s time for my second annual Oscars Best Bets. This year is shaping up to be much more exciting and difficult to predict than expected, with large shifts in the odds even in the week that I’ve started writing this article. But before we dive in, let’s take a look at last year and see how we did and what we learned. Also, if you’re brand new to betting lingo, I recommend reading last year’s article to understand the odds and EV and exactly what we’re looking for when placing a winning bet. Also, since last year, Kalshi has popped up as the dominant place for betting on the Oscars, however I find their odds less reliable so I’ll be looking at FanDuel1 to place my theoretical wagers.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how we did last year. We once again went 3-2, and are inching our way to profitability all-time since beginning our hypothetical Oscars Bets in 2023. Anora and Adrien Brody were favorites, but short enough odds worth betting, and I’m Still Here feels like a good read given it’s near even payout. We knew The Brutalist was a long shot, and truth is I’d never put a full unit bet on odds that large, so at the end of the day, a small profit.

Looking forward to 2026, I can’t help but ask myself two questions about how the last couple years have gone:

Will a long shot underdog ever win?

And what the hell is going on with the Best Actress category?

Which brings me to this year’s awards, starting with Best Actress:

An immovable object and an unstoppable force… Will Jessie Buckley finally break the curse of Best Actress favorites, or will Rose Byrne overcome the odds and take home the win? While I’ll certainly be waiting anxiously on this category, and I might put a small $5 wager to win $50 on Rose, this isn’t a Best Bet of the night. Sure, Jessie has taken home the Critic’s Choice, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and SAG Award, but I’m never risking $4,000 to win $100. Not when I think there’s a better opportunity in their male counterparts category.

Best Actor:

Since I started writing this article, the odds on this category have swung wildly. While ultimately I’m sticking with my pick below, note that when this was written, I thought I was picking an underdog, and now I’m on the side of the favorite.

This has quietly become the most hotly contested category of the night. The two way race between Leo and Timothee seemed to be settled as Timmy took home both the Critic’s Choice and the Golden Globe, but now as we approach Oscars night, Michael B. Jordan is racing up from third. Every part of me is screaming, take the favorite* at the lowest odds he’s been at since before Marty Supreme even came out! But I can’t help thinking that timing is everything when it comes to Oscars voting. Marty Supreme got all the early awards season buzz because of its December release, Sinners hadn’t been in a theater for nearly six months! But now that the dust has settled, it seems that Marty isn’t able to sustain the love. It’s +2700 in Best Picture, +900 in Best Screenplay (behind Sinners at -1250), and has no other Actor or Actress nominated. Personally, I think it’s Chalamet’s best career performance, but he’s got a long career ahead and maybe he’s already transitioned from Marty Mauser to Lisan Al-gaib in people’s minds. Also, the BAFTA’s were on February 22nd and the Oscars voting opened on February 26th… I’m not implying Jordan is going to win because of the unfortunate viral outburst, but he was certainly in the headlines garnering sympathy during the crucial window of decision making.

Michael B. Jordan: +150* (Now -115!) Grab this while you can as I expect the price to keep dropping.

Now that we’ve knocked out Best Actor and Best Actress, I won’t wait around all night to get to Best Picture. One Battle After Another is the clear favorite, so much so that I can’t in good conscience take it as a “Best Bet.” Laying $100 to win $20 isn’t good gambling, but it’s still worth talking about considering Paul Thomas Anderson is -1500 to win Best Director and OBAA is -1000 to win Best Adapted Screenplay. I was tempted to take the slightly better odds for Best Editing at -340, an award that has gone hand in hand with Best Picture the last three years, but then I noticed an even better angle for the night’s biggest favorite in Best Cinematography:

One Battle After Another: -210

The ASC Awards are March 8th, so I expect this to shift slightly, but I’m locking this in now in case Michael Bauman becomes even more of a favorite, and will gladly take shorter odds if he somehow loses the ASC2. This might be the award most influenced by my own personal taste, as I just liked OBAA better than the rest in this category when it comes to the visual storytelling. But it’s also a process of elimination: Train Dreams and Frankenstein are both Netflix productions and didn’t have theatrical releases. As mentioned above, the love for Marty Supreme has faded fast, and ultimately it’s not a film with a visual style distinct from the Safdie’s previous work. Finally, Sinners, the second favorite to take home best cinematography, does have some interesting sequences and was shot on IMAX 70mm, but a good majority of the film is inside a barn, on a soundstage, at night. There’s only so much you can do. One Battle After Another also has one thing in common with last year’s winner, VistaVision, and truly I think it’s that simple.

While I don’t think the Best Picture category will leave people on the edge of their seats, I am interested to revisit a money maker for us last year in Best International Feature Film, which could be a toss up. Sentimental Value currently sits as the favorite at the same odds as One Battle has to win Best Cinematography, and it makes sense. Every actor in that film is nominated for an award, it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and Joachim Trier is nominated for Best Director (albeit, the least likely to win). It’s a film about making films and if there’s one thing I trust it’s for Hollywood to sympathize with themselves. I keep trying to convince myself that maybe The Secret Agent will swoop in and steal this one away, but as I write it out it feels so incredibly foolish to not go with my gut, so with that, Best International Feature:

Sentimental Value: -210

As I look at all the reasons Sentimental Value takes home Best International Feature I can’t help but wonder who from the cast has the best chance of taking home an Oscar. Renate Reinsve doesn’t stand much of a chance against Jessie Buckley, as we saw before. Stellan Skarsgård was the favorite for Supporting Actor for a little while, but has fallen to a distant second to Sean Penn. And then there’s two chances at Best Supporting Actress, with both Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning getting nominations. Elle is a distant last place at +5000, which makes sense. Her role is not nearly as memorable as Inga’s. But shockingly Inga is at +3300. Clearly I haven’t learned my lesson that underdogs don’t win, cause my fourth Best Bet of the night is Best Supporting Actress:

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas: +3300

The odds favorite is Amy Madigan at +105, and even though her performance in Weapons is a highlight of the year, I just don’t see the Oscar going to a horror movie villain. Teyana Taylor and Wunmi Mosaku are second and third at +170 and +300 respectively, but both had roles with minimal screen time. They’re both great, and have gotten their flowers this year, but their characters are mostly there to push exposition. To me, Inga’s performance is the most well rounded and impactful. She ties the whole film together, and stands out as a newcomer amongst familiar faces. Anyone could win this category (making it one of the most exciting of the night) but that means ANYONE could win! (Except you Elle, sorry.) So why not Inga at a full 33 times our bet?

With four picks locked in it’s hard for me to find a fifth I like as much as any of the above. Running through some of the categories we’ve skipped, I think it’s obvious why nothing else stands out. I’d love to say One Battle After Another at -500 is bet five, but that feels cheap.

Frankenstein looks to take the triple crown in Production Design, Hair & Makeup, and Costumes. (-600, -700, and -900 in each).

Animated Feature and VFX are both locked up by Kpop Demon Hunters and Avatar at -1250 and -1100 each.

Sound will go to F1 at -450 cause car movies are always loud I guess? It’s always car movies with sound…

Score and Original Song are both at -1250 to Sinners and Kpop Demon Hunters respectively.

Best Supporting Actor could be interesting, but Sean Penn has jumped up to -320 and any other pick would just be hoping for an upset. My logic of looking at the film with two nominated actors and choosing the one who stands out more applies here, even if I think Benicio was more fun to watch.

I’m not touching the shorts block, cause there’s just no information there.

So all that’s left is Best Documentary, and to be completely transparent I haven’t seen any of them. So here’s all I’ve got: The Perfect Neighbor has won A LOT of awards and A LOT of people have actually seen it. I tend to follow the trend that Netflix movies don’t win Oscars, but second place is Mr. Nobody Against Putin and my instinct is… people are over movies about Russia? It seems like every year we have a new Russia doc. This is poor logic and probably a silly pick, but finding a favorite that isn’t -1000 or more this year is hard, so for my last pick, I’ll say favorites seem to just find a way to win and will do so again in the Best Documentary:

The Perfect Neighbor: -170

That’s all for this year. I’d love to hear from others if they agree or disagree, and fingers crossed we can all make some money together!

Pete McClellan is a Brooklyn based Producer, Line Producer, and UPM, whose credits include The Dutchman, premiering at SXSW ‘25, Dandelion available on AMC+, and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, from Pastel and A24. His Instagram is @mcclellanpete for more degenerate gambling ideas.

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Last Monday, I had a pretty transcendent film experience. I caught Snakes on a Plane on a 35mm print at Nitehawk Williamsburg. The screening was presented by programmer Desmond Thorne as part of Nitehawk’s Reconsider This series, which highlights different commercial and/or critical flops of the past and asks viewers whether they were truly hot messes or actually under-appreciated masterpieces. And let me tell you, Snakes is an unequivocal big budget B-movie comedic masterpiece (73% of attendees agreed). With its bonkers premise, transportive period music, and absolutely perfect line deliveries, it’s everything I wish Send Help was (minus a few very 2006-coded moments that obviously do not age well), and should be inspiration to anyone trying to make a bad but extremely fun midnight movie. I mean, come on…

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Ryan Martin Brown is looking for someone to run a sound mixer, boom, and single lav on Tuesday for 2-3 hours. At Life World. DM @ryanmartinbrown on IG.

• Jamie Rice is seeking grip gear (flags, appleboxes, sandbags, singers, silks, clamps, etc.) to borrow 3/4 - 3/9 for a low budget project. Open to trades. DM @jamiehrice on IG.

• Neal Kelley is searching for a creative producer for an upcoming drama feature hoping to shoot in September in northern Michigan. They’ve already raised a fair chunk and are closing in on a Line Producer/UPM so are really looking for someone who can help shape our casting approach as well as a festival/distribution/marketing strategy. Email nealgregory@gmail.com.

• Stupid Co. is hosting its 6th monthly roundtable and quest to demiystify distribution, build community, and open the conversation between a working film distributor and truly indie filmmakers interested in self-distribution, DIY filmmaking and beyond. March 10 at 10:00 AM PST. More here.

• Nicola Carbini is looking for a kitchen/apartment in Harlem for a film shoot in mid-April. Paid. DM @nicofromboston on IG.

• Joshua Holtzman is seeking background actors in LA March 7th 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM.

• Yona Strauss is ISO an LA suburban home for a 2 day short. DM @yonastrauss on IG with recs.

• Aaron Schoonover is seeking a trained male dancer for a short film in LA. 3/27 - 3/28. DM on IG.

• Millennium Film is hosting a workshop: intro to 16mm film led by Anton Adtudillo. Sunday March 8, 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. at 167 Wilson Ave. $15 - $30 sliding scale. Email info @millinniumfilm.org to register.

• FWIW: In a recent interview, Jason Blum said that in addition to focussing on more IP, he wants Blumhouse to not “lose the capacity to make low budget and super low budget movies.” He added: “We’re looking at some sub-million dollar movies, and I wanna have an apparatus to continue to do that.”

• is now on Substack.

• I want to hear your hottest Oscars takes for a segment in next week’s newsletter. Can be about the nominees, new award ideas, watching preferences, etc. Email nothingbogus1@gmail.com.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

Cartuna Is Betting on the Freaks

“We’re on the cusp of new voices, of really interesting, cool, challenging, far out-there cinema coming out.”

For over a decade now, James Belfer has quietly been one step ahead on where video content and platforms were heading. Belfer’s company, Cartuna, has moved from producing short-form animation for social (including the first two animated shows that Facebook ever greenlit) to doing so for streaming. And in recent years, he’s been turning his attention to the weirdest corners of low budget DIY feature filmmaking, both as a producer and distributor. Cartuna’s slate has included notable Broke Wave flicks like Julian Glander’s Boys Go to Jupiter, Albert Birney’s Obex, and Grace Glowicki’s upcoming Dead Lover. These are the sorts of films Belfer loves. And he sees them as indicative of a rising film movement.

That realization came when Birney told him about how he and Pete Ohs had been shooting Obex completely independently, without a real crew or budget. “I was like, ‘If this is the way artists are acting right now, and all of these weird, cool things are happening — like what Todd Rojal is doing with Fuck My Son — then we’re on the cusp of a film movement most likely. We’re on the cusp of new voices, of really interesting, cool, challenging, far out-there cinema coming out.”

Recently, I went deep with Belfer on his journey with Cartuna, how he’s been approaching the business of distributing weird little microbudget features, and the gaps he sees in the current market. It’s a long, detailed conversation, but one that I think will be quite useful to anyone interested in indie distribution.

How did Cartuna come about?

James Belfer: Back in 2013, I was producing indie film and investing in indie film. I was coming out of business school. I had a feeling that things were about to change in independent cinema. I was worried that the market was going to collapse at any minute, because what was happening was too good to be true. So I launched what at the time was the first ever content accelerator program. And for two years I was basically experimenting with all different kinds of artists and creators. Everything from feature films to marketing companies, small screen platforms, graphic novels, Vine creators, YouTube creators. It was kind of like, “Let’s throw everything at the wall and see what’s working.” And what emerged out of it was seeing that short form premium digital content was the hot buzz term, and no one was really focusing on creating animated comedy for adults.

Through this two year program that I was doing, I did animation for the first time, which I have a personal passion for, and I fell in love with the process. So I was like, “Look, I see a gap in the marketplace.” My brother, Adam, was looking to shift careers as well. So we were like, “Let’s just start producing all of this animation on spec. And then we’ll either license it to these platforms that are popping up — like Watchable and Go90 and Seeso and YouTube was starting to pay for stuff — or sell it to them, or use it as proof of concept to sell as a TV show. And that was the birth of Cartuna.

So with that ethos in mind, we were both looking at things from a producorial landscape and perspective. And as the company has evolved and changed over the years, it was looking at what’s working in the market, what are people interested in, what’s selling, and what’s interesting to make. We always would be producing things independently, whether it was these digital series’ or eventually stuff for social channels or now going back into supporting independent features and shorts. And then, through similar sort of Spidey senses that I had about three years ago with television and streaming, that’s what kind of drop-kicked me into looking at features and ultimately distribution. I thought television streaming is probably going to collapse. And if I was stuck focused on that, I’d be in a lot of trouble.

That experiment with short form cartoons worked then?

Yeah. It was interesting because I was saying “We’ll produce this stuff, and we’ll license it to these companies or we’ll sell it to them, and if everything else fails we’ll put it on Facebook.” I’m like, “Facebook just allowed native uploads for the first time ever. And if they’re allowing native uploads, that means they’re trying to become YouTube. And if they’re trying to become YouTube, YouTube is now paying for content, so Facebook is going to start paying for content. So if we’re the first people on Facebook posting this stuff, getting views on this stuff, then when Facebook goes to pay creators they’ll look at who their top creators are and say, ‘Ok, you, you, and you, here’s some money.’” And that’s kind of what happened. The only thing I predicted wrong was I thought Facebook would start doing it in three to five years and they did it in two years. And we were the first two animated shows that Facebook ever greenlit. And we were the first show that Watchable licensed. And we were the first animated shows that Comedy Central digital produced. We were always the first of these things because all these existing animation studios were focused on getting a Netflix show or a Comedy Central TV show. We were focusing on digital and no one else was really paying attention at the time.

All of that was working. But eventually we saw that all of these platforms were starting to disappear and pull back and get shuttered. So we said, “Look, we have all this experience in producing these shows, so let’s focus more on television and streaming.” Because that started to skyrocket. The amount of shows Netflix was producing went from like three to 30. And then all these other networks and streamers started coming up. And that was good and we sold a couple shows and had a couple successes. But it was a much slower process. And in the middle of it I was like, “I don’t know about everything, guys. The strikes are a few years away. I think it’s going to be far worse than what everyone is saying it’s going to be. We’re in the midst of, or on the cusp of, a massive global recession. Consolidation is happening nonstop. This is basically what happened in 2008.” So I was looking at all that and was like, “If history repeats itself, streaming is going to collapse.” And we were solely focused on streaming. We had like twenty different projects on our slate. So I was like, “Ok, let’s keep doing what we’re doing. But let’s start paying attention to everything else.”

First I said, “Let’s forget about the US right now. What’s the rest of the world doing?” And the rest of the world, when it comes to animation, it’s mostly not series’; it’s predominantly shorts and features. And everything is being funded by these international coproductions. So I was like, “Ok, let’s start looking to that. How do these things work?” We set up a couple of projects, one of which we got into the Sundance producers’ lab and then the Berlinale talent labs. And we have a couple others we’re circling piecing together.

And did that lead you back somehow to indie film?

Yeah. I was like, “Ok, if we’re looking at independently producing features again, let’s go back to the US and see what’s going on in the indie film world.” I’d been removed from it for a while. So I started asking people, “How’s the market?” And they were all like, “It’s horrible. The buyers are all terrible. No one’s paying anything. No one’s buying anything. Investors are not interested in funding anything. It sucks. Far worse than when you left and what you said was going to happen.” And I was like, “Well, that’s disappointing. But what are you doing about it?” And everyone was like, “We’re just making stuff weirder and cheaper. We don’t care. If no one’s going to buy it, we don’t care if it’s commercial. We’re just going to make a thing.” And that’s how Obex came about.

I was like, “If no one’s really buying this stuff, and the hot distributor at the time was really just an amalgamation of different contractors they were hiring to do all their work for them, I could probably do that.” It seemed like a lot of work, but like it wasn’t that hard. So I started going deep down the rabbit hole of distribution.

And then I’m doing the total full circle of, “Ok, now I’m looking at indie film distribution, so what’s the deal with these international coproductions?” And I was seeing that no one was buying them. The top three or four international animated films, excluding Japan and anime, would get acquired. But the majority would go unsold for years. Films that are nominated for European film awards or won Annecy. No one really cares here in the US. It was like years ago no one was really buying Kurosawa films, until you had Janus and Criterion go, “We will.” It was this realization that there’s so much incredible animated film internationally, and there’s so much incredible weird, interesting film happening in the US, so I think I need to get into distribution.

So you see all this interesting stuff happening and you think there’s a market that’s not being filled.

I think there’s one market which isn’t being filled, which is animation. I think animation is wildly underserved. You have GKIDS as the only independent North American animation distributor, which you could argue is not even independent anymore now that they’re owned by Toho. And I have no idea what they’re going to be like now that they’re a Japanese subsidiary. What I have noticed is that they’re distributing a lot more live action Japanese rep titles and fewer independent European animated titles. So it’s likely that the only real buyer in North America is buying even less of these animated features that are out there. So I think there’s just a pretty big hole in animation. And audiences love this stuff. It’s interesting and it’s cool and it’s weird.

And in general when it comes to independent distribution, I don’t think there’s so much of a gap as there are so many films going unsold. And it’s particularly the weirder ones that aren’t getting sold or that are reluctantly accepting lowball offers because distributors say, “Well, this isn’t commercial so how commercial can we release this?” And I’m like, “I think these things are going to do far better than what’s quote unquote ‘commercial’ if you know how to service them properly and you give them dedicated attention.” I think that’s the biggest issues that most independent producers site about working with a distributor. A lot of the time they feel like they don’t really have distributors’ attention. They’re not given enough time and focus. There’s not anything special or unique given to their film. Granted, you’re talking about companies that are short-staffed and over-slated. So if you have a company that’s focusing very intently on the specifics of this title, then it could perform much better than if you just run it through a factory, see if it’s a hit, and if not, then just turn off the ads and throw it on digital.

What does it look like if you do give these films the attention they deserve?

Boys Go to Jupiter.

OK, tell me everything you did.

Read more

Happy blizzard day to all in New York or other northeastern cities that have been barraged. I’m happy to report that this snow is the good stuff — dense and packable. Most NYC theaters are closed or partially closed today (though not Low or Syndicated), and I’m hoping to spend the evening at home, watching something as good as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Paul Mazursky’s incredible, unique 1969 comedy about the dangers of going to a New Age retreat. I’m a little embarrassed it took me until last week to see this classic. But on the other hand, wouldn’t it suck to have already seen all the great movies? As a side note: Can someone tell me why everyone isn’t talking about how great Dyann Cannon is all the time?

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• Film Forum has a new director: former Sundance director Tabitha Jackson. In a recent NYT interview, Jackson didn’t reveal much about her plans and vision, but I was intrigued to learn that “Film Forum just experienced its two best box office years ever.”

• Applications are open for the 2026 Gotham EDU Film & Media Career Development program. More here.

• The first Video Store.Age events are coming up this week in NYC. Feb 27 is the Roast of Caveh Zahedi at Life World. Feb 28 is a reading on trans optimism at The Bench. And March 1 is a conversation on the philosophy of the unknown at KGB Bar Red Room.

• Shortly after I sent last week’s newsletter, news broke that Frederik Wiseman, and then Tom Noonan, had died. RIP to two idiosyncratic legends who followed their own curiosities.

• SXSW is fast approaching (March 12 - 18). If you want to attend without buying a badge, here’s a little guide from Drew Marshall.

• Props to the filmmakers and film workers who signed a Feb 17 Open Letter to the Berlinale, opposing the festival’s censorship of “artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it.” Full letter and list of signees here.

• Become an LAFM member today. More here.

• A few casting calls for an upcoming film called Please Consider here. Open to NYC locals.

• If you haven’t done so yet, sign the pledge to boycott Enterprise and its subsidiary brands National and Alamo for providing vehicles to ICE.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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SCENE REPORTS

Should I Move to… Baltimore?

Everything you need about the Baltimore film scene.

The film industry is leaving LA. New York is impossibly expensive. If you’re an aspiring filmmaker — or working class film worker — you may have found yourself wondering if there’s a better alternative. Where are cool, new things percolating? Where can a person actually live like an artist — while also, you know, being around other artists, resources, and sources of inspiration? I’ve been asking myself these questions frequently — probably because I’ve personally found life in New York increasingly difficult to sustain. And this week, I’m excited to present the first in an ongoing series of Scene Reports. The idea is simple: to highlight what’s going on in places that aren’t NY or LA. First up: Baltimore. Enjoy!

Within the local film scene, what are the key places? (ie theaters, bars and houses where people congregate, etc.)

Royal Blue, Charles Theater - Zachary Michel, Actor/Producer, Baltimore for 12 years

New/Next Film Festival, New Works, watching movies in each others living rooms, making work in each others backyards, The Compound (artist studios), Beyond Video, Saul Zaentz Innovation Center, MIC/A, Revival Series at the Charles Theater, $7 Movie Tuesdays at the Warehouse Rotunda, Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival - Emma Hannaway, Film Producer and Festival Producer, grew up here, moved back in 2020

The Charles Theatre and Beyond Video - Eric Allen Hatch, co-founder and director of programming of New/Next Film Festival and co-owner of Beyond Video. Resident of Baltimore city since 1996

Current Space, 2640 Space, The Charles, Beyond Video, Ottobar, Fadensonnen - Nastasya Filippovna, erstwhile actor, DMV native

Charles Theater, Current Space Gallery - Becca Brooks Morrin, production designer

Who are the key people within the scene? (this could be filmmakers, theater programmers, festival organizers, etc.)

Eric Allen Hatch, Eric Cotten, Miceal O’Donnell, Albert Birney, Camila Franco Ribeiro Gomide - ZM

Eric Hatch, Albert Birney, John Waters, Marnie Ellen Hertzler, Corey Hughes, Jonna McKone, Elegance Bratton, Terence Nance, Emma Hannaway, Danny April (who just moved here!), Bradford Young, Elissa B Moorhead, Meredith Moore, Dan Deacon, Theo Anthony, Riel Roch-Decter (tangentially), Tyler Davis, Lynn Tomlinson - EH

Filmmakers: Sam Pollard, Albert Birney, Marnie Ellen Hertzler, Dan Deacon, Jimmy Joe Roche, Elegance Bratton, Karen Yasinsky, Jimmy Joe Roche, Kalima Young, Ramona Diaz, Chris LaMartina, Emma Hannaway, Corey Hughes... the list goes on and on - EAH

Eric Allen Hatch, Emma Hannaway, Jimmy Joe Roche, Albert Birney, John Waters (duh), KJ Mohr, Tomi Faison, Danielle d’Amico, Dina Fiasconaro, Camila Franco Ribeiro Gomide, Lincoln Robisch - NF

What are the big events that are important in the scene each year?

New Next Film Fest, Maryland Film Fest, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund cohort - ZM

New/Next Film Festival, New Works, Maryland Film Festival - EH

The annual New/Next Film Festival, the annual Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, The weekly Charles Revival Series, and the periodic New Works Baltimore screening series - EH

New/Next Film Festival, MD Film Fest, New Works screening series - NF

There’s New/Next, there’s a seasonal film showcase called New Works, Maryland Film Festival - BBM

What are some important works that have come out of the scene?

Strawberry Mansion, OBEX, Little Doors (in post, lookout!) - ZM

Strawberry Mansion, OBEX, Crestone, lots of short films, Move Ya Body the Birth of House Music, Rat Film, Baltimorons, All Light Everywhere, Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers - EH

Rat Film, 12 O’Clock Boys, Crestone, Strawberry Mansion, All Light Everywhere, Hamilton - EAH

More recently: Strawberry Mansion, OBEX, Sollers Point, The Baltimorons; obviously John Waters’ full filmography, The Wire, Homicide - NF

What’s the general vibe of the scene?

DIY, weird - ZM

I find a lot of work pushes formal boundaries, filmmakers in Baltimore are generally very process oriented, we are poor but have many treasured collaborations. - EH

DIY and collaborative, with an emphasis on experimental film, animation, doc and essay film, and low-budget indie features - EAH

Small, a little insular, heavy on weird/experimental/non-narrative works, lots of cross pollination with the local arts/music scene - NF

The Baltimore scene is really cool and fun. In New York there's all these subcultures and pockets, like the indie film crew, and then there's the indie stand-up comedian film crew, and then there's the music crew, and then there's the art bros, and then there's, you know, the regular stand-up comedians. And you can see the same people, like, every weekend, because you all go to the same kind of events if you're in one of those particular groups. But in Baltimore, it's like the fine artists hang out with the people in bands, and the filmmakers hang out with the photographers. The scene is built up because it's just a smaller town. It's not like all the film people only hang out with the film people. - BBM

What else is there to know about the scene?

We like to be kind and have fun and work together. - EH

It’s affordable for artists to live and work here. It’s a very diverse city and there’s a very exciting collaborative energy between the film, music, comedy, and visual arts scenes. - EAH

Lot of local filmmakers have connections to the MICA and Hopkins film programs, either as alumni or professors- NF

It’s a music town. I feel like a lot of the filmmakers don’t leave their house, and just emerge when their movie’s done. And there’s a lot of commercial work. - BBM

Do you have specific likes/dislikes about film in relation to this place?

Definitely dislike the lack of state funding. Love that you can do just about anything here though. - ZM

I love living and working in Baltimore. It feels like there’s room to breathe and work outside of a failing system in our own way. The artists who work here are all creatively rigorous and ambitious with their work without bending towards Hollywood pressures. There is a feeling that we will all continue to make work no matter what, and the process of making should be protected. I’m actively working to bring more work to Baltimore, always. - EH

We need a viable year-round microcinema. - EAH

love how unrepentantly freaky it is!!!! - NF

To participate in a future Scene Report, please fill out this form. Open to anyone in a city other than NY or LA.

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See also:

Famously amorous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” This Valentine’s day, the madness was a double feature of “Wuthering Heights” and Send Help (“Wuthering” Help? Send “Heights”?). And the reason was: What better way to spend our second campiest holiday1 than with one’s partner, a large gummy, and a campy double feature loosely about people in love?

This was my first Valentine’s Day double feature, and conceptually I love it. It’s communal; it’s great for couples, singles, and polycules alike; and it sure beats going to a fancy dinner where you’re surrounded by other couples overspending for pasta and wine on account of Pope Gelasius I being scandalized by Lupercalia.

In practice, this specific double feature left much to be desired. To be more specific: fun. I expected each of these films to be dumb. I hoped that they would be dumb in different ways than they were (i.e., the fun way).

Send Help was the sort of dumb where every scene lasted too long, various beats kept repeating themselves, and it never committed to its wild swerves. I kept wishing it was either Lost or Misery, rather than just miserably lost. To everyone giving this thing 3.5 stars on Letterboxd… I love Rachel MacAdams too, but I’m sorry, I really don’t understand???

As for “Wuthering Heights,” Alison Oliver is a delight and Hong Chau gets one funny moment that made me think, OK, maybe Emerald Fennell is a little bit self-aware. Otherwise, this film was useful in that it crystalized the Emerald Fennell project for me. This is a filmmaker who makes feature-length commercials for hashtags that were trending one to two years earlier (the source text of this film is clearly Charli XCX’s Brat, not Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights). My main issue is that if you’re going to be a provocateur, you should provoke! Don’t sand off the edges of everything that made the source text sharp and thorny. Who, apart from Mike Pence, is scandalized by very tonguey make outs and degradation fetishes in 2026?

Ultimately, these are both films that feel like they exist in service of their marketing materials, rather than vice versa. In hindsight, I should’ve just rewatched Pillion and these beautiful freaks doing their awesome ice dance.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• The Film Independent Spirit Awards were last night. Congrats to all the winners and nominees (both of which you can find here). I was particularly excited to see Kayo Martin recognized for his phenomenal “Breakout” performance in The Plague.

• Congrats to all the friends of the newsletter behind The Scout and The Travel Companion on having their films picked up for distribution by Greenwich Entertainment and Oscilloscope, respectively.

• And congrats to Screen Slate on 15 years!

• Hannah Schulman is looking for background extras for a low budget gritty NYC dark comedy short film shoot Feb 19 - 22 around Brooklyn and East Village, with BG needed 20th and 21st. Unpaid but we will have snacks and good vibes. Interested parties can email Hannah at portalfinderfilms@gmail.com or DM @portalfilmz on IG for more info. Sign-up sheet here.

• Courtney Therond is hiring BG PA from NYC to travel in bus with BG to CT and back for a shoot in CT 2/17 - 2/22. DM @courtneytherond on IG.

• Jackson James is seeking NYC gaffers (particularly ones who own their own G+E package) for a shoot 3/6. DM @jackson_____james on IG.

• TJ Misny is seeking a DP who can work locally in Western Mass. Green screen experience a plus. DM @tjmisny on IG.

• Alex Megaro is seeking an old-looking motel location that would allow filming at night in and around the front desk area. Can pay modest location fee. DM @prophetkotto on IG.

• “Looking for Ms. Keaton” continues at FLC this week, with screenings of notable Diane Keaton films such as Crimes of the Heart, Reds, Something’s Gotta Give, and more.

• If you haven’t done so yet, sign the pledge to boycott Enterprise and its subsidiary brands National and Alamo for providing vehicles to ICE.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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SOMETHING BOGUS

Powerful People During Imperfect Days

On Wim Wenders and Berlinale.

The Berlin Film Festival began last Thursday. But so far, the films have been overshadowed by how the festival is responding — or failing to respond — to current events.

At the opening press conference, German blogger Tilo Jung asked the jury why Berlinale — a festival with a history of vocally advocating for human rights causes — had shown support for people in Iran and Ukraine, “but never for Palestine.”

Jury president Wim Wenders got himself into hot water with the following response:

We cannot really enter the field of politics. We have to stay out of politics because if we made movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics … We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics, we have to do the work of people — not the work of politicians.

Wenders’s quote has made the rounds on social media, provoking ample backlash as well as a fierce rebuke from author Arundhati Roy, who proceeded to back out of a planned appearance at the festival.

For the most part, I think Wenders is being misinterpreted. Perhaps this is an overly generous reading, but I don’t think Wenders was literally saying that art should not be political. (After all, he has previously been quoted as saying “Every film is political.”) Rather, I read him to be advocating against art that is didactic, which is a sentiment I agree with. The problem then, if I’m interpreting him correctly, isn’t what he said; it’s what he said in response to the question he was asked.

Here’s the question, as reported by Deadline:

My question is, in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale do you as a member of the jury… support this selective treatment of human rights?

Wenders wasn’t being asked about art and how artists should approach making it. He was being asked about an institution that, as Jury President, he was choosing to represent.

Let’s put aside2 the political role of art. Wenders, at this stage of his career, is a relatively powerful person, and one who in that moment, as jury president, was occupying a position of power. He wasn’t attending the festival as a filmmaker; he was attending as an honorary representative of the festival. (The journalist even specified “as a member of the jury.”) In that context, not only was the question fair; I believe Wenders had a responsibility to take a stand. Whether or not it is the role of an artist “to enter the field of politics,” it certainly is the role of the powerful. Wenders’ dodge of the question was a form of complicity. And we’re seeing again and again — albeit at varying scales — how damaging the complicity of the powerful can be.

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

‘Union County’ Producer Stephanie Roush’s Sundance Diary

Stephanie Roush is an independent producer and founder of Foxglove Films. She produced Adam Meeks’s Union County, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Friday, January 23

As the plane begins to descend into Salt Lake City I hear the woman in front of me tell her seatmate that the Great Salt Lake is beginning to dry up. As I look out the window onto the brown, grey landscape of where we are landing, I hear her explain that the arsenic in the sediment at the bottom of the lake will turn to dust and make Salt Lake City uninhabitable. Something about her conspiratorial tone (and her Kemo Sabe hat) gives me pause, so I quickly Google “Salt Lake arsenic.” Her claims seem to be substantiated. Is this why Sundance is moving to Boulder?

By the time I do a Trader Joe’s run, pick up the filmmaker and his fiancee, grab breakfast burritos and coffee, and head up the mountain to Park City, it will be 48 hours exactly before the premiere of our film. The combination of stress, nerves, excitement, and impatience means that this is both a long and short amount of time. I have spent the month prior planning every hour of every day that we will be on the ground for Sundance, not for myself, but for our filmmaker and the actors. I feel excited to finally meet our publicists in-person (the wonderful Laura Sok and Kate McEdwards of TrackShot), and feel even more excited to let them run the show in the packed-to-the-gills press schedule we have ahead of our premiere.

Friday night, after a fun group dinner, I volunteer to get one of our actors, the inimitable Annette Deao, into an Uber back to her hotel. Everyone else I’m with goes to “try to get into the CAA party.” Annette, who plays a version of herself in the film, traveled to Park City from West Liberty, OH, where she and her husband grow tomatillos and raise chickens on a beautiful piece of land. I walk with Annette up to the parking lot designated for Uber pickups. The app tells me eight minutes, but of course I know better than to believe that. Thirty-five minutes later, the car pulls up and I apologize again for the wait, for having to stand out in the cold for so long, for exposing her so early in her time in Park City to the vulgarities of Sundance. She looks at me and smirks as she dips into the backseat of the sedan. “Oh, that was some of the best people watching I’ve had in a long time.” I call my friends who went to the CAA party. They’re still in line, but “getting closer to the front.” I decide to head home. My toes are completely numb and I make a mental note to wear better socks tomorrow.

Saturday January 24

It’s 8:15am and we are in the car driving to the Canyons resort to The Hollywood Reporter Studio where the filmmaker and our lead actor will do their first press of the day. As we walk into the room, I clock the Bogner pop-up, with their racks of fancy outerwear. As a producer, I know these coats are reserved for the “talent,” but I am of course going to press my luck anyways. It is always a dance with these fancy brand types at Sundance, but I’m not sure I’ve had enough coffee for my best performance.

An hour later, I walk out of the THR Studio with a Bogner balaclava, but no coat: a small consolation prize. I wonder if I’ll have better luck in Boulder.

Our next stop is a panel at the Adobe House on Main Street, a real opportunity to discuss the nitty gritty of making the film. My expectations for these things are always low, but moderator Angelique Jackson did her homework and sparked a deep, fluid conversation. My eyes begin to well up as Annette eloquently speaks about her work with the adult recovery court. Looking around the room, I realize I’m not alone. When the panel ends, a line immediately forms to speak with Annette.

After our fourth or fifth (it’s easy to lose track) press stop of the day, it is finally time for lunch. We head to Bangkok Thai, the only humane restaurant in Park City. I order tom kha ghai and sit down for the first time in what feels like, and perhaps genuinely is, hours.

As I consider ordering something else, a friend texts that she has a reservation at Butcher’s at 4:00 PM for an early dinner of steak and martinis. I text my husband, who is at the only sports bar in Park City watching the end of the Knicks game, to meet us there. At Butchers, I have neither a martini nor a steak, but a glass of water and a loose approximation of a cheeseburger. I am furiously texting trying to figure out how to get our actors off of Main Street and into cars without having to wait the typical 30 - 45 minutes. I should’ve known better to think I could’ve been good company.

Sunday January 25

I attend the Sundance Producer’s Celebration the morning of my premiere. I am unsurprisingly stressed, which hinders my ability to make the sort of small talk required of these kinds of events. Still, I have the opportunity to congratulate my friend Apoorva Charan for winning the Sundance Producer’s Award. It feels gratifying to watch someone so deserving of recognition receive it with such grace and poise. Her words of acceptance wash over me as my mind drifts back to the premiere.

Finally, we are heading to the premiere of Union County at Eccles. It’s the most calm I’ve felt all weekend. I’ve sat through many Eccles premieres before, but never one of my own (Stress Positions, which I also produced, premiered at the Library in 2024). The room oddly feels smaller than it’s ever felt, maybe because I can’t see the balcony hovering above me, or maybe because I know more people in this room than I ever have before.

When the lights finally come up in Eccles I look next to me to see my husband wiping tears from his eyes. Adam, the director, returns to the stage and calls up each of the actors. He brings Annette up last. As she makes her way onto the stage, the audience springs onto their feet. Watching her receive a standing ovation, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of pride. The feeling of connectedness in the room to the film — to its themes, to the hope of recovery, to the work that Annette does on a daily basis — is palpable. It reminds me of why I want to do this job in the first place. I feel a sense of pride that I want to remember.

Suddenly, it’s over and I’m calling an Uber for a few of our actors and manically checking my email for press breaks from our PR team. This job can be unrelenting. But that feeling in Eccles as Annette got her standing ovation was one I hadn’t quite felt before. It’s reason enough to make more movies.

To read more about the making of Union County, Stephanie recommends checking out the following pieces in The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire.

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See also:

And RIP to Robert Duvall, truly one of the best to ever do it.

Wow. Bad Bunny. That was the best Super Bowl halftime performance I can remember — and that’s even without the added benefit of imagining the horrified reactions of JD Vance and Stephen Miller. Art — even cleverly radical art on the biggest stage — is not going to be our salvation from fascism. But it sure feels good to experience an increasingly rare moment of exultation.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

• NoBudge Live 49 is tonight at Nitehawk Prospect Park.

  • And shortly after it (9:15 PM at Nitehawk Prospect Park and 9:30 PM at Nitehawk Williamsburg), you can catch a special sneak preview of Dead Lover, with “Stink-o-Vision” scratch-and-sniff cards + a Q&A via Zoom with co-writer/director/star Grace Glowicki and co-writer/star Ben Petrie. Use code “DeadLoverBKHorrorFF” for a discount.

• Applications are open for next year’s Square Peg Social — “a five-day, intimate gathering designed to break down the walls and barriers that too often exist within the film industry.” Friends of the show, Grant and Adam Conversano, attended last year and wrote about their experience on their Substack, .

• Bethany Arts Org’s Emerging Artist Fellowship applications are open through Feb 20. The fellowship offers a private studio conducive to your artistic medium + weekly stipend. Apply here.

• Filmmaker Friday NYC has a 40% discount code for equipment at Adorama. Email derekb@adorama.com and mention filmmaker friday.

• If you haven’t done so yet, sign the pledge to boycott Enterprise and its subsidiary brands National and Alamo for providing vehicles to ICE.

• The Sundance Producer’s Lab is accepting applications through Feb 11 at 9:00 AM PT. More here.

• If you’re a filmmaker living in BALTIMORE, please please please fill out this quick survey and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• Some industry jobs here, courtesy of TAPA.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

LA-DI-DA

The Sum of Diane Keaton’s Extraordinary Filmography

Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle discusses the late star’s enduring power and influence.

After Annie Hall was released, in 1977, Diane Keaton noticed people imitating her character, using the phrase “La-di-da” in daily life. “I don’t like it, you know?” she told a New Yorker profiler the following year. “It’s not a good idea to be identifiable, though it’s reassuring. It feels safe in most ways, and that’s bad, because it means that you’re accepted, and once that happens that’s where you stay. You have to watch yourself. I’d like a life like Katharine Hepburn’s in terms of work. She matured. She made the changes. Like Martha Graham.”

If Keaton never quite eclipsed the singular high of Annie Hall, over the next 47 years she certainly succeeded at changing and maturing. She took on roles that were challenging and provocative (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Interiors, Reds) and, later in life, found new shades to her unique persona (The First Wives Club, Something’s Gotta Give, The Family Stone); she worked through weighty questions concerning feminism, morality, and meaning in her work; and she also directed, most notably, the collage-style afterlife-exploring documentary, Heaven, and an episode of Twin Peaks. Today, you can see her profound influence both in some of our greatest working actresses (would we have Frances Ha or The Worst Person in the World without her?) and in her countless unsuccessful imitators.

This week, Film at Lincoln Center will be commemorating Keaton with “Looking for Ms. Keaton,” a 15-film retrospective that explores the full spectrum of her work, running from Feb. 13 - 19. I spoke to series curator Madeline Whittle about Keaton’s career, life, and legacy. Whittle has been a programmer at FLC for most of the past decade, working heavily on festivals’ and series’ like New Directors / New Films, Rendezvous with French Cinema, and Scary Movies. In addition to talking about Keaton, Whittle discussed her approach to programming, some favorite up-and-coming filmmakers, and where she sees hope for the future of the art form. For now, that latter part of the conversation will be a bonus for paid subscribers. I hope you’ll become a premium subscriber and share the newsletter with friends.

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Do you remember where you were and what you thought when you found out Diane Keaton had died?

Madeline Whittle: I’m pretty sure I was home. My colleagues and I have a group chat, and often the news comes to me through that channel. And I think immediately my colleagues and I were all stopped in our tracks. Certainly I was startled to think that it was even possible that we could lose Diane Keaton. I think on some level I perceived her as being ageless. It seemed impossible that we would’ve seen this coming. And yet, you look at her body of work and recognize the robustness of it. She has been a presence and a force in the American cinematic landscape for half a century.

I think part of what was so shocking about losing her is she is an embodiment of a generation — or an expression of a generation. She was born in 1946, so truly in the purest sense of the word she was a Baby Boomer. She was a product of the immediate aftermath of World War II and the immediate economic moment that gave rise to the baby boom. And the stories she was drawn to telling over the course of her on screen career had a real knack for expressing what women in her moment of American history were going through — and in incredibly specific roles that she embodied with absolute precision and uniqueness. She somehow managed to build a body of work that expressed a certain spectrum of women’s experience from the beginning of the 1970s to the new millenium. I think the outpouring of love and affection for her that we saw in the aftermath of her death really captured the extent to which she represented to audiences not just a particular star persona or approach to the work of acting, but that she really tapped in to social and cultural currents that we’re still reckoning with.

What was her significance to you personally? Do you have a favorite performance?

I think the first two Godfather films are two of the most rewatched films in my adult life. My mom’s family is of Italian ancestry and my great grandparents came through Ellis Island. So the Godfather mythology always loomed large in our family. We’re also a big movie family. And every time I revisit those films in adulthood I’m more struck by the character of Kay Corleone, who’s played by Diane Keaton. In some ways, it’s a very small role. And certainly it’s a role that encapsulates the way that women were marginalized in this very specific milieu of Italian-American mafia families, but the particular quality that Keaton imbued in that role made Kay a much less passive observer than the role was written for her to be. Without delivering many monologues, her status as a moral observer to the goings-on and the choices she makes in the role become the moral center of gravity of the trilogy. And it allows the viewer to find a way in and a perspective on the events that you wouldn’t necessarily have if the film was more narrowly focused on the experience of the men in the family.

Another one I saw early on was Something’s Gotta Give, I remember watching that with my grandparents, who gave me an education in ‘90s romantic comedy. And of course, she’s working in an entirely different register in that film than The Godfather, in a very self-deprecating, comedic mode. But in a way I think you can trace a through line from her roles in the ‘70s, like in Annie Hall or Looking for Mr. Goodbar, to her work in late middle age as an aging baby boomer who’s still grappling with these questions of work-life balance and how much importance a woman should place on her sexuality and her love life. I think encountering her in these roles at a fairly young age opened my eyes to how a movie star can build an argument over the course of their work. Through different roles and different dramatic registers, you can see a working through of these questions. Working on this series I was blown away by both the thoroughness of her inquiry but also how effortless she made it look. Now looking back at her life, it’s a really beautiful and well-rounded, coherent picture that she’s left us with.

In preparing this series was there anything about Keaton and her career that surprised you?

I think I was surprised to discover, in reading her words in interviews and profiles over the years, just how unselfconscious she seemed to be as a person. Looking at her filmography and sensing this remarkable coherence, I found it a bit startling and endearing just how guileless her self-presentation was throughout. In many ways Diane Keaton the person reads to us now as a Diane Keaton character, with the earnestness and guileless curiosity. For someone whose career in retrospect could look quite strategically constructed, it’s very clear that she was just feeling her way through a lifetime of artistic expression. Following her own curiosity, following her own affection or befudlement about the characters she was playing. And finding her way to the truth of these women — not by accident, but without a calculating approach.

I think there’s something about spending time with her as a person and an artist that sheds more light on the characters she played and the particular ingenuity she brought to her performances. She’s just a force of nature. And she very much understood her own work and contribution. But I wonder if she was conscious of just how effectively she was channeling these experiences that hadn’t been articulated by a whole generation of women.

How do you see her influence on future actors and directors? Who are some of her acolytes?

I think her legacy provided a model for acting in a self-deprecating mode that never surrendered self respect. If you look at a character like Annie Hall, who’s so sui generis, part of what makes a character like that so endearing and powerful is that Keaton was hyperaware of the silliness and absurdity inherent to the character, but also how that absurdity was grounded in a real human being and the specificity of a real human’s experience and sense of humor and outlook on life. I think she was not afraid to be the butt of the joke while also being the engine of the joke.

I look at stars today like Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, and I think they’re fully borrowing from the Diane Keaton playbook in terms of being fully self-possessed and fully in control, but perhaps creating an illusion or impression of being a little kooky or awkward. And not being afraid to zig when they’re expected to zag because sometimes letting an organic feeling take you to an unexpected place can create a much more powerful effect than adhering to convention or expectation. I very much see her example redounding in our new generation of actresses.

Tell me about your background and how you got into programming?

I’m actually coming up this month on ten years working with the programming team at FLC. I studied film as an undergrad and wanted to find a way to work with films, and in this industry, without making films. And the form that ended up taking was I worked as a research assistant. I contemplated an academic path after college. But ultimately, I gravitated to the New York film culture scene. I began to acquaint myself with this world of festivals. After studying a bit in Paris, I had a sense for what a really robust film culture within a city could look like. And it became clear that New York was the place in our neck of the woods to participate in a film culture on that scale. I was very fortunate that while I was working as a research assistant and doing some freelance translation work, an entry-level position opened up with the team at Film at Lincoln Center. I moved to New York to take that job, and I have been part of that team ever since. And I’ve really benefited from team leaders who have cultivated talent and put effort into training junior programmers on the job.

How would you describe your taste and philosophy as a programmer?

I’ve been very fortunate working at a place like FLC that has year-round programming, alternating between festivals, mainly comprising of films that have never shown in New York before and rep cinematech programming, which tends to focus on reintroducing an audience to a filmmaker with which they were acquainted but hadn’t been prompted to do a deep dive in a body of work before. Or sometimes we’ll do a thematic retrospective that’s older films from a number of different artists that are tied together within a particular historic moment or thematic grouping. All of which is to say I’ve had the opportunity to figure out exactly what my taste and sensibility is over time.

And I have different priorities within my programming work. When it comes to festival work, I’m always excited to sniff out new talent and new voices who have not had the opportunity to connect with an audience in a deeper way. New Directors / New Films is a great space for this. It’s a festival that’s all about discovery. It’s all about connecting our audience with filmmakers they may never have heard of because they’re on their first or second film.

Are there any particular films you’re proud of helping to champion?

In recent additions of New Directors / New Films, I’ve been excited to work with filmmakers like Theda Hammel. We showed Stress Positions a couple years ago, and I think she’s just an incredibly specific sort of perspective and sensibility. And she also happens to be a big rep cinema enthusiast. We see her at our theaters often.

A number of young filmmakers have also come through Rendezvous with French Cinema, which is a program I work on. That is just returning for its next edition next month.

I also work on a festival called Scary Movies that we brought back after a hiatus. Last year’s edition opened with It Ends, directed by Alex Ullom, who’s a first time feature director. He’s a really young guy who’s incredibly smart and focused on navigating this changing landscape of film production and distribution — how you make a film and then deliver it to an audience. His film didn’t have a distribution deal yet when we showed it last summer, and a great development at the end of 2025 was that the film got play on the new Letterboxd Video Store and then was picked up by Neon. These are the things that make the work exciting on an ongoing basis — being able to keep an ear to the ground and catch the exciting new personalities just as they’re coming onto the scene.

Being that you see so much new work from up-and-coming filmmakers, what’s your take on where independent cinema is at and where it’s going?

It’s a big question. I just got back from the Sundance Film Festival, which is very much a space where these questions are being asked. It might seem like a simplistic answer to the question, but as much as we’re seeing so much turmoil and uncertainty with regards to technologies of production and distribution and AI and streaming and corporate consolidation — all of these forces that effect the work that goes into the making of movies and the process by which those movies reach an audience — what a filmmaker like Alex Ullom or Theda Hammel demonstrate is that there continue to be young people who have something to say, who are really passionate about the art form of cinema, where this art came from, how it developed over time, and how it led us to where we are now. And as long as these artists are able to learn from each other and draw on each other’s experience and examples — how to find funding, how to make due with very little funding, how to adapt a particular idea to the constraints imposed by, say, the need to make rent — that gives me hope.

The filmmakers who give me hope tend to be the ones who are very scrappy and resourceful and adaptable and really committed to finding an audience — to not just have a vision and pursue it at all costs, but have a vision they want to share. If you look at the filmmakers who made the greatest impact at his year’s Sundance, for instance, they’re not trying to rehash what’s already been done. And maybe there are certain expectations you have for a Sundance film, but the films that do make an impact are the ones that are not afraid to diverge from what’s come before while also taking lessons from predecessors. The film that won several awards at this year’s festival, Josephine, by a second-time filmmaker named Beth de Araujo, is telling a story that hasn’t been told before, in a way that’s very rooted in the personal. It’s also very thoughtfully engaging with film form and thinking about ways to communicate something essential about its subject matter through artful means that are in conversation with a genre or tradition but also ways to bring about something new and specific and personal.

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As a programmer at Sundance, Ash Cook has spent the past eight years advocating for films like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and Kokomo City — films with small budgets and bold visions, made by people working in the margins. Over that same period, Cook watched as the system of indie distribution increasingly failed films that were challenging and didn’t have ample resources. “There’s been a consensus for years now — between sales agents, distributors, and filmmakers — that distribution is broken,” Cook says. “I felt like: What’s one thing we’re actually going to do?”

Cook had no illusions that he was going to fix the system himself. But he did think he could help some of his favorite films that he’d seen through his programming work find an audience. “It began as a pet project: How could we get these films into the audience’s hands?”

The answer: Video Store.Age, a new company he founded with Frameline programmer Aidan Dick, which launched today. It’ll work like this: Each quarter, Video Store.Age will release a collection of five features and five shorts on encrypted USB drives. The company will launch each drive with a non-screening event (the first will be a roast of Caveh Zahedi, on February 27, at Life World). And people can buy the drives at the events or through online mail orders. Profits will be split 50-50 with filmmakers. “The scale we’re aspiring to work at is pretty modest,” Cook says. “And it’s kind of been abandoned, because people are only working on films that are going to recoup millions of dollars. This real independent space feels like there’s a vacuum right now.”

I spoke to Cook and Dick about their aspirations for Video Store.Age, the systemic problems in modern distribution, and their first slate of titles.

When you say “distribution is broken,” tell me what you mean. When did it start and how did it happen?

Ash Cook: It’s a lot of different things. It’s a confluence of issues. Streamers changed the game — coming in with so much cash and beating out a lot of boutique distributors, being able to offer MG and give people the deals they wanted up front — and that meant that they boxed out some of the people who were doing things that were more hands-on, more filmmaker focused and smaller scale, to the point where they were pushed out of the industry and it left a lot of open space there. And then, after so many years of overspending on content and realizing they had to have such a critical mass, they’re not even able to pay much money anymore. So over time, as streaming has risen and theatrical has dwindled, what’s happened is that the deals available to filmmakers are no longer consummate with their performance. So basically, to get a deal is extremely competitive, it’s very unlikely, and it’s pitiful. In an ideal world, you get a streaming deal and everyone watches your movie. But you’ve signed up for an MG that’s so low — you’re keeping maybe 200,000 people on Netflix for a month: imagine what kind of money that is. But you only get what you signed for. Or, your film gets buried on a platform and nobody ever sees it even though it’s out there.

Aidan Dick: From an insider perspective, too, there’s just not transparency in terms of how many people are watching different films. That information is valuable, and it’s being withheld from filmmakers, and it’s something we want to be able to provide them.

Why address the problem in this specific way?

AC: We see a huge appetite for the slower media movement — people feeling like they have an unprecedented access to content but not really any curatorial point of view to find a way through it. No guidance to the editorial. And the bloated feeling is hitting a lot of people. There’s this consummate decline in quality if we’re working at this quantity. So, when you follow those feelings and follow filmmakers we’re interested in working with, this idea naturally emerged to do something in a distribution space that felt more humanistic, slower, hand-to-hand, DIY, kind of punk, kind of bootleg. And surprisingly, there was tons of momentum as we started having conversations with filmmakers and other distributors. It started as a pet project, but once we realized there was momentum, we asked: How can we build a runway long enough to capitalize on all of it? So over the past eight months, we’ve brought on capital partners to back the venture and we started thinking about it as a real label.

We’re only planning on touching twenty titles in year one. The size is such that we can be hands on with each team to build a campaign that makes sense for where they are in the film’s life cycle and what they want out of our collaboration. For example, for films that are on our slate that will also be in theaters, we’ll be selling drives in the lobby, like you would at a punk show where you’re getting merch as you leave. For films that are older, we have a different strategy. For films that have a great band that scored it, we have a different strategy. A huge part of the model is that bespoke element. As a festival, as a distributor, this process of trying to standardize and fit everything through the same mold is just not working. These are each precious, specific materials, and we’re planning to be really responsive to that.

AD: The thing that attracted me to Ash’s idea at first was talking about these in-person events, and how we both feel let down by just having a Q&A. You’re physically so close to a person who made something you loved, but there’s not enough time or space to get into anything about it. So I liked the idea of creating these ancillary, curated events around the films, where people can find their own way into something and take away that film and that experience and go home and watch it with their friends.

AC: We want to create as many opportunities as possible for people to find their way to this media. Maybe you know the director, maybe you know us, maybe you know the venue. And then you become part of something that feels rhythmic and social and connected. And the events will act like primers. We’re not planning on working on any films that are too commercial, so there’s a challenge. These are tough movies, they’re weird, they’re interesting, they’re different. So giving people a chance to set the table a little bit with their audience and give them a primer before a watch rather than a 20-minute explainer after will be valuable.

Were there certain films you had in the back of your mind as being Video Store.Age films? And if so, what connects them?

AC: I’ll give you three from our first collection that are indicative of the three main editorial thrusts we have. We’re going to do Sam Feder’s new documentary Heightened Scrutiny, which we world-premiered at Sundance last year. That is indicative of one thing we want our drives to do — circulation of revolutionary materials. When we’re talking about the collapse and narrowness of the distribution landscape right now, there is a big political implication. We’re seeing a situation where if the only way for filmmakers to get their bag is to get in bed with Bezos, that’s not A) good, and B) it’s not the kind of platform that’s going to provide the opportunity for films that aren’t politically in line with their agenda. That’s a big deal. I think people don’t realize how these things have come to really serious focal points. The Murdoch family are majority shareholders of Tribeca, Penske Media owns SXSW, the channels are in the hands of very few. So what is an independent channel right now where you could have 1-to-1 digital ownership?

And then, we’re going to collect The People’s Joker. We’re going to have a digital exclusive of the VHS copy. And that’s expressive of the hope that we’re going to be circulating things that have this mythology. If you’re down an r/lostmedia thread and wondering how you can see something, we want to help get it to you.

Third, we’re going to do Caveh Zahedi’s Higher Education. And that’s indicative of films that have made it out in the circuit, but in their time in the cycle never hit a distribution groove and aren’t available — things people know about, talk about, but are under-seen.

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How would you each describe your tastes?

AD: I think the films that I’ve really loved over the past couple years are movies that feel like the community they’re creating around and the community they’re creating inside of the filmmaking world feels like an ecology they’re growing and wanting to continue. That’s something Ash and I talk about a lot — wanting to align with people putting their energy in that direction and who are excited to work with us or finding new ways to share their work. I also love weird, sad, scary documentaries.

AC: One of the best parts of programming is how expansive your tastes can become — and how you learn there’s an audience for every film. Flexing those muscles and figuring that out is really fun. But the films that lie closest to home for me are low budget, grimy, gritty, and bold. I was really attracted to Sundance for filmmakers like Gregg Araki and Jennifer Reeder, who were working on these shoestring budgets but doing things that are so provocative, powerful, interesting, and bold.

The films I’ve been proudest of bringing into the fold at Sundance have been on that tip. I think of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and Kokomo City — these smaller films that I’ve been so excited to be able to get into the program at Sundance. How I’d express my taste is it’s mostly people who are working on the margins. So there’s this existential question at Sundance when you’re bringing marginalia out into the mainstream. It sometimes withers in the sun. I’m thinking infrastructurally about how you work at the margins and stay at the margins, because that’s where shit is cool and stays that way. And that’s what we’re doing here. We want it to be sustainable without making compromises about what that means for the editorial.

What will the first launch event look like?

AC: The first event will be on the 27th of February. We’re going to host at LifeWorld in Brooklyn, and it’ll be The Roast of Caveh Zahedi. I think it’s a good illustrator of what we’re doing. These events are exclusively non-screenings. Theatrical is so important, but there are so many great collaborators out in the field who are doing that work. We don’t need to be competing with that. We don’t need to be cannibalizing our own filmmakers’ audiences. We want to be doing something that feels more like nightlife or a literary reading — something profoundly social and a little less intense as an audience member. So we’ll have a lineup of some sceneyboppers who are going to come and roast Caveh at LifeWorld, and you’ll get the drives at the event. Maybe Caveh will tape the roast and put that on the drives that we sell online afterwards. The drives are fun because they’re so dynamic. They can take so much new material. We’re working with every team to put bonus content on each release. This is one that feels really organic.

How will you find titles down the line? Can people submit their films?

Read more

Sundance ‘26 wrapped yesterday. Much has been made of the all-night marathon bidding war for Olivia Wilde’s new comedy, The Invite. The film, which stars Seth Rogen, Ed Norton, Penelope Cruz, and Wilde, reportedly sold to A24 for $12 million. That there was a decent market for what seems to be a broadly entertaining film with a star-studded cast and Annapurna’s backing is, of course, better than the alternative. But I’m not sure it says much about the current state of the independent market. What of everything that was made, shall we say, more independently?

Levictus, the Australian queer horror film from Adrian Chiarella, reportedly sold to Neon for seven figures. And Sony Pictures Classics picked up a couple of (*gasp*) dramas: Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! and Stephanie Ahn’s debut, Bedford Park. No word on how much either went for or what the deals looked like, but it’s cool that Sony Pictures Classics came out swinging.

As for awards, the Grand Jury Prizes went to Josephine (U.S. Dramatic Competition), Nuisance Bear (U.S. Documentary Competition), Shame and Money (World Cinema Dramatic Competition), and To Hold a Mountain (World Cinema Documentary Competition). The NEXT Innovator Award went to The Incomer, and the NEXT Special Jury Award went to TheyDream.

Here’s what else is happening this week:

• If you haven’t done so yet, sign the pledge to boycott Enterprise and its subsidiary brands National and Alamo for providing vehicles to ICE.

  • According to a friend on the ground in Minnesota, ICE “purposefully ram their vehicles into other cars and leave the victims' vehicles in the middle of the road (sometimes still running or not even in park), they switch plates or drive with no plates at all to avoid tracking and accountability, they drive on the wrong side of the road, and they far exceed the speed limit constantly.”

• Shame on all the trades writing adulatory headlines on the ‘success’ of Melania’s opening weekend. These are the same clowns who can’t shut up about the Sinners and One Battle box offices not being that great when you consider their budgets and marketing spends. Do you realize how much Amazon spent marketing this craven propaganda?!? Grow a spine, people.

• UFO Short Film Lab applications close at the end of the day today. Get them in now for a chance to receive $10K, mentorship, and in-kind production/post resources.

• The Sundance Producer’s Lab is accepting applications through Feb 11 at 9:00 AM PT. More here.

• Stella Tompkins is casting an A24 film that’s looking for a male body builder/mma/self help guru type (40s - 50s). DM @stellatompkins on IG if that’s you or someone you know.

• Jesse Zhou has a full video and sound kit and will shoot and edit for cheap for those looking for content for a business, brand, etc. DM @fml.jesse on IG.

• Chris Amaya is seeking extras for a short film/pilot shooting 2/3 in the evening. Food provided. Shoot is at a Brooklyn diner. DM @tatamidreams_ on IG.

• Are you an experienced horror director (ideally Asian) who wants to shoot a $1m feature in Q3 of this year? Email materials to hi@thomaspk.com.

• I liked this review of Union County from . If you don’t follow her substack, you should.

• If you’re a filmmaker living in BALTIMORE, please please please fill out this quick survey and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• Some industry jobs here, courtesy of .

• And RIP to the great Catherine O’Hara, a truly one-of-one comedic genius.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

Exploring Texture and Memory with Aidan Cronin

Non Films’ Brian Ratigan and filmmaker Aidan Cronin discuss experimental techniques, formative collaborations, and Ithaca Experimental Film Festival.

by Brian Ratigan

When I first met Aidan Cronin, it felt like we had known each other for ages. At the time, Aidan was developing what would become his first feature film, The Birds Tell Me All There is to Know. We shared similar film influences and interests, and both gravitated to those that are taking actual risks in their filmmaking, whether shooting on expired stock or adapting from poetic source materials.

After graduating from Ithaca College, Aidan crafted and collaborated on numerous short films (including Philip Thompson’s I’m at Home and Living Reality), launched the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival at his alma mater, and became a festival programmer at the Brooklyn Film Festival. I recently met up with him in Prospect Park to talk about his origins as a filmmaker, his upcoming debut feature, and the act of looking.

Brian Ratigan: What was your first introduction to filmmaking?

Aidan Cronin: I remember when I was about six, I went to the Coney Island Aquarium with my grandparents. My aunt and uncle had three disposable cameras, and I just remember I took one from them, and started rifling off photos. Everywhere I looked, I was like “This needs to be captured. Oh, this needs to be captured.” So there was always this need to document.

In late middle school I would make little comedy videos with my friends. We went to thrift shops and eventually found a VHS camera. In my friend’s basement — it was all wood-paneled walls with a VCR player and a little TV — we started making these movies. And we would shoot them on VHS, so we couldn’t edit anything. It all had to be done in one continuous take. We would sit around and watch the things we had just made, and it felt so much better than just shooting something on your iPhone and playing it back. It felt like you were really creating something.

In high school, I did a lot of 35mm street photography and continued making movies. My whole life, I would just watch movies by myself. Freshman year at Ithaca College, I met the people I still make films with now, such as Desirée Tolchin and Philip Thompson.

BR: How else did you develop at Ithaca College?

AC: I discovered 16mm studying under my professor, Brad Rappa, and I made a comedy movie called Macaroni Serenade. You can’t sync sound on the Bolex, but I was doing everything else: directing, cinematography, acting, and then I ADR’d the whole thing afterwards. So I’ve always made things way more difficult than they need to be. I had tried shooting things on digital and I had no restraint — I would just roll. There was something that just drew me to shooting on film and 16mm with all these restrictions. It was the ephemerality of it or the tactile nature of a physical print or object. Just like with VHS, I want to hold it, I want to see the imperfections.

I had another professor in college named Joshua Bonnetta, and my big takeaway from his class was to “synthesize your project through other mediums,” which was something I never even thought to do prior to that. This led me to start painting, making music, and writing poetry as ways of exploring the emotions surrounding a film from another perspective, which in turn pushed me to experiment with film imagery and how I told and visualized stories.

BR: So how did these instructions make their way into film collaboration?

AC: I met Phil Thompson at summer orientation. You’d have screening for first semester projects and you’d see who was making films that you really liked. People would just talk and talk about working together on something, so it was naturally collaborative. I feel a lot like what I was doing before was just wearing every hat: doing the sound as I was directing, etc. So there was something nice about shooting other people’s work, where I’m just focused on the compositions, and the feeling and the light. Then you’re just drawn to working with cool people. You have 2:00 AM conversations and it’s like, “You’re interested in thinking about things. Let me help you make something cool that you want to make.”

I started writing a lot of poetry and began developing my early films in college. There is a Hole in the Ground and I Don’t Fight the Dark as Well as I Used To both started as poems. They were very locked down and observational. Those films are mostly older people kind of at the tail end of their life, reflecting a lot, and then also being anxious about what’s about to come. I worked with cinematographer Akesh Patel on those movies, and Jack Liden always did sound.

Desirée Tolchin and I had been living together for about two years, and she would carry around a super eight camera and just capture moments that were happening in our life with our friends and her family. I think I might have shot one or two frames, but she shot the vast majority of what became Visions of Waves. She had it all scanned and edited but didn’t really know what to do with it. She showed it to me and I was like “Oh my god. This is great. Keep going.” I really wanted to do sound design or make a little composition for it, and by doing so I think that film really helped me grow in other avenues. I guess I was being emotionally conscious as I was writing that into the movie.

BR: And all of you continued to collaborate on each other’s films?

AC: I had been working with Phil a lot on his film, I’m At Home, where he plays this kids TV show host who kind of spins off. The cinematography of that film is intended to make the images feel like they’re in the past tense, like they’ve been sitting on someone’s hard drive forever. So in playing around with different analog textures and scanning, we tried to make it feel like it has its own anxieties and emotions in the activeness of the shadows and the color. We pushed the 16mm quite a few stops when developing the film to create this chaotic grain structure and muted color palette that reflected the character. Anxiety, texture, and there’s so many shadows in that film that are so active and moving like feeling it in that moment. You can recognize it a little bit subconsciously.

So continuing to explore ideas like that, we did another movie, Living Reality, that has more of a sitcom feel. We shot it on a church stage but we couldn’t afford studio cameras, so I bought three of these Canon XL-1s off eBay. The goal was to get this texture to feel like those weird, burned-in YouTube clips that someone’s recorded, then re-recorded, then re-re-recorded. To achieve that feel, we experimented with shooting it on Mini DV and then scanning it to VHS, digitizing, then going back again to VHS.

BR: How many times do you think you re-digitized in total?

AC: I broke the VCR, so we couldn’t do it too much, but I really want to do a film where it’s like completely near the last rung of information. We wanted to capture something in the real world that did feel like an impressionist painting, as if it’s emotion first and image second. A lot of the ideas just come from curiosity and a little bit of sleep deprivation. By researching camcorders, I was stumbling on these really intimate home movies that also had this visual quality of an awareness that it was fleeting. Even though you’re looking at a moment unfolding in-camera, present tense, there’s also an emotional weight that’s beautiful, but you know it depends on the moment.

BR: Can you talk a bit more about visual texture?

AC: I really wanted to explore that texture in a more locked down kind of way with my feature. I wanted to not have it feel like there’s a cameraman behind it. More from: let’s explore this texture as a texture, without the implication that someone is telling you where to look.

I found this guy on YouTube who would record his dog in a garden on this camera called the Sony TR640E, which is like a video 8 camera before high 8. The interesting thing about that camera is that the color really stayed. With later models, like high 8, they wanted to increase the quality, so they sucked a lot of color out. But those video 8 cameras have this really vibrant color that you’d see in a lot of home movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I also found this filmmaker that I would watch a bunch named Nelson Sullivan. He would make vlogs on VHS in the ‘80s. I loved the way he treated every passing moment, focusing on little things that most people would overlook.

BR: With shooting on these formats, how did everything build into you making a feature?

AC: I started inadvertently making a lot of films about my grandmother’s sickness through these different stories, which was a cathartic thing for me. My grandmother had Parkinson’s, and it was a long battle that got really bad near the end, when she was not really verbal. After she passed, my grandfather kept forgetting that she died, and that was kind of our introduction to his dementia. As a young man in my early twenties, I was looking at my grandparents — who I really admired — and both of their identities were kind of being stripped of them. That’s the genesis of my feature: I’m searching for my identity as a young man, and simultaneously theirs is being ripped away from them. So I’m exploring identity, mortality, and life’s purpose.

I’ve always been interested in capturing images as memories, or as things that aren’t happening in the present moment. When looking at a space or a moment, that is only ten percent of it. There’s like this ninety percent weight of what it feels like — what do you really remember from it? And I wanted to explore that in film, and I think I’ve found it a little bit by shooting on antiquated cameras. I’m fascinated by the little things that make us people — the little things that can elicit a memory or a feeling that we all share. I think all of that makes us feel a bit more connected.

BR: “Images as artifacts” or “images as memories.”

AC: I had written the script after I graduated college. It was about an old man with dementia who befriends a young woman grieving the loss of her father. My one grandfather without dementia is playing a version of my other grandfather who has dementia. And my parents are in the movie. My dad, who’s the son of my grandfather with dementia, plays the son of my other grandfather without dementia. In this movie, he’s kind of having the same conversations that he has with his real dad. So in a way, it’s all kind of an artifact of us together exploring this chapter of our lives, and I guess printing it on something physical to look back on: This is who we were and this was something we were feeling. It can sound overwhelming, like beauty and sadness in life, but in a very understated way.

BR: What’s next for your feature?

AC: Currently, just submitting to film festivals and awaiting a world premiere.

BR: Lastly, can you talk about the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival?

AC: So me and my collaborators, we all went to Ithaca College. When we graduated, we started submitting our thesis films to festivals. We were able to go to some really cool festivals and meet some really cool people, but mutually we thought, “Damn, if we had this when we were in college, this would be so helpful. This would be so sick.” Especially the parts where you’re talking with filmmakers who’ve been doing this for a while, and we’re all kind of interested in vulnerable storytelling and alternative forms of storytelling. We were really drawn to programming a lot of things with different visual aesthetics, people experimenting with antiquated cameras, and work shot on celluloid. From this, we decided to launch the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival in 2023.

This year, February 27 - 28, will be our third festival. The only criteria we’re looking for is an honest filmmaking voice, whether that comes in documentary, animation, experimental, or narrative. It really has informed a lot of our own filmmaking. We’ve had a whole other round of education in film by just watching such incredible things. Not only looking at them visually, but from the sound recording techniques and the structure of the way people tell stories.

Brian Ratigan is a filmmaker and festival programmer in NYC. He is the founder of Non Films and hosts monthly DarkRoom Screenings in various boroughs.

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A few years ago, I identified a rising film movement predicated upon embracing teeny-tiny budgets to tell the sorts of stories and make the kind of art that the broader industry had forsaken. Every movement, though, needs a good name, and let’s face it: I failed at inventing anything sufficiently catchy. Cut to the present, and Pete Ohs and Danny Madden came up with the perfect name: Broke Wave. Here’s Ohs:

The system is broke. We are broke. But we won’t stop making movies. It’s not poor filmmaking. It’s broke filmmaking.

Ohs specified that we should think of this as the American Broke Wave to leave room for, ya know, a Romanian Broke Wave or Italian Broke Wave, etc.

What’s an American Broke Wave film?

Here are a few that immediately come to mind: The Civil Dead, This Closeness, Eephus, Free Time, Good One, Inspector Ike, Invention, Jethica, No Sleep Till, Rap World, $Positions, The Scout, The Travel Companion, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair…

Comment with more.

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Here’s what else is happening this week:

• Boycott Enterprise and its subsidiary brands National and Alamo for providing vehicles to ICE. Sign the pledge here.

  • And while you’re at it, if you’re outraged by everything going on — and you should be — a couple good resources for finding action items are the 5 Calls app and indivisible.org.

• Non Films is hosting a DarkRoom screening 1/27 at Freddys Brooklyn at 7:30 PM.

• Tickets are on sale now for NoBudge Live 49, at Nitehawk Prospect Park, Feb. 9.

• The 22nd MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation is happening now through Feb 2.

• Future of Film Is Female presents Standing Above the Clouds at Nitehawk Williamsburg Jan 28 at 6:45 PM.

• Cherry Lane Theatre is launching a 9-month Playwrights Collective development program under the direction of Annie Baker, designed to support emerging NYC playwrights. More here.

• The Sundance Producer’s Lab is accepting applications through Feb 11 at 9:00 AM PT. More here.

• Speaking of Sundance, it seems like The Screener, The History of Concrete, and The Invite are getting the most positive buzz. If you’ve been watching stuff in Park City, comment with what’s been great, meh, or totally bogus.

• I’m hoping more people will fill out this form and be part of a future Nothing Bogus article about the state of different cities’ film scenes.

• Recently, I created this spreadsheet for producers to consult when seeking crew, gear, or scripts to develop. If you’re looking for work or to find collaborators, sign up. It’s free.

• Some industry jobs here, courtesy of The Anonymous Production Assistant.

• Lots of grants, contests, and awards to apply to here.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.)

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THE FEATURE PRESENTATION

With Natchez, Suzannah Herbert Leaned Into the Discomfort

Her new Tribeca-winning documentary explores why people are so intent on whitewashing history.

In 2018, documentarian Suzannah Herbert first visited Natchez, Mississippi. She was on a road trip with her mother, en route to a wedding on a plantation near New Orleans. During the trip, she was thinking about making a film where she embedded on a plantation during wedding season. Family friends recommended she visit Natchez, which was the second most prevalent slave trading city in the United States prior to the Civil War and today is a destination for antebellum tourism. When she and her mother went, they toured one of the antebellum homes and were presented with a romanticized version of history that failed to acknowledge slavery. “It was really uncomfortable,” Herbert says. “I was so struck by the beauty and the pain [in Natchez], and I ran away from it… I was like, ‘Let’s get to New Orleans. I don’t feel good here.’”

Herbert did wind up finding a plantation outside of New Orleans to shoot the film. After coordinating with it throughout the pandemic, she shot for ten days in 2021, and it went well. But then there was a snag. The executive director told Herbert that she needed to get permission from the plantation’s Board, and the Board immediately shut down the production. “It was devastating,” Herbert says. “I’d invested my own money and years of my life developing this idea. I gave up for like six months. I thought about leaving filmmaking.”

Soon thereafter, though, Herbert was accepted by the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship. “I told them that I didn’t have a film anymore. And they were like, ‘Oh, that happens all the time. Come here and figure it out and pivot.’” During the fellowship, Herbert looked back at her early research and read her notes about Natchez, and it dawned on her that, “Oh, I shouldn’t be running away from this tension. I need to face it. That tension is where a film should exist.”

In 2022, she returned to Natchez without a camera for a long weekend, and met with friends of friends who lived there and got their more nuanced takes on Natchez. She also went to the Visitor Center and found a tour guide who was giving a more complete version of the city’s history. “I could feel that there was a film there because it was a community grappling with these issues and not just one site.”

Herbert eventually shot for about 100 days. And the film that she made, Natchez, burrows into the complexity of the city and its history, exploring why people continue to be so intent on whitewashing the past. The film premiered at Tribeca last year, where it won Best Documentary Feature. It hits select theaters this week.

When you began this project, did you have a specific question that you wanted to answer for yourself?

Suzannah Herbert: Definitely. The question for me was: Why do people hold onto these legacies around the mythology around slavery and the lost cause? Why are people so attached? Why do people have this cognitive dissonance around these historic places where so much pain and suffering and trauma happened, where they can use it for entertainment or pleasure?

If you had a hypothesis around the answer to that question before making the film, how was what you found different?

I think I thought people were just oblivious and don’t want to think about it. But now having filmed the movie and lived it, I think it’s much more sinister. I think it’s systemic. I think it’s part of upholding whiteness. It’s part of how people hold onto power and their idea of themselves being better.

What kind of footprint did you have in terms of crew and equipment?

We were a very small crew. It was me, cinematographer Noah Collier, and then two different sound people, Brian Fish and Sean O’Neil, at different points, and sometimes my producer Darcy McKinnon, who’s based in New Orleans. It was hard [being such a small team], but it was very essential in terms of not making people uncomfortable and being in the background. We were on so many tours, in the mix with the tourists and the tour guides. I think if it had been any more people it would’ve disrupted the reality even more. I was handing Noah lenses and holding the tripod and doing the driving. It was a team effort.

There’s a shot early in the movie (above) where the mayor is talking to the Garden Club. And you have this head-on shot that’s angled up slightly. Tell me about the choice there.

Noah and I talked a lot about the look of the film and how we were going to shoot it before we shot it. Natchez is very maximalist. There’s so much in every house. There’s a lot to look at. And we wanted to capture that. Noah felt that shooting from below did that — captured the grandness of it all. And then contrasting that with Forks of the Road, the slave market, and the lesser known sites of history.

We also really wanted the film to feel like narrative and be entertaining. We wanted you to feel some of the fantasy that Natchez portrays itself as, and then to slowly strip that away as we progress. So that’s why we used vintage prime Zeiss lenses from the ‘60s, which gave it an ephemeral look. And Noah used a glimmer glass. Mississippi is also just so lush and humid. There’s so much texture and color and we wanted that to pop. And shooting it on a tripod was hard because nothing was really set up. It was going on tours or being somewhere when, “Oh, the mayor is coming.”

It’s kind of about setting people’s expectations, too. From the beginning, we were always kind of close, and Noah was shooting on an 18mm, except when we were shooting really intimate moments with our participants. Then we would go on a 50. I think it gives the film a more cinematic feeling.

Were you looking at narrative films for reference?

Yeah, we were. Nashville was one of the main ones. Because there’s so many characters and things going on in it. So we were looking at how that was threaded, and there’s the van…

What did you learn about how to bring a lot of characters into the fold from Nashville?

It was more in the production and less in the edit. The campaign van that goes around in Nashville is just like [the tour guide] Rev’s van going all around Natchez. So we thought Rev could drive us around and hand us off to the different characters. Those were the staged shots with Rev. He’ll complain to anyone about those. Because we’d do them over and over again. But he was a good sport. And so we’d have him drive, and we’d get the shots zooming into the van. And we also hired a grip for three days, and he built rigs on Rev’s van to have a camera outside on the driver’s side. And that was amazing, to have part of Rev’s tour be so cinematic.

How did you navigate portrayals of these people in the edit?

We wanted to show the complexity and humanity with everyone, and give everyone their due. It was hard, though, because of time. We shot a lot of personal story arcs that are not in the film. I thought the film could do it all and we realized six or seven months into the edit that we needed to strip away a lot of the personal storylines that I had covered for a year and a half. It just wasn’t in service of the film. It weighed it down in ways we didn’t need. It was hard to get there but once I realized it, I was fine with making cuts.

A lot of people have asked why we didn’t show certain people’s racism right up front. And I was like, “That’s not fair, first off. And also, that’s not how life works.” And if you do that, some people will immediately tune that person out and not listen to anything else after that. So I wanted to show everyone’s complexity.

The music does a really great job of setting the tone for the film. How do you go about giving direction to a composer?

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