***

Thank you Professor Whissel for your very kind introduction, and thank you, Class of 2026, for the privilege of addressing you today. I’m especially honored to be sharing the stage with your wonderful professors.

Before we begin, please join me for a few moments of reflection in the presence of two images. Both are fragments—let’s call them close-ups, pulled from a series of photographs by the great artist Carrie Mae Weems.

Consider this first one. What is the image, as we like to say, “giving” you?

For me, I love how it communicates the reader’s purpose and absorption, her concentration -- the beauty of the deep space of learning she inhabits.

It reminds me of so much of what today we celebrate in you.

Because, amidst all the noise, the doomscrolling, the relationship drama, the authoritarianism, the friends made and lost and found again, the fires, the chatbot windows, the mental health days, the mom-texts, the computer viruses (not to mention the zoonotic viruses) – amidst it all—you have managed to find precious communion with all such seekers through the deep and difficult pleasures of study. And in a few minutes you will proudly be holding the diplomas that attest to that solidarity.

And here’s the second close-up I want to share:

I don’t know about you, but I really admire this person’s attitude – the pensive gaze, the folded arms, the powerful stance, the stubborn sense she gives of an impending decision.

Her impatience but also her monumentality. Like yours. We’ll return to her in a bit, but now to the speechifying at hand.

It’s been nearly half a century since I first stepped foot on to the Berkeley campus, and for four of the decades since I’ve been a professor at Columbia, and had two kids along the way, each of whom ran the gauntlet of graduations from pre-school to grad school, so I’ve been to a lot of these things, and have, over the years, sat through more than my fair share of commencement addresses.

I’ve learned there are some basic requirements to the commencement speech genre. I’m supposed to apologize on behalf of my fellow olds for so badly screwing things up for you, but then I’m supposed to reassure you that I have all faith that your generation is, for some unknown reason, smart and brave enough to clean up the mess;

I’m supposed to discuss some pressing topic of public concern that touches on my own area of expertise (in this case I guess that would be the pending Paramount Warner merger);

and lastly I’m obligated to share a personal anecdote, usually about some profound failure or setback, from which, with the wisdom of passing years, I draw lessons that I must then force upon you, accompanied, of course, by a few dropped names and a clutch of humble brags.

I guess failure is an appropriate recurrent motif for these speeches, given how rightfully anxious everyone feels facing our uncertain future; the topic, though, in classic American style, shifts the burden of the anxiety from the collective to the individual , usually resulting in the “do-what-you-love-and-follow-your-dreams and you, like me, will win”! mode -- an idiotic schtick, given that it’s often delivered at commencements by heads of large enterprises employing legions of precarious wage laborers, who have all received gotten the same advice, and yet have somehow mysteriously failed to follow it; and anyhow, if I had always only done what I loved I would right now be sitting with a gallon of Costco chocolate ice cream on my lap watching Turner Classic Movies on an endless loop, because, well, that’s what I love.

Which is not to say you should not follow your dreams or not do the thing you love, but I honestly think it’s just not that big a deal if you’re not the greatest at what you love, or maybe if what you love is something you might want for good reason to avoid pursuing. Because the thing with this commencement advice genre is that it turns out that whatever the greatest, truest piece of advice I could ever give you, the exact opposite is always 100 percent true too.

Like: Do what you love and you will succeed. Ok. Now, also, do the hard things you don’t love and that discipline will lead to success. Whatever. But have no fear, I will fulfill my duties and deliver some advice, and to get to that meaningful moment, I’m going to make use of, as a long-time student of rhetoric and a film and media studies prof myself, a special hack many of you are familiar with: montage theory.

For the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, meaning is not something that exists as a property of any single shot; rather, it’s the result of the encounter or collision between shots. Shot A is, by itself, only potentially meaningful; it becomes meaningful retroactively, through its relationship with what follows it, shot B -- just as it, retroactively, changes the meaning of the shots that preceded it. Meaning is constructed, and thus ever-changing, through these encounters between shots; and you can see how the same principle might apply to our lives, to our memories, to the lessons we learn from experience and from those around us.

The simplest form of this is the shot-reverse shot. For example, a shot of someone who appears to be looking at something, followed by a shot of what they were looking at. This is the essence of the famous “Kuleshov experiment,” where the same, seemingly expressionless close-up of an actor’s face was intercut with different shots –a plate of soup, a coffin in which lay the body of a dead child, a reclining woman.

As Pudovkin later recalled about the experiment: “When we showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been let in on the secret, the result was terrific. The public raved about the acting of the artist,” retroactively assigning subtle expressions of hunger, sadness, and desire onto the same image.

For Eisenstein, montage meaning-making collisions don’t just happen between shots; they can create meaning within shots, too. The point is: Meaning only comes about through relationship. For example, the two images I shared with you already—they actually are details from one single shot:

And now you can see, as we say, the plot thickening. There is a tension in the frame that must clearly modify our initial interpretations when we looked at them in isolation. What we celebrated as the unequivocal virtue of deep learning comes, we see, at a cost. The book may represent a path, through learning, to a better future for mother and child, but it requires an absorption that pulls away from the child’s desire for parental attention. Weems leaves clues in the frame for us to decipher – the glass and notepad left unattended in front of the chair at right, perhaps abandoned and/or awaiting the child’s engagement.

As it turns out, the photo is part of a triptych, three photographs within Weems’s epic Kitchen Table series on black American life, love, and history, that enact their own montage unfolding.

Here is the second photo, shot B to the first photo’s A:

Our mother/student has now risen to assume a professorial authority. And while there is no escaping the power dynamics here, there is also no escaping the agency and deliberation we can sense in the girl’s regard, both defiant and suppliant, and the respect embodied in the very distance the mother keeps. If this is a scene of instruction and injunction, it is a highly nuanced and complex one indeed. What is being taught, what is being learned?

If montage theory gives us tools that inspire us to look closely and imaginatively at great works of art and world-making such as Weems’, it also reminds us of the infinite creative and cognitive capacities we humans have within us that can be unlocked simply by juxtaposition. What happens, for example, when we take this Shot A:

And collide it with this shot B:

Now I know that for a lot of our graduating class, the “meaning” – I’m now using properly montage-theoretical scare quotes -- of Shot B is readily apparent. Because it marks the day of the arrival into our lives of another shot, another image:

Which means, Class of 2026 (and let’s take a moment to take in just how huge this is): you are the very last graduating university class in history who got to experience (even if only for a few short months) what it was like to learn and to write in a world without generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT.

Which also means that while I still very much hold to the truth and power of our first reactions to our first montage fragment, your own version of it more often probably looked like this:

Or, rather, this:

To acknowledge that reality is not to diminish our joy in your having survived it; in fact, maybe we should let the excitement of some of the prevaricating sociopaths who have done so much to shape your college experience these past few years join in the celebration. So -- let’s hear from Sam!

And while we’re at it, how about we add some real main character energy to the proceedings: so step right up Alex Karp – let’s do it!:

And how could you not, when…

Uh, but, but…

Speaking of great companies:

Shot A:

Shot B:

Concept C:

That is, the merger of Warner and Paramount is not, as they are calling it, WarnerMount, it’s something that comes in the wake of, as the Financial Times puts it, “the AI tsunami.” The same one that has disconcerted your years of college education.

The technofascist oligarchs riding that wave have been very public and very clear about their goals for world domination through its use. As Larry says, when his version of the AI world comes,

And for Larry that world already has arrived, at least in one corner of it, where his extraordinary investments haves created a kind of population-level contained lab for his vision.

And thus the “AI first” road to WarnerMount routes directly through Gaza. And finds its way back to us here at Berkeley.

But students and faculty are not taking all this without a fight. Last spring term, the Berkeley faculty senate, voting with 95% in favor, passed an extraordinary resolution in defense of freedom of thought on campus.

The resolution called out and warned against a number of specific threats, including assaults on ethnic studies, and the threat posed by the possible adoption of something called the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which makes many criticisms of Israel proscribed and punishable.

Of course the University Regents, a year later—that is, just this past month—entered into a legal settlement that pointedly ignored that faculty guidance.

Which leads us to my own failure.

That’s from 1984. Back when I had hair.

Now let’s widen out to Shot B:

And what’s the context? “Foreign Affairs: The East Bay and the West Bank.”

Turns out I was, 42 years ago, the spokesperson for and co-leader of a long-forgotten, but at the time, quite the talk-of-the-town Berkeley City ballot initiative, called Measure E, that a bunch of us student rabble-rousers cooked up and somehow managed to organize to get on the June 1984 ballot.

We had a club on campus called CAFIOT – the Committee for Academic Freedom in the Occupied Territories – and we thought: wouldn’t it be crazy if we could get an initiative on the ballot demanding an end of US taxpayer support for funding Israeli settlements in the occupied territories?

As you can imagine, we had not much of an of idea what we were doing, and, as you can tell from the fancy design of today’s PowerPoint, my design skills were not exactly cutting edge:

But we had a message we believed in, and the coolest diverse group of activists and volunteers pitched in. We made our case, and to our surprise everyone from Joan Baez to the then-mayor of Berkeley came out to endorse us, including many of my fellow Jews.

The whole thing snowballed,

And so, naturally, did the opposition campaign. And let me tell you, those people were professionals. And if that wasn’t enough, the death threats really ratcheted up the intensity of it all.

For us students, as the campaign took off, the whole win-or-lose logic of it took over too; we had started out thinking it would just be a really cool way to raise awareness, and we had zero expectations we’d win. But as election day drew near, we were swept up in the intensity of it all.

Well, you know the punch line: we lost, with just shy of 40% of the vote.

During the whole thing, I got to know the guy who led the No on E campaign, and some time after the dust settled, he confided that their fancy pollsters were actually scared we might win. But he walked me through some of the amateur mistakes we’d made, and then he told me: if we hadn’t stupidly picked the June election, but had instead waited for November, when all the students were in town, we would have won. Duh!

So, there you have it, my anecdote of failure.

And now for your lesson:

It’s not really much of one. I mean, what can I say? I just wish we’d won. Because, you know, it’s better to win.

I mean, sure, I learned a lot from the experience, but it was just an early step on a long road, and that road is not some personal growth influencer commencement speech journey, but a constant struggle with very powerful and determined antagonists, including people one may, in fact, love – for example, as in my case, my late great mother,

And speaking of mothers, and love, here’s the final photograph in Carrie Mae Weems’ triptych, and our concluding point.

The mother has returned to her place as student, or rather her place as teacher and as student. Her daughter now shares the table, engrossed in her own work. And note: it is the daughter who writes—it is now in her voice – in your voices -- that the call to our shared future comes.

That small quiet moment at the kitchen table is, in fact, the site of a heroic battle. Recall that for many of the forebears of the people sitting at that table the very acts of reading and writing were illegal in these United States. You now continue that battle, one that pits your passion, creativity, and curiosity against the rapacity of the oligarchs who would extract and consume your humanity in their quest for global domination. And I know I what I’m about to say sounds incredible, but I can’t help it. Yes, those oligarchs will do – they are doing—untold damage. But they are not winning, and they will never win. How do I know this? Because I learned it from you.

Behold: The daughter is teaching her mother an unexpected truth--for truth, as Eisenstein shows us, is a relationship, and, as my own mother taught me, even in conflict, indeed especially when tested in conflict, truth is thus a function of love, and what is love if not the shared experience of the infinite possibilities of montage meaning we confer on one another? Meaning that only exists through what we do with it. And that is why I, and everyone on this stage, is not here simply to wish you well, but more importantly, to thank you. Because all along, it has been your teachers who have been your students. Thank you, Berkeley Rhetoric and Film and Media Studies Class of 2026, for that precious gift, the power of which is only just, at this moment of your commencement, emerging into being.

Some acknowledgements: I took the idea of using Carrie Mae Weems’ work to illustrate the power of montage from Noah Schamus, who uses a version of this exercise in the film classes they teach; see Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series, Mw Editions, 2022. Brian Patrick, under the Instagram username pano.dime, usefully chronicles highlights of AI oligarchic insanity; I have used screen grabs from his account here. I took a number of the other slides from off of the series of interconnecting tubes known as the internet; they are in such general circulation that I can’t source their original authors with any certainty. Had I more time, I would have expanded on the experience of Measure E, and on the tremendous cohort of activists who made it possible. The brevity of my mention of the death threat stuff should not be misconstrued as levity; in the year following the election, a beloved community leader and activist, Alex Odeh, was assassinated. The prime suspects in his killing are well known and now living in the occupied West Bank; see the documentary film Who Killed Alex Odeh?, which premiered earlier this year at The Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded a Special Jury Prize; it will be released later this year by Watermelon Pictures. Odeh’s legacy was very much present to me during the preparation of these remarks. Final thanks to the team at the UC Berkeley Rhetoric and Film & Media Studies departments for all their support in seeing this presentation through to the finish line.

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope speaks with Emmy‑nominated documentarian Ivy Meeropol about her new film Ask E. Jean, a portrait of advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll that goes far beyond the courtroom headlines to explore her Miss Cheerleader USA past, gonzo magazine career, TV show, and late‑in‑life decision to publicly confront Donald Trump. They discuss the challenge of balancing E. Jean’s buoyant, hilarious persona with the gravity of the assault and its lifelong impact, the complicity and constraints of the boys’‑club media world she navigated, and the transformative power of women’s friendship and lawyering embodied by Carroll’s bond with attorney Robbie Kaplan and her close circle of friends. Throughout, Ivy reflects on how E. Jean’s willingness at 75 to reckon with her past, revise her own advice‑giver legacy, and insist on telling the truth offers exhausted audiences something rare in the Trump era: a story that is both deeply sobering and unexpectedly joyful, galvanizing viewers—women and men alike—to see sexual violence, patriarchy, and American democracy as inextricably linked.

Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, & Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen

Vanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined today by Ivy Meeropol, who is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker whose work consistently explores power, justice, and the intimate lives behind public headlines. She is the director and producer of Ask E. Jean, the award‑winning feature documentary about advice columnist and journalist E. Jean Carroll, the only woman to have beaten Donald Trump twice in court. Her early films include After the Bite, about the explosion of great white sharks and seals on Cape Cod; Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn; Indian Point; and her debut, which is super powerful and a must‑see also, Heir to an Execution, a deeply personal exploration of the legacy of her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Her work has premiered at Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Tribeca and other major festivals. And she is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ivy, thank you for being here.

Ivy Meeropol: Thanks for having me, Vanessa.

Vanessa: Before we dive into your incredible film and the life and work of E. Jean Carroll, it seems there were criminal charges filed against E. Jean shortly after your movie appeared in theaters. Is there anything you can say to us about that?

Ivy: Yeah. Well, I mean, the timing is suspicious, I will say that, and I’ll let your audience, you know, connect the dots. But I wrote an op‑ed for the New York Times that came out just before we then premiered the film at the IFC Center in New York City. And then really days after that, it was announced that the Department of Justice was launching a criminal investigation into E. Jean, accusing her of perjury.

You know, of course, I mean, I was horrified when I first heard that, read that, and then just thought it was very consistent with the vindictiveness that emanates from this White House. Other than that, I mean, there’s no grounds. You know, I know E. Jean really well now, and I think the film presents someone who’s incredibly honest—some might say to a fault—but she is herself, she’s honest, and then the evidence speaks for itself. Two juries found him liable. So I think it’s par for the course. This is what he does. And E. Jean really gets under his skin.

Vanessa: It’s beautiful that your film actually opens up all of E. Jean Carroll’s life far beyond the courtroom headlines. You give us her Miss Cheerleader USA days, gonzo journalist, advice columnist, TV host. When you first encountered her New York magazine story in 2019, what was the moment you knew this isn’t just a Trump story, this is a whole life that needs its own film?

Ivy: Yeah. I mean, you know, reading the piece in New York magazine, which was specifically about her career and the assault at Bergdorf Goodman, I was really struck by how she told the story. I mean, her voice. She has such a distinct voice as a writer and she’s just a real character.

So I was really intrigued by that. And then when I started reading more—I honestly didn’t know much about her. Some of my friends were kind of horrified, like, “How did you not know Auntie E, the amazing advice columnist?” I was living in Washington, D.C. at the time, working in politics. I just wasn’t as aware. So I dug in and started reading about her and thought, “She’s not just an advice columnist.” Not that that wasn’t a huge accomplishment—she’s hugely popular—but she was really ahead of her time in a lot of ways.

She was the first female editor at major magazines during the heyday of the magazine world in New York City, and mainly men’s magazines, which is even more interesting—like Esquire, Outside, and Playboy. And she was writing these articles that were typically in the male journalist domain, like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson and people like that. And then there’s E. Jean Carroll going out and reporting these stories and just, you know, a gonzo journalist. So I was really intrigued by her. I really was.

Vanessa: For me, watching your film, it was the first time I got to see her in her TV show—see her as a television personality—because I knew of her column, but I had never watched her on TV. And I love also listening to her book that works really well with your movie. She reads the audiobook, Not My Type, and it’s a really distinctive voice—razor sharp, funny, and honest, as you said.

And I wonder when you felt like you could explore, tonally, how—because she talks about how she laughed instead of screamed, like the women of her generation. As a director, how you found the tonal balance, letting her be hilarious and outrageous and herself without trivializing the violence that she survived.

Ivy: Yeah, it’s a really good question. That was the hardest—that’s really the hardest part about making this film, other than, you know, raising the money and all the other things that we do. Once we had all this amazing material—which includes, like you said, her television show, which she was shooting over a three‑year period, the period when she ran into Trump at Bergdorf Goodman—so you really get to see her and know her during that time. It’s just an incredible archive for us to use.

It was hard because E. Jean herself is so buoyant and full of bravado. She’s always “Everything is fantastic!” She’s the cheerleader, right? She was a nationally ranked cheerleader. So how do you balance that, because not everything is okay, you know? We were really fortunate because I was able to use the video depositions. You don’t get more serious than that. She’s being deposed by Alina Habba, Trump’s attorney, and it is really serious. She has to focus and be honest and tell her story without all the colorful exclamations that she makes typically.

I didn’t ever interview her, Vanessa, directly about the assault. I was fortunate in a way, because I also didn’t have as much time with her as I had hoped. Luckily, I had focused early on everything else in her life and telling those stories. But I have to say, we put this film together in the edit room. It is a painstaking process of finding those moments with her that we feel are revealing and are fun, but keeping them kind of siloed.

So you notice in the film how we go through different periods of her life: we use different music, different pacing, than when you are with her talking about the assault. And it’s not just the assault by Trump; it’s about the cumulative effect in her life of what that assault did to her and other experiences with men. There’s a revelation in the film that after age 52 she never has sex again, and it’s really heartbreaking because she’s discovering this about herself in real time. We’re watching it in the depositions because things were so buried.

So in that sense, we were able to—once you’re in that mode and you’re not hearing her fun writer voice anymore, which is what was so intriguing in that original piece in New York magazine. I thought, I’m so entertained by this story, but it’s horrifying. That’s kind of her special ability. But yeah, it was really hard. And it was also hard to balance how much Trump should be in there. He is the villain in this story, but we didn’t want him to dominate either.

Vanessa: You really manage a brilliant tonal balance. It’s so powerful and, I think, inspiring for women to see how E. Jean can face the music in this serious way, and that her humor gives her resilience and also gets her—and everyone else—through and up.

You mentioned that she was in this world of magazines—Esquire, Playboy, Outside, Elle—into this post‑Me Too Trump moment. What did you discover about how those media worlds shape what women are allowed to say, and how that history shows up in E. Jean’s own reckoning with what happened to her?

Ivy: Well, I would say, you know, it’s interesting because she has this great kind of Mary Tyler Moore story about who she is. She does all the “girl things” when she’s younger—she’s a sorority sister, a beauty queen, a cheerleader, married very young—but she keeps writing. And the minute she gets this big story, and she was already in her early thirties, she left Montana and started her life completely anew and had no connections. So there’s this sense of: wow, she is an independent, powerful woman.

There she is on TV in her pantsuits, and she’s telling women they don’t need to be married at 30 and giving really great advice. But at the same time, she had to be part of the boys’ club. And we know how that can really tear you apart ultimately, because you are accommodating so much. You are, and it can put you in terrible situations as well.

I think that’s a big part of it. She was very proud to be at the boys’ table. She literally was at the writers’ table at Elaine’s on Thursday nights where all the big‑shot writers were. And what does that do? Roger Ailes gave her her television show, and we know what happened with Roger Ailes. But she managed to kind of turn the tables on Ailes in a way—she would tease him and kind of, you know, push back. I was fascinated by that.

Then that leads into the Me Too era where it’s like, okay—and E. Jean’s realization that all of that accommodating… She has said to me, and this didn’t end up in the film but I think it comes through: you still don’t get the promotion, you still don’t get the reward. All of that effort.

Vanessa: Robbie Kaplan is a vivid presence in your film. She’s like a legal counterpart to E. Jean’s voice—sharp, impatient, relentless, inventive. What did you want audiences to understand about their partnership, and maybe more broadly how women’s storytelling and women’s lawyering intersect in this case?

Ivy: Yeah. It’s interesting. One of the things I love about making documentaries is that you discover your themes as you’re making the film. I didn’t know at all what I would be walking into. Remember, when I first started talking to E. Jean, she hadn’t even gone to court yet, never mind win twice and everything else that’s happened.

What I saw was a true friendship and caring that goes beyond attorney and client. I think that’s part of why they were so successful. It wasn’t just Robbie; there were other attorneys on the team, and they just adored E. Jean, and she adored them. And like you mentioned, if you read her book Not My Type, which I really recommend—and listen to it, she does the audio recording, it’s fantastic—the way she talks about her team, they’re like her kids. I think that’s beautiful.

So the film started to become about female friendship. Not just Robbie and E. Jean, although that’s a central one, but Robbie and Lisa Birnbach; E. Jean and Carol Martin—her two closest friends at the time, who were her outcry witnesses, which means they were the only people she told, over 25 years ago, what happened with Trump. And then they were willing, very nervously, reluctantly, to come forward and speak out for her and testify.

That’s why I shot them having those lunches together, because I wanted us to have that feeling that we’re listening in on friends having a conversation. I just thought, okay, this is powerful. When E. Jean says that when she came out with her story, she started hearing from all these women who were saying, “E. Jean, what should I do?” and she’s helping them—that’s what women do for each other. It’s really powerful. To me it gives us something that we can actually work on and continue. It gives us hope that we can stand up to the bullies and win. If you’ve got a group of women—if you have E. Jean and Robbie Kaplan coming together—I mean, some kind of magic happened there.

Vanessa: Yeah, some magic. It’s great. You start to feel her posse of female friends and how supportive they all are of each other, and what a difference that makes, coming from that boys’ club, as you said.

Ivy: Yes. And I wonder, you know, E. Jean may even not have known such close friendships before.

Vanessa: You’ve spoken about wanting viewers not just to believe E. Jean, but understand her across time, across these bad cultural scripts, across her own coping mechanisms. Was there a specific scene or interview moment where you felt that understanding snap into place for you as a filmmaker? For some reason now I’m picturing her in her cabin in the woods. There’s a level of threat she has dealt with since fighting back that is, I think, beyond what most of us can imagine. But I wonder what you felt really helped crystallize her for you.

Ivy: Yeah, I mean, there’s a few moments. I think there are two things to talk about here. The first part of your question is: I will say that when she started saying that she hated all of the advice she gave—when she started telling me that. She hadn’t said that publicly. We would have these interesting conversations because I was already starting to watch the 25 episodes I managed to get hold of of the Ask E. Jean show. So I was saying, “Well, you’re actually giving some great advice, you know? You’re giving advice, and that’s why you were so popular—because it was when women wanted and needed to hear that.”

But at the same time, you know, it’s a mixed bag. You see that in the Geraldo clip where she, some would say, victim‑shames Paula Jones and Anita Hill. Her ability to reckon with her past that way and to talk about it very frankly, and just to say, “I didn’t even think about patriarchy, I didn’t think about…”—that was a moment where I thought, this film is bigger than Carroll v. Trump. And it’s bigger than E. Jean. It’s illuminating for all of us who recognize it, and also for younger people who need to know that this is what happens.

And then the other part of your question—she calls it “the hovel”—it’s a tiny cabin in the woods, but that’s how she’s lived for a long time. As much as she’s the New York City part of the film and the early part of her story—she loves New York City, she’s in the city all the time—she really likes living like that. It was scary for a while, and I know people in her close circle really wished she would live somewhere else. But E. Jean’s not going anywhere.

Vanessa: It’s so true what you say about her ability to reckon with her past and evolve. What if our leaders could actually do that? Be responsible, be held accountable as they’re being brave and putting themselves out there, because it’s not easy. She’s like my mom’s generation, and it’s scary to think about how we make progress when we are up against these obstacles and we might make mistakes. But you have to be okay not being perfect, as long as you can reckon with the truth in your past.

Ivy: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s why it’s really meaningful to me to have had the opportunity to tell the story of someone—she was 75 years old when she came forward with this. That’s beautiful. Why not? Now she’s had this whole other life experience and look at what she’s accomplished.

Vanessa: This film is a big success, screening in theaters nationwide right now. It’s played the festival circuit, really powerfully moving audiences. I’ve been in some of them—at Middleburg Film Festival, it was really great. Are you finding people are exhausted by Trump—by his litigiousness, his lawsuits, by the relentlessness of his administration? And is E. Jean giving them something emotionally and politically that we can’t find anywhere else right now?

Ivy: I think she is giving people something. That’s why it’s having such an impact. When I introduce the film, I’ve been saying—it’s what we were talking about before—who E. Jean is is completely the reason why she’s the person who went all the way and took him on and beat him. But it’s also what gives us hope.

So I introduce the film, I say: there will be some really graphic descriptions of very painful things. Obviously, you know what you’re coming to see—most people do. But I also want you to remember that, as E. Jean would say, this film and her story is a “glorious romp,” or something like that. She wants you to laugh. I want you to laugh. I welcome you to laugh. That’s who she is.

I think it’s really having an effect. We are exhausted. We’re exhausted by the sour, miserable… it’s just relentless. We can’t even believe it—we’re looking at so many awful things. So to have this woman who is just like, “You’re not going to scare me,” and to keep going and say, “This is what happened,” and to have had the opportunity because the Adult Survivors Act is so important. I didn’t get into it in the film because it was this whole complicated tangent, but she was able to file charges against him for sexual assault because there was this one‑year look‑back window and New York passed that law. Normally she would never have been able to do that.

I think people come out of the theater really galvanized. They’re talking to each other in very intense ways. A friend of mine said they had been at one of the screenings at IFC Center, a matinee; it was full and everyone sat through the whole credits, which never happens except for super cinephiles or someone looking for their name. They sat through the whole credits and then they were talking amongst themselves to the point where the ushers had to shoo them out.

So that’s what we want. I feel like this is a real communal act—seeing this film together really gets people charged up. They want to know what else to do to help get the film out, during the Q&A. It’s completely galvanizing.

Vanessa: People shouldn’t be afraid of what they’re going to see in the film because you have this incredible person at the center of it. It is uplifting and inspiring. I hope people understand that in whichever way you look at Trump as a leader in this country—who is not for democracy, who is not for the people, who is entirely corrupt—at the basic foundational level of it all, if you’re not going to treat the other half of the population equally, if you’re just seeing women as completely less than, we are never going to get there as a democracy. That is the basic truth. E. Jean’s life is showing you what has happened here in this country. People wanting to understand us as a democracy need to see this film and tie it together. E. Jean matters because all women in this country matter to the existence of our democracy. It’s like a joke—our 250th anniversary coming up, you know, with this wrestling match on the front lawn.

Ivy: I know. I agree. What’s great is that E. Jean is not an expected heroine in this role either. That’s what’s also beautiful to me. I grew up with all this stuff, and my mother, who died some years ago, would be around E. Jean’s age, and very different. I think it’s really remarkable. I think it’s a story that so many women—who might assume they would never have anything in common with the woman who’s going up against Trump—need to look, watch the film. You will see yourself. You will see your sisters. You will see your mother. You will recognize so much of what we all experience.

Vanessa: Yes. And men really need to see it too.

Ivy: Definitely. Definitely. It is a powerful, important story. I’ve been really heartened by a lot of the men who’ve been coming to the screenings and who’ve been really moved and asking great questions.

Vanessa: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re busy and running around the country doing these screenings and Q&As and interviews. It was really great to have you.

Ivy: Thank you for having me, Vanessa. If you go to

AskEJeanFilm.com

you can see all the screenings, and we’re getting booked at more and more cities across the country, which is really exciting. We’re in New York City, we’re in Los Angeles, I’ll be in the Bay Area showing the film. So please, you know, come see us wherever we are.

Vanessa: Yes, definitely. And we’ll put all the details in the post. Thank you again!

Ivy Meeropol - Director/Producer

Ivy Meeropol is the director of ASK E. JEAN, a feature documentary film about the advice columnist and journalist E. Jean Carroll, the only woman to beat Trump twice in court. Her previous feature documentary AFTER THE BITE, about the explosion of great white sharks and seals on Cape Cod, premiered to great acclaim July 2023 on HBO. She premiered her HBO documentary ROY COHN: BULLY, COWARD, VICTIM at the 2019 New York Film Festival and in 2020 the film was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary. She was the Senior Story Producer on the CNNFilms documentary THE END: INSIDE THE LAST DAYS OF THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE, which premiered at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and was one of the highest rated of CNN’s original films. She directed and produced the feature INDIAN POINT, about an aging nuclear power plant close to New York City, which was honored with the Frontline Award for Journalism in a Documentary Film and aired on NHK during the anniversary of Fukushima in Japan. Ivy created and directed the nonfiction series THE HILL (Sundance Channel), about Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) and his young staff (nominated for best series by the International Documentary Association). She produced the feature documentary MUSEUM TOWN, which premiered at SXSW, and has produced and directed for the Emmy Award winning climate change series YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (National Geographic) and for DEATH ROW STORIES (CNN), Executive Produced by Alex Gibney and Robert Redford. Ivy’s debut film, HEIR TO AN EXECUTION (HBO), explored the legacy of her grandparents Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It premiered at Sundance and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, called it, “An exceptional documentary... a compelling emotional narrative laced with explosive political material.” Ivy was a Sundance Institute Fellow and has been awarded grants from the Sundance Documentary Fund, the NY State Council for the Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.

Filmmaker and Moonbeem founder Dan Sickles revives The Five for today’s Hope For Film TakeOver

Intro:

Hello, Hope For Film. I’m Dan Sickles, and Ted has handed me the keys for the day. I’m a filmmaker (MALA MALA, DINA, and the forthcoming NEW HERE), the founder of Moonbeem, and I write about the business and future of authored work on the dpop Studios Substack. Thank you for having me, Ted, and thank you all for making this the most useful space for storytellers on Substack.

My daughter Telma was born in summer 2022. I haven’t shown her many films yet, but Toy Story was one of the first we watched together (fast-forwarding through the moments where Sid enacts violence on his toys). As a result, the Randy Newman track “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” can be heard in our home, on repeat, from sunrise to sunset, though Telma has revised the lyrics to “I’ve got a friend in me,” which, as her father, I happen to prefer.

Watching her has quietly rewired how I think about the work all of us do. A three-year-old is what creativity looks like before it learns to ask permission. She takes whatever is in reach – a wooden spoon, a half-remembered song, the story you read her last night – and rebuilds it into something unmistakably hers. She does not wait for a greenlight. She has never once checked whether the rights are cleared. She naturally builds on what came before, which, once you strip away a century of gatekeeping, is not a loophole in how culture works, it is how culture works.

The way she loves the things she loves has a name: fandom. She embodies it in its purest form: devotion, joyful repetition, and the irrepressible urge to make the thing your own. Our industry tends to treat fandom as a transactional marketing funnel, or worse, as a piracy problem to be managed. But fandom is and has always been the seed. It is where the best remixes, the sharpest commentary, and the liveliest cultural dialogue all begin. The fan who loves a film enough to argue with it, cut it up, and pass it on is not a threat to the work, they are a steward of it. A culture that fails to honor its fans is a culture quietly deciding to end.

I have spent nearly twenty years making films. MALA MALA premiered at Tribeca in 2014, becoming the first feature-length documentary from Puerto Rico to receive a theatrical release stateside, and I premiered my second film, DINA, at Sundance just before my 30th birthday. Currently I’m deep in post on my next film, NEW HERE, about a pizza delivery driver who falls into a video game and discovers a generation of artists reconceiving the notion of ownership and authorship from the inside. I have produced for other filmmakers, and I have lived the cycle most of us know in our bones: dream up a film, hustle for the resources to make it, give it years of our lives, release it into a fragmenting market that continues to consolidate, then start over.

After my daughter arrived, that cycle started to feel like the wrong unit of work. Not unimportant, just insufficient. The honest question stopped being what is my next film and became what systems do I want her generation to inherit, so they can afford the kind of risks I was fortunate enough to take.

We know well the case for alarm. Three weeks ago, in this very space, Emily Best wrote: “You know what’s broken. We all do. And I swear if I have to sit through one more panel about what’s broken, I will scream.” On that point, no argument. So I’ll articulate the broken part in one paragraph and move on. At the final Park City edition of Sundance this January, the overwhelming majority of premieres went home without distribution, and the trades called it an improvement, because the year before, virtually nothing sold at all. Congress clawed back $1.1 billion from public media, and in January, after 58 years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s board voted to dissolve the organization entirely, taking with it the funding base that independent nonfiction was quietly built on. Either of these alone would be a serious problem. Together they amount to a slow siege.

One fact keeps me up at night, half dread, half adrenaline: the audience never left. A Harvard Shorenstein Center study led by Keri Putnam found that 36.7 million Americans actively watch independent film, while 77 million, more than a quarter of the country, say they would pay for a service dedicated to indie and documentary work. ( , who helped build that dataset, walked this community through the charts in his own takeover.) That gap, roughly 40 million people, is not a demand problem. It is an infrastructure problem. The pipes that used to connect the audience to us have been bought, narrowed, or switched off.

I will say the unfashionable thing: the fix is not another subscription platform. The same research tells us audiences now find films through social platforms and free streaming, in the places they already live. One more paywalled destination asks 40 million people to change their habits again, and routes their money through yet another middleman before it reaches a filmmaker. We do not need another gate managed by another gatekeeper. We need new rails: ways to host, share, remix, and pay for the work, threaded through wherever the audience already is.

There is a harder version of this, and we should name it, because it is the elephant in every panel I sit on: a growing number of films that cannot find distribution are not failing on merit. They are failing on fear, and on a lack of infrastructural imagination. Stories that touch power, identity, or geopolitics are being quietly avoided by platforms wary of advertisers, of governments, of backlash. Scott Glosserman recently documented the casualties and called it a Black List for docs. When the safest commercial decision is to not show a true story, the problem is no longer taste, it is the architecture.

So in light of this, I began a personal shift that ten years ago I would not have thought reasonable, possible, or worthwhile. I started building. I taught myself to ship software, built a media-tech studio in New York, and began an education in the business of show business. I released the Creator Calculator, a free tool that shows artists exactly what each platform takes from them, so the business case for our work can rest on real numbers instead of vibes and hopium. And in late 2024, I co-founded Moonbeem: a home for fandom, where fans can legally remix and distribute the films and series they love, and the artists who made the originals get credited and paid every time they do. As much as I’d like to take credit for the insight, it took a three-year-old to remind me of what is true: building on what came before us is how culture grows, and good infrastructure can make that legal, trackable, and fair instead of impossible and illegal.

None of this has been feasible alone. It’s been made possible by community, and we are in a moment when the tools to build alternatives are more accessible than ever, which brings me to the takeover itself. Longtime readers will remember that Ted used to run a column here called The Five, a weekly set of links that inspired him, now retired into the FilmStack Daily Digest. With his blessing, I’d like to bring it out of retirement for one day. Here are five people who, instead of waiting for permission, are building the alternatives, and doing it with conviction.

1

Christie Marchese is building the movie theater out of your living room.

was the first advisor to say yes to Moonbeem, back when it was a sketch, and she has been the kind of mentor who gives you her time and wisdom without ever keeping score. So I am biased, but I’m also right in evangelizing her work. Her company, Kinema, treats distribution as something you host rather than something you wait to be granted. A filmmaker, or a fan, can set up a screening anywhere, a living room, a church basement, a yoga studio, sell tickets, and keep the relationship with everyone who shows up. The people doing the hosting are very often a film’s biggest fans, which is exactly the point: fandom turned into distribution. Christie recently shared some numbers with me that Kinema has yet to publish, so you are reading them here first. Across more than 10,000 events: roughly half happened outside major cities, in exactly the places the traditional release map ignores; 60 percent were in person, because people still want to be in a room together; 78 percent were free to attend, because hosts would rather pay the filmmaker’s licensing fee than charge their neighbors; and the average rental price runs $6.94, above the industry norm, which Christie reads as proof that people simply like paying creators more than they like paying platforms. Those numbers are a portrait of the audience that supposedly left. And in December, Kinema joined forces with Show&Tell, the filmmaker education hub built by Keith Ochwat. Show&Tell’s filmmakers moved onto Kinema’s screening and streaming tech, every Kinema filmmaker got free access to Show&Tell’s education and community, and each side now leans into what it does best. Keith calls the result a unified education-to-exhibition pathway, and it is what building looks like when the ground shifts. Christie names the problem plainly, that today’s system leaves artists paid less and films seen less. Kinema is her answer, and it is a beautiful one.

2

Elizabeth Woodward got the world to pay attention to a film it tried hard to ignore.

If you don’t know Elizabeth’s name, that is partly because the hardest-working people in this industry are so often the ones not chasing credit. She founded WILLA as a documentary and scripted company and built it into something rarer: a producer-distributor that pairs traditional financing with philanthropic support, so it can back films the market is too nervous to touch. WILLA co-produced The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s film about a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza, and when no major distributor stepped up, took on the film’s US release as well. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, with the longest standing ovation in film festival history (nearly 24 minutes, a record previously held by Pan’s Labyrinth at Cannes), and went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature. It also grossed nearly a million dollars domestically in its theatrical run, which WILLA calls its most successful release to date. Getting there was not simple. An organized campaign during Oscar voting tried to brand the film as propaganda. Elizabeth’s measure of success is worth stealing: not only the box office, but the rooms the film reached — the United Nations, the UK and European parliaments, university campuses across the country. And her line about this moment is tattoo-worthy: “Destabilisation is exciting.” It is, if you are the kind of person who builds inside it.

3

Giulia Caruso is quietly rewiring where the money meets the filmmaker.

Giulia runs Catalyst at the Sundance Institute, and if you have not been through that program it is hard to overstate how unusual and effective it is. Catalyst exists to put independent investors in the same room as filmmakers, on the filmmaker’s terms. Since 2013 it has helped raise more than $60 million for over 150 fiction and nonfiction features. Moonbeem itself was incubated in that orbit, and it is no coincidence that Elizabeth Woodward is a Catalyst fellow too (so once again, my bias is showing). But what makes Giulia great is her insistence that audience and financials are part of the same conversation. At a recent panel she put it roughly this way: you start folding audience knowledge into your creative strategy and your financing strategy at the very same time. That is the whole shift in one sentence. The filmmakers who make it through this decade will be the ones who stop treating the business as something that happens to their art after picture lock.

4

Shekhar Kapur wants stories to behave like rainforests, not vaults.

This pick is further out, and it is the future I am most drawn to. Kapur, who made Bandit Queen and Elizabeth (starring Cate Blanchett), launched an AI-assisted series called Warlord whose entire world, its designs and its characters, is open for anyone to reuse for a penny a use, on one condition: whatever you build on top of it stays open too. He calls it a rainforest of ideas, and his larger claim is the one I have bet my second act on: “Great stories can become their own platforms. They don’t need to be hosted by another platform.” This is exactly the world I am capturing in NEW HERE, where artists are building ownership, authorship, and remix directly into the work rather than signing it all away at the door. Whatever your feelings about generative AI, and this community holds the full spectrum, the underlying idea deserves to be taken seriously, because the next generation will grow up assuming that building on each other’s work is normal, and they will be right.

5

Manhattan Neighborhood Network has been handing New Yorkers the keys for over thirty years.

I was introduced to Manhattan Neighborhood Network by my friend Lindsay Firestone, who leads film and special content projects at Bloomberg Philanthropies and is one of the most generous and fearless champions of storytelling I know. MNN is the largest community media center in the country, and it runs on an idea that feels almost radical in 2026: that anyone, regardless of money or background, should be able to walk in, learn to make media, and put it on the air. Founded in 1992, MNN trains well over a thousand New Yorkers a year in production, editing, podcasting, and documentary filmmaking, lends them professional equipment, and broadcasts their work, uncensored, in more than 40 languages, to roughly half a million households in Manhattan and millions more nationwide. It is the unglamorous, foundational infrastructure most of us forget exists until it is threatened. In a moment when public media has been defunded and the powerful would plainly prefer fewer cameras in fewer hands, a free and open First Amendment forum for whoever walks through the door is not nostalgia. It is one of the bravest things a city still offers, and it is exactly the kind of institution I want my daughter’s generation to inherit.

The night I started writing this, I read my daughter the same book for the fourth time this week (we are big fans of Mac Barnett’s Extra Yarn right now), and once I was finished, she “read” it back to me, inventing half the words along the way, with an authentic voice entirely her own. I keep thinking that this is the whole job now: not to guard our stories, but to build a world where the next generation can take them, remix them, make them theirs, while crediting and remunerating the original teams.

That is why I build. It is also why these five give me genuine hope for the world Telma will inherit.

Before I hand the keys back to Ted, two things. First, where to find me: I write about all of this, the business, the tools, the future of authored work, for free on the dpop Studios Substack. I am also locking NEW HERE over the next few months and moderating our Discord of more than 14,000 people, which you are welcome to join here. If you make things, the Creator Calculator is free and built to ground any storyteller’s ambitions in financial data you can actually use. And if expressive fandom is your thing, you can claim your username on Moonbeem now, early, as we bring on more films, more artists, and more fans. Anyone who claims their username on Moonbeem in the next month will receive a special “Early Adopter” badge on their profile.

Second, a suggestion for this community, since Ted invites them, and since Elizabeth Joyce and the Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative are currently showing us what it looks like when this community decides to own its infrastructure: what if we built an open, living directory of independent, filmmaker-built tools and platforms? Some of the map exists already. Christie co-wrote The Distribution Playbook, and Ted keeps growing the Resources here. But a playbook teaches you the game, and a directory tells you who is already on the field: the Kinemas, the WILLAs, and the small scrappy ideas many of us are quietly building in the dark, gathered in one place so no filmmaker has to rediscover the same infrastructure alone. I’m happy to seed it and keep it current. Name one tool in the comments, yours or someone else’s, and I will fold every single one in and report back to this community with the results.

The audience is waiting outside. Let’s go build the doors.

Thank you, Ted. And thank you all for reading.

Dan

I love this book. I think everyone in the FKATheFilmBiz should read it, and certainly all the HopeForFilm subscribers. I laughed consistently while reading it — because, yeah, otherwise you’d have to cry. If it all wasn’t 100% true, I’d never believe our industry could be in such a shithole! But we are… so grin and bear it, until we change it that is.

Described by the publisher, MIT Press, as:

An almanac of every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025.

From A. S. Hamrah, the film critic at n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018, comes this unique archive of unfortunate movie bulletins, compiled for his weekly newsletter, Last Week in End Times Cinema, and presented here in digest form.

These customized batches of misfortune and upheaval record a full year of wrong thinking, bad decisions, and man-made disasters from the world of filmmaking. Set against the backdrop of the crazed push for AI, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the reelection of Donald Trump, the general disaster of current commercial cinema in the age of streaming platforms, theater closures, and the dead-end reliance on IP franchising becomes apparent. As the Hollywood film industry plunged into near irrelevance, these weekly roundups tracked every passing mistake, every easily avoided blunder, every up-to-the-minute example of unnecessary garbage as it emerged from the content mills of our newly tech-based movie business.

Presented without commentary, footnotes, or links, inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and the Coffee News, this compilation lists filmland items in naked form, stripped of any ameliorating showbiz happy talk. As Fred Allen once wrote about Hollywood, beneath all that phony tinsel there is real tinsel. Here it is, all the shiny nothingness of an industry gone astray.

Enjoy. And buy the book today. In fact, you should buy five copies because you will want to give it to all your friends.

Buy this great book now!

June 30, 2024

Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne, age 89, and Mank director David Fincher will be doing a Chinatown–prequel series for Netflix

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a 37-year-old woman swapped bodies with a 65-year-old woman? Disney’s forthcoming sequel, Freakier Friday, with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis returning from the original remake, will presumably answer that question

Beowulf director Robert Zemeckis’s next film is called Here. It is shot from a fixed point of view in a living room and features deaged and up-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright seen through many years, although evidently the film is somehow more about the living room

Hallmark is teaming up with the Kansas City Chiefs football team to make a Christmas movie called Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story

Horror director Ti West seems to have staged a fake protest outside a theater in Hollywood to promote his new film, Maxxxine

The Revue Cinema in Toronto is on the brink of closing because their landlord wants to raise the rent so much. Meanwhile, the West Newton Cinema outside Boston appears to have raised enough money to purchase itself and remain in operation

Many screenwriters and actors in Hollywood are on the brink of losing their health insurance because the strikes last year limited the amount they could work, meaning they will not meet the union work-time minimums that allow them to maintain their plans

There was a long article in The New York Times in which the major villains of the streaming era, including Ted Sarandos and John Malone, gathered on Barry Diller’s yacht to discuss “the future of streaming,” which was the title of the piece

WBD’s Max is bringing back the HBO brand because no one likes Max

Sony, Universal, and WBD aresuing various AI start-ups for using their copyrighted material to train content-generating AI systems

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it’s OK to do that because “the social contract” of the web implies that all online content is “freeware” and therefore can be used for training AI

Movie studio A24 has secured a large investment from Thrive Capital, a finance firm specializing in AI run by Josh Kushner, Jared Kushner’s brother. Thrive is a major investor in OpenAI and is helping pitch their Sora product to studios The first-ever all-AI TV commercial has been created, and it’s for Toys“R”Us, which I thought had gone out of business. Toys seem like an odd use for that, since they already exist and kids like to see them in action. Maybe they’re not real toys?

Headline of the Week: “Faces made of living skin make robots smile”

Paramount+ is raising its subscription prices while also cutting all the content on its Comedy Central, TV Land, MTV, and Country Music Television websites

The South by Southwest festival, aka SXSW, aka “South by,” a Penske Media property, has dropped its partnerships with various arms manufacturers and the US military after being boycotted because of its complicity with the Israeli apartheid regime’s genocidal war in Gaza

The new Netflix rom-com A Family Affair, featuring an all-star cast led by Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron, has premiered to terriblereviews and low audiencescores, and is the first film I have ever seen a Penske Media property describe as “puzzlingly uncinematic”

Relatedly, The New York Times thinks Catherine Breillat’s new film, Last Summer, about a woman sleeping with her stepson, “may shock” its viewers The perpetrator of the Graceland scam meant to rob Mad Max: Fury Road actor Riley Keough of her birthright as Elvis’s granddaughter appears to have been an elderly conwoman in Missouri posing as a Nigerian

Streets of Fire actor Willem Dafoe played Nosferatu actor Max Schreck in the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, which was a fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu. Now Dafoe will play the Van Helsing character in a remake of Nosferatu in which It actor Bill Skarsgård will play the Nosferatu role

The dog of Lola director Nicola Peltz Beckham has died at a dog groomer operating out of a van, and the heiress-auteur is going to sue after she finishes a series of social media posts about her “unbearable pain”

Billionaire Brinah Milstein and her husband Roy Bank, a producer of reality TV shows including It’s Worth What?, own the house Marilyn Monroe died in. They want to tear it down after having purchased it a year ago for $8.35 million. The couple lives in the residence next door and wants to expand. The Los Angeles City Council has stopped them by declaring the Monroe house a landmark

Marry Me actor Jennifer Lopez was spotted flying coach, and we were told that humanizes her

A new phenomenon has been identified among men flying on airplanes who don’t watch movies, listen to music, read books, or look at their devices during long flights, opting instead to just stare at the on-screen flight tracker, and think. It has been named “rawdogging,” and as soon as an article appeared about it, it was denounced as essentialist and said on social media not to be an actual thing. Reader, I have done this. Does that humanize me?

July 21, 2024

Hours before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race to be reelected, The New York Times published a bizarre op-ed by Trial of the Chicago 7 writer-director Aaron Sorkin calling for the Democratic Party to nominate Republican senator Mitt Romney as its candidate for president

In other Utah news, now that Park City has decided not to renew the Sundance Film Festival’s agreement with the town to host the fest, Sundance has announced five potential new host cities nobody from Hollywood wants to go to: Atlanta, Boulder, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Santa Fe

The Disney leak of 1.1 TB of data on unreleased projects by the hacktivist or hacktivists called NullBulge was prompted by Disney’s disregard for artists’ rights, its approach to AI, and its exploitation of consumers, according to the outlaw group. Apparently NullBulge infiltrated Disney’s servers as early as May Disney is removing its animatronic character Liver Lips McGrowl from their theme parks’ Country Bear Jamboree. The company went out of its way in a press release to explain that LLMcG was offensive to alcoholics because of his appearance, and that “liver lips” is a pejorative term for people with cirrhosis— and, also, incidentally, by the way, the look of the character could be considered offensive to Black people

WBD CEO David Zaslav has a plan to raise the company’s stock price by breaking up the company into component parts. Not sure how that would work or do anything at all

WBD’s HBO is planning a TV series based on the 2002 Brazilian movie City of God. Not sure how that would work or do anything at all

Bulworth actor Halle Berry has dropped out of starring in a forthcoming Ryan Murphy TV series called All’s Fair, which the media portrayed as an example of her continuing uncanny ability to avoid crap TV work, which would be admirable and true if she hadn’t starred in the CBS TV series Extant in 2014

Berry also this week blamed the failure of her 2004 movie Catwoman on critics That’s part of a renewed trend this week that included Green Book actor Viggo Mortensen, who while decrying the Amazon only release of his 2022 movie Thirteen Lives also claimed that “what passes for critical thinking in terms of reviews is pretty poor” these days

And Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, who supposedly went full Trumper because of the terrible reviews the Netflix movie of his book Hillbilly Elegy received Thirteen Lives and Hillbilly Elegy, it should be noted, were both directed by Ron Howard

After Kyle Gass, Jack Black’s partner in the musical comedy duo Tenacious D, wished, during a Tenacious D performance in Australia, that the bullet had not missed Trump, Black issued a statement saying that the joke “blindsided” him. Black then canceled the Tenacious D tour and broke with Gass professionally. Black stars in the movie franchises Kung Fu Panda, Jumanji, Goosebumps, Super Mario Bros., and Minecraft

Silence of the Lambs actor Anthony Hopkins had never heard about Donald Trump’s obsession with Hannibal Lecter until last week. In addition to frequently name-checking the fictional serial killer / supergenius Hopkins played, Trump has also asserted that Hopkins is dead and that he supported Trump in 2016, both erroneous claims

At the Republican National Convention, AI screens used as backdrops featured American flags with 70 stars instead of 50, perhaps in celebration of the second Trump administration’s potential annexations of all Canada’s provinces, Greenland’s municipalities, and Bermuda

Studios are starting to microslice success metrics the way broadcast TV began to do as it lost viewership to streaming. Thus, the Twister sequel, Twisters, leads the box office this week, but also had “the biggest start ever for a natural disaster pic.” Twisters, incidentally, does not mention climate change despite its subject, because Minari director Lee Isaac Chung didn’t want to be seen as “putting forward any message”

Disney’s Marvel Studios is returning to the more recent past by hiring the Russo brothers to direct the next two Avengers movies. The next two?

Season 26 of the CBS reality TV series Big Brother will feature something called BB AI, which will somehow run the show, making it “the most unpredictable season for Houseguests,” a phrase that already seems AI generated. The disgraced, indefatigable Julie Chen Moonves will return to host alongside what appears to be hologram of herself

The 9,500-square-foot, $27 million San Francisco mansion of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is falling apart because the eyebrowless tech whiz hired a shady contractor, whom he is now suing. Part of the problem is that the Lombard Street house’s sewage line was plugged up with bags by a pissed-off subcontractor, causing flooding and attracting coyotes to the patio

The founder of NBCUniversal and WBD’s crappy movie-ticketselling app Fandango, J. Michael Cline, has committed suicide by jumping from a high floor of Midtown Manhattan’s Kimberly Hotel. The depressed investment banker was also a former employee of McKinsey & Company

Pearl Harbor actor Alec Baldwin, not content to get off scot-free for manslaughter, says he will now sue the State of New Mexico for everything he went through

The new Alien: Romulus popcorn bucket has a distinct sex-toy look like the other ones made as in-theater promotions this summer, and if I were an editor I would assign someone a piece on why these things all look like they were made for coitus

Leave a comment

The excerpts above originally appeared in Last Week In End Times Cinema, published in November 2025 by Semiotexte(e).

A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018. He is the film critic for n+1 and writes for a number of other publications, including Harper’s, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Fast Company, The Baffler, and the Criterion Collection. He has worked as a movie theater projectionist, a semiotic brand ana- lyst in the television industry, a political pollster, a football cinematographer, and for the film director Raúl Ruiz. He produced the feature-length documentary Bunker, directed by Jenny Perlin, which was the opening night film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight in 2022. He lives in New York.

Ted’s note:

See the Alien: Romulus popcorn bucket here.

Did you read Vanessa’s great post this week? It’s a fantastic bit of writing where she reveals what she has learned of her grandfather’s top-secret intelligence work and uses it to bridge to our screening of INVISIBLE NATION in US Congress less than a week ago.

Read it now please:

Dream of a Better World

Four Generations, Three Chinas, One Taiwan: My Family’s War Story and the Boomerang of Authoritarianism

Read more

4 days ago · 17 likes · Vanessa Hope

This post led to her being invited onto a live podcast tomorrow (Wednesday) that perhaps you’d like to join.

Wednesday, June 10
3:00 PM Pacific Time (6:00 PM EST, 2200 UTC)

Here’s the blurb from the host:

We welcome Vanessa Hope, award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and director of the acclaimed documentary Invisible Nation, for a timely and thought-provoking conversation about democracy, authoritarianism, Taiwan, China, and the future of freedom around the world.

Vanessa recently published a powerful and deeply personal essay:

“Four Generations, Three Chinas, One Taiwan: My Family’s War Story and the Boomerang of Authoritarianism”

In it, she traces an extraordinary journey spanning four generations—from her grandfather’s secret World War II rescue missions in China, to her own work documenting Taiwan’s democratic transformation, to the growing global challenge posed by authoritarianism in the 21st century.

Our discussion will explore:

• Taiwan’s remarkable democratic journey
• Lessons from World War II and the struggle for freedom
• The rise of authoritarianism around the world
• The role of storytelling, film, and citizen engagement in defending democracy
• What ordinary people can do to build a more peaceful, democratic future

Vanessa’s documentary Invisible Nation has helped bring international attention to Taiwan’s vibrant democracy and the challenges it faces today. She recently screened the film at the U.S. Capitol with bi-partisan impact! She continues to be a leading voice in global conversations about democracy, human rights, and citizen empowerment.

Among others in her film she interviews Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former digital minister who has proven that we can, with the right interactive tools, bring people together across the seemingly impossible divisions. See the interview with Audrey Tang at TheWorldIsMyCountry.com/club

Following Vanessa’s interview there will be a bonus presentation by Mega-Meeting founder Ozuem Esiri on One Big Impact: Mobilizing Peace Advocates and Communities through Positive Peace and Ecological Thinking.

Whether your interests are peacebuilding, international understanding, democracy, human rights, Rotary service, or simply learning from inspiring global leaders, this promises to be an engaging and important conversation.

Join us live on Zoom by registering at this link:

https://www.theworldismycountry.com/tryoutclub

Together, let’s explore how citizens can help create a more peaceful, democratic, and people-powered world.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Read more

When I wrote this up originally across four posts back in 2024, I realize I didn’t separate out what was needed for the system versus what we need to do as individuals.

You can think in two directions at once, right? Well, please do, friends. Please do.

I am going to separate them these steps into the ones for us as individuals — or even a community — and that what is needed for the overall system we are building.

But that requires a bit of a rethink and evaluation. So first let’s look at what he had initially. That’s today’s post before you now.

Then I will do a separate post on:

• Steps Recommended For The NonDē Cinemaker Committed To Building A New Ecosystem.

And I will follow that with a:

• Revised List Of Recommended Requirements For The New NonDē Ecosystem.

I think this will help us all best grok the work ahead of us. I know it will do so with me. And we are building this together, right?

Sound good? Make sense? You with me? I need to you to keep up. I recognize some of you have been following along since I started this while others only recently got hip to it. If you have been there from the start, perhaps you can skip this beat, although you might want to refresh yourself with a dose or two from the selection down below. The newbies may want to take a somewhat more extensive bath. The choice is yours.

Now you see where we are going, understand where we are, and know a bit better how we got here.

The Initial 25 Steps Recommended For A New Non-Dependent Film Ecosystem

1. End anti-competitive practices of GSPs (government regulation)

2. Sustainability is the primary goal;

3. Deepen appreciation & comfort in the feeling for and expression of “art”

4. Artists Bill of Rights

5. Avoid binary “either/or” thinking; it’s “both/and”.

6. Aim for both excellence and the spirit of the perpetually “amateur”;

7. Embrace aesthetic & narrative risk taking

8. Embrace innovation & encourage experimentation in adoption of new platforms;

9. Leaders lead and communities empower.

10. Execute the operational improvements that have been neglected.

11. Think beyond one film at a time.

12. Encourage all film investment to be 1/3 production, 1/3 marketing, 1/3 ecosystem operational improvement.

13. Think/work holistically.

14. Shift to a single title revenue-driven model.

15. Secure & share institutional knowledge (Best Practices).

16. Collective alliances.

17. International alliances.

18. Establish & Maintain First Principles & Tenets.

19. Code of collaboration for individual enterprises.

20. Utopian vision & map.

21. Prioritize audience engagement (go them more than you try to bring them to you).

22. Provide context.

23. Prioritize Cinema exhibition.

24. Provide (at the very least) the benefits and opportunities that are currently available (like real time payments and reporting).

25. Prioritize joy; Have fun!

Come back soon so we can consider the next steps.

Any questions, class?

Leave a comment

I chose boredom as my enemy at a very early age.

I avoid boredom, perhaps over anything else. I will quit or leave when it enters the room; I flee when I suspect it even dares to linger longer than necessary. To be clear, it is why I no longer call them… if you know what I mean.

When do you first smell boredom? And do we have a reason to be concerned here? On the ‘stack? In Filmland? You’d let me know if you think I am beating that dead horse too much, or perhaps we all are, altogether and in unison, right?

Leave a comment

How do we start to check ourselves at the door? Are we treading upon well worn territory today? Yet again? Please say it ain’t so, Joe!

Perhaps we should count the ways. Perhaps we could get , , or to measure it for us. Are we singing some songs too oftern? What are our over-worn topics? Or maybe we can do a quick brainstorming of it now.

And to be honest, there are multiple film communities on the ‘stack. It ain’t just FilmStack after all. In fact, the most popular film newsletters on this platform aren’t the ones that are filmmakers talking about making films. The most popular film-related Substacks deal more with film from a pop culture standpoint. All hail and ! And then there’s too, who is really in a class unto himself. He does examine the industry as well as celebrate creation.

But for today, we are examining Filmstack, and you who are part of it, know who you are. So….

What are the most well worn subjects on FilmStack?

Before we begin, it should be made clear though that this is not a plea to ban these as subjects for further exploration. Just like with cinema in general, the popularity of the subject (at least from the authors’ point of view) raises the bar for the rest of us. The fact that everyone makes horror films doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make horror films; it only should make you well aware that everyone does, which might mean you need to try even harder. It’s that sort of thing.

Call this a form of self-criticism. Or the encouragement for all of us to do a little of it for ourselves. How do we keep moving forward? Making it better together? When do we know we have read enough on a particular subject — or most others have?

Ready? Set... Go!

1. “Theatrical Is Dead / Theatrical Is Back”

   So how do people want to watch movies now?

2. Hollywood Is Dead! Indie Is Dead! / Long Live Hollywood? Long Live Indie?

3. Streaming Economics Don’t Work

4. AI and Filmmaking / How Filmmakers Must Adapt to AI

   Perhaps this is now the dominant topic. Should it be?

5. The Crisis of Independent Film

   This is certainly where I got started… even before Substack.

6. Inspiration & How To Find Your Voice

   Maybe I am guilty here. I did start the FilmStack Daily Inspo Challenge. What can I say? The question of where to find it is one of my personal faves.

7. Festival Relevance

   Are acquisitions dead? Are festivals the only distribution left for SC-Indie film?

8. Creator Economy vs Hollywood

9. The Collapse of Film Journalism

   Film journalists writing about the collapse of film journalism. It’s like filmmakers writing about the collapse of filmmaking, instead of making films when it is in many ways cheaper and better than ever before.

10. Why Audiences Aren’t Showing Up

11. The State of Cinema

12. Own your audience. Build an audience.

    There are few things I believe more than email lists. I guess that can get a bit boring, eh?

13. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Representation

14. What is cinema? What is better cinema?

    The good vs. great debate… the problem with the status quo… content! Mid. Meh. Long live ambiguity. And again I love this one. Guilty as charged.

15. The Death of the Middle Budget Movie

16. Distribution Is Broken

17. Labor and Sustainability

18. Film Education and Career Advice

19. Nostalgia for when everything seemed better….

What did I miss? Leave out? And what comes next?

Leave a comment

Is it time to pick some new subjects perhaps? What about here, on Hope For Film? Do you feel I go to the same source too often? I know there are some topics I keep returning to… Is that a problem for you, mate?

I think my main topic is how to build something better together. I think I will use a new tag line that summons that. What am I really trying to do here anyways? I like to examine the conditions that make good movies—and good creative lives—possible — particularly the cinema ecosystem and its communities. Yeah, that’s my beat. What’s yours?

In the end, I think if I had a plea, it would be…

FilmStack, please stay weird, be weird, grow weird.

I hope that is okay with you.

Today's is a short-ish post. I don’t normally do short. Maybe I should do more of it?

This is another compilation of past posts; I’ve linked to them below. I think the next step will be to reorder them into categories. For now they are just in the order I wrote them.

Any suggestions on how to make this sort of list more useful that you have are greatly appreciated.

Personally I suggest printing them out several times and using them as the wallpaper in your study.

The full list is a perk for the paying subscribers. I really appreciate your support. I am going to try to do more for you…

100 HopeForFilm “Film Industry” Truths v1.0

1. Film is a cultural industry — thus combining art with commerce. Both aspects are necessary to focus on and enhance for success.

2. Film is a cultural industry of abundance. There is more than enough to satisfy anyone for their entire lifetime. To entice audience engagement, distinction and urgency must be displayed.

3. Film is generally a customer experience of access. We have been groomed to believe we can get anything anywhere at anytime and that that is a positive attribute. Satisfying this or denying it is a choice to be considered.

4. Like other cultural goods, our anticipation of a film greatly influences our experience of it.

5. Film will never be a predictable performance industry other than occasionally around some high recognition IP and then it will only be partially predictable and still predicated on a wide range of inputs.

6. As Film will never be a predictable performance industry, the financiers, as well the manufacturers and distributors, must accept a level of risk and should adopt a portfolio approach.

7. Film of quality and any degree of sophistication will generally be execution-dependent and thus requires valuing that which improves execution outcome. Other than talent and good fortune, it is process, communication and time that are the leading factors that contribute to positive outcome.

8. Films collapse more often than not and as such financial planning across a slate is only valid upon Greenlight, locked lead cast, and the start of prep — and even then some movies will collapse or need to be halted.

9. Testing of finished or work-in-progress films by audiences or critics is not a science, but only a data point, and must be treated as no more than that. Poor testing films can be a success and vice versa.

10. After capital, talent control, and distribution, the Film business is driven by reputation and respect. We must treat our partners well and honor our agreements. Short term thinking around individual project decisions will harm brand’s reputation.

Read more

For me, this journey was never envisioned as just another professional ladder to climb. It started as something far more personal with a deep, almost irrational love for film that felt like it was wired into my bones.

For 10 full years before the strikes ever hit, I devoted myself completely to this craft. I pursued the formal education, racked up the crushing costs that came with it, and clawed my way through the relentless, soul-grinding climb despite setback after brutal setback. Year after year I showed up completely by pouring everything I had into the work because I genuinely believed in its potential to matter, to move people, to build something lasting in a world that often feels disposable.

In a post-COVID world, it felt like everything I had spent that decade building simply vanished. The industry I had bet my life on — the one that had already been fragile — shut down theaters, halted productions, and shifted so violently toward streaming and “cost-cutting” that the path I had fought so hard to carve out no longer existed in the same way. Projects dried up, opportunities evaporated, and the entire ecosystem I had invested my 20s and early 30s into looked unrecognizable, and for a while it felt like all that time, all that sacrifice, had been for nothing.

So, like many others in this industry, the 2023 strikes then slammed what little momentum remained to a sudden, dead stop. No safety net, no severance, no fallback plan — just the sudden, terrifying realization that the entire system I had bet my life on could vanish overnight and leave me standing in the wreckage with nothing but bills, questions, and the heavy weight of a decade that now felt erased.

I lived that intensity firsthand. I sustained major initiatives with zero backup options, no rich parents, no studio safety net, and no promises of what came next. I kept going anyway, and I came out the other side stronger, clearer, and far less willing to hand my future over to anyone else ever again. The repeated sting of being undervalued, overlooked, and dismissed didn’t break me — it lit a fire. Those frustrations became fuel and forged a profound, unshakable determination to create something authentic that stares reality dead in the eye with NO illusions, softened edges, or corporate polish garbage to make it palatable for people who don’t actually live this life.

That resolve, born straight from navigating the wreckage of an industry that stopped caring about people like US, is what now propels me forward with total, unyielding purpose to build for myself as the only practical way left to protect the work, protect my sanity, and protect the future I still believe film and television can have.

This is the new direction. This is the only direction that feels honest anymore.

So where are we now?

The year is 2026, and the landscape feels both unsettled and full of possibility. Studios have pulled back from the endless greenlight frenzy of the streaming boom years. Box office numbers are selective with big event films that still draw crowds, but mid-budget projects have largely migrated or disappeared. Streaming services, once in a frantic race for subscribers, are now laser-focused on profitability. Consolidation is happening quietly. AI tools are everywhere, from script analysis to visual effects, lowering the barrier for creation while raising questions about what remains distinctly human. Linear television is shrinking further, yet people are still hungry for stories that feel real, personal, and worth their time.

In the middle of this shift, one truth stands out more clearly than ever and that is that the old gatekeeper model—waiting to be chosen, shaped, and distributed by someone else—has become a fragile way to build a life in this field. Building for yourself isn’t a fallback plan but rather the foundation that lets you move forward with clarity and control no matter what the larger industry does next.

Think about what the future actually looks like when you own your path. Film and television IS evolving into something more fragmented, more direct, and ultimately more personal. Audiences have splintered across platforms, devices, and attention spans, but that fragmentation creates space for voices that speak straight to specific communities rather than trying to please everyone. The creators who thrive won’t be the ones who chase the next corporate trend BUT instead who have already built the relationships, the body of work, and the small infrastructure that lets them keep going on their own terms.

Start with creative freedom.

When you build for yourself, you decide what story needs telling right now, in this moment of cultural flux. You aren’t rewriting scenes to fit a notes call from an executive who may not even watch the final cut. You aren’t waiting for a green light that might never come because quarterly earnings shifted. That freedom lets you respond to the world as it actually is—whether that’s a quiet character study that captures the loneliness many feel in 2026 or a genre piece that speaks to a niche audience tired of the same formulas. The work ends up more honest, and honest work travels farther in a crowded landscape. People can sense when something was made because the creator needed to make it, not because it was engineered to check boxes.

This ownership also creates real sustainability. The industry has shown us repeatedly how quickly external support can evaporate. One studio regime change, one algorithm tweak, one round of cost-cutting, and projects disappear overnight. When you build for yourself through direct audience connections, your own small distribution experiments, or even simple tools like newsletters and community platforms, you create assets that belong to YOU. Your films or series don’t get pulled from a catalog because a licensing deal expired and your skills don’t rust because you’re not waiting for the next gig. Every project you finish becomes part of a living catalog that can generate revenue, spark conversations, and open new doors years later. In a world where AI can generate drafts and visuals faster than ever, the sustainable advantage isn’t speed but rather the accumulated trust and body of work that only consistent, self-directed effort can build.

While everyone will be talking about Obsession and Backrooms for the next few weeks, let us not forget Kevin Smith’s Red State — a film he wrote, directed, and self-financed for $4 million before self-distributing it through his own roadshow tour after traditional studios passed on it — or the original Saw, which James Wan and Leigh Whannell shot in just 18 days on a shoestring $1.2 million budget because they refused to wait for big-studio permission, or the ultra-low-budget 2020 crime series Big Dogs, where Liam Neeson’s son Micheál Richardson starred as the lead in a gritty direct-to-audience streaming drama made outside the traditional television pipelines.

James Wan and Leigh Whannell wrote Saw in 2001, couldn’t get it made in Australia, and shot a 9-minute proof-of-concept short to get producers and actors to take the feature seriously. Producers came aboard, formed Twisted Pictures, and financed it independently for around $1.2M, which Wan shot in 18 days. Lionsgate bought worldwide rights at Sundance in 2004 and put it in cinemas after the Midnight reaction, where it grossed $104M and started a franchise that is still running. Wan and Whannell reportedly turned down a $5M buyout and took a backend deal instead, which is two first-time filmmakers choosing to bet on their own film.

Kevin Smith made Red State after the Weinsteins, who had distributed nearly all of his work, passed on it. He raised the $4M budget from two private investor groups, premiered at Sundance in 2011, bought his own film back for $20 on the stage in front of the assembled distributors, and released it himself under SModcast Pictures. He toured it as a roadshow with a live Q&A, grossing close to $1M on under $500 of paid advertising, including $162K from one night at Radio City Music Hall, before handing VOD and home video to Lionsgate. The tour worked because he had spent 15 years building an audience that would pay $40 and up to see him, and that audience was the asset that made self-distribution possible.

Big Dogs started as novelist Adam Dunn’s books, was adapted by Dunn and was produced independently through Aurelian Productions. Micheál Richardson took his first lead role, and the 8-episode season went straight to Tubi and Prime Video in 2020, with no network in the middle deciding whether the audience was allowed to find it.

None of these 3 skipped the hard part, and none of them waited for the support system to show up on its own. They built something finished and working before they needed anyone’s yes, and they kept enough of themselves in the work that people still talk about it.

The human element matters more than ever in this future.

AI will handle repetitive tasks, generate options, and even help polish footage, but it cannot replace the messy, lived perspective that comes from a filmmaker who has walked through their own life and chosen to turn that experience into art.

Audiences in 2026 are craving that authenticity amid so much synthetic content. They want to feel the hand of the maker. Building for yourself protects that hand. It keeps you close to the work, close to the reasons you started, and close to the people who respond to what you make. That closeness becomes your edge - the thing no algorithm can replicate.

Community grows out of this without much effort. When the work is yours, the audience stops being a passive count and becomes part of the long game. You share the process, you ask questions, you let people in, and over years those relationships become your release network, your first readers, your most honest critics, and your most reliable support. Word of mouth still drives discovery in this field more than any ad buy, and that network outlasts platform changes and lean years because it runs on trust rather than rented attention.

There’s also a quiet effect on everyone watching. Every time a maker chooses ownership over waiting, it shows the next group that handing over your rights and your point of view isn’t the only way in, and it widens the range of stories, because the people telling them aren’t filtered through a narrow read of what worked before. The whole field gets healthier when more of us work from the position of having built something rather than from scarcity.

None of this erases the hard parts, since investment is still hard to find, attention is still scattered, and burnout is real. What changes is that those obstacles stop being someone else’s decisions and turn into questions you can answer for yourself, about what you need to keep going, who you actually want to reach, and what feels worth the effort across years rather than quarters. Those questions lead to clearer decisions, better limits, and a more satisfying creative life.

The joy comes back, too. When the work belongs to you, the daily practice of making it stops feeling like a gamble and starts feeling like a conversation you’re having with the world on your own terms. You wake up knowing the next scene or episode or short belongs to what you set out to do, not to someone else’s shifting priorities, and that alignment carries you through the hard days and makes the good ones feel earned.

Looking further out, this business will reward the people who built something durable. The technology will keep changing, the formats will keep emerging, the distribution tools will keep evolving, and the need for human stories told with care will stay put. The people who spent years tending their own corner will be the ones ready to meet that need without panic, because they won’t be starting from zero every time the market shifts. They’ll already have the audience, the skills, the catalog, and the steadiness that years of showing up for your own work produce.

Building for yourself was never about going it alone. It’s about choosing the relationships and the methods and the pace that let you stay in the conversation for the rest of your career, and recognizing that the business may change shape around you while your ability to make something that matters doesn’t have to wait for permission. In 2026 it’s simply the practical way forward for anyone who wants to keep telling stories that hold up.

The path isn’t glamorous on a daily basis. It asks for consistency, for new skills, for patience when growth feels slow. It also offers the thing the old system rarely could, the steadiness of knowing your creative life is in your own hands. We’re early in a more decentralized, more maker-led stretch of this business, the tools are more reachable than they’ve ever been, and so are the audiences.

What’s left is the decision to build, day after day, for yourself, knowing it won’t guarantee fast success and will guarantee that whatever success you reach is real and lasting and yours. That’s the future I see, not a perfect business, but one where the people who care most about the work are steering their own ships, and it starts with each of us choosing, deliberately, to build.

I learned that before I had the language for it.

I met Paul Reubens on Season 2 of The Blacklist in 2014, and over that season he became something like a mentor to me without either of us ever putting the word on it.

The thing he told me that never left was the plainest version of everything above, that you do the work for yourself first, before anyone else’s approval gets a vote. He meant it as the way to stay honest, and he had earned the right to say it.

Paul died in 2023, and it still hurts, and I expect it always will.

The lessons outlived him, which is about the most any of us can ask of the things we make and the things we hand to other people.

So when I tell you to build for yourself, know that I’m passing along something that was handed to me first, by someone who lived it all the way through.

Follow me on this wonderful journey!

Subscribe to me here on Substack

Subscribe on YouTube

Subscribe on Rumble

Sign up for my Newsletter

For more in depth Insights

Follow me Personally on LinkedIn and Business on Linkedin

Follow me on Instagram

Follow me on X

Today, zoom in for discussion on how to end enshitification, act on your utopian ideation, and prioritize the art, artist, audience — and the sustainability of all. Or as my friend Jon prefers to say.. to “save independent film” ( doesn’t he know? It died already!).

Click button below to register and attend live or receive the recording.

6/3 Zoom Registration

If you missed Elizabeth’s HopeForFilm Takeover yesterday, now is when you should catch up.

And of course, you know you must pledge your support to The People’s Campaign To Save Letterboxed From Private Equity’s Enshitification.

Film Lovers Should Own Letterboxd

https://deadline.com/2026/05/letterboxd-for-sale-1236921783/

Make no mistake: THE REVOLUTION IS NOW HERE.

The last weekend of May, 2026 will long be remembered as when it was clear that Hollywood’s dominance ended. Belly up.

This is FANTASIA, EASY RIDER, and BILLY JACK. This is PULP FICTION on too many espressos.

When it comes to a business model, there is one for cinema that has not only worked 3x in a row this year alone, but costs significantly less than any one previously and tastes a whole effin lot better. This is bigger than 70’s New Hollywood, or 90’s Indie. Time to toss out the suits and change out the pills — there is a new reality upon us.

(And as much as I wish I could say it was NonDē that slayed the beast, it ain’t so; it was that not-so-new kid in town, YINDIE).

Read Evan’s whole brilliant piece:

Media War & Peace

YouTube + Filmmakers = Yindie Film

Happy Monday, Peaceniks. Wanna go to the movies…

Read more

13 days ago · 46 likes · 10 comments · Evan Shapiro

But yeah, I like this part below best… where Evan, gives me some credit. Hahahaha… Thank you, Evan. Evan and I have been speaking up about this for a long time. Three years now maybe. And The Industry has not been listening. At least as far as I can tell. And they’ve paid the price.

The disintermediation of distribution is great opportunity — particularly for all films/filmmakers in the targetable audience space. Fandom, yes, and Social Impact for sure, but also for any theme that people aggregate around. any demographic. Angel Studios has recognized this. Blumhouse has too. This goes beyond Hollywood missing out on just a film or three.

This is the sound of a thousand flowers blooming, of the running dogs losing out to the snails and turtles. This is the start of the glorious bouquets of worker-owned studios.

And what once was called Indie needs to recalibrate their missions, and start to train the people for the “Distribution as a service (DaaS)” era. The neglect of this is can no longer be excused. I tried to tell you…

A new era began this weekend. Are you on the bus?

We’ve been giving you a map of the new terrain; have you looked at it yet?

Yeah, we’ve been coloring in the blank spaces, step by step, Vanessa and me, with a lot of help from our friends.

Have you been following our NonDē distribution case study of INVISIBLE NATION? I got almost halfway through before pausing. I haven’t been able to write about it for awhile because we’ve been on tour and still have a life to lead. I may be 64, but Sir Paul is a whole lot more and he dropped a new album just this week too.

Seriously though, more has been learned. New chapters to come! Who says you can’t teach new tricks to the old dog? Bowwowwow indeed.

Our release for the next two weeks on Kinema gives everyone that doesn’t use PBS or live in one of ten or so nations — like Taiwan — where we’ve licensed it, a chance to catch it.

Through June 14th, use this link to check it out: https://www.invisiblenation.net/sneak-peek

And if you are in America you can check it for a little bit longer free on PBS:

https://www.pbs.org/show/invisible-nation/

The tide has turned. The people have the power. And we are going to #BlockTheMerger. It never was a done deal.

We may have the most corrupt government that America has ever experienced. But America still stands for something. Democracy and fair competition are still things that most of us cherish.

You’ve no doubt been following my own commitment to this issue. But why say something once when I can encourage you to read it again (and again).

Sign the open letter to Block The Merger:

Block The Merger

Exciting times are going to get even more exciting! Join me in NYC and let’s shake it up further, friends…

No tears and no more complaining. Indie died awhile back, and TheFKATheFilmBiz got its own death certificate at the end of ‘25. So what if it took five months for The New Era to begin? Now you know, we started the clock again last weekend.

It may only be an hour long, but Sanjay and I are going to make sure it is the best sixty minutes you’ve had on Planet Earth yet, legally that is and without risking your life or well-being.

Public Entrance: 50 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013

Ticket info: https://tribecafilm.com/storytellingsummit

Didja notice? Hope For Film has changed!

The old one was:

“We need a vibrant alternative to mainstream culture, especially a non-dependent cinema ecosystem. Let’s build it together & examine what got us here in the first place -- including how we can each build our own sustainable & generative creative practices.” Whew. Mouthful, eh?

I just want to know why. didn’t you stop me when you know I needed your help. Tell me.

Leave a comment

If you are a cinema lover or cinemaker, you really should subscribe to our other great newsletters…

FilmStack Deep Dive

FilmStack Deep Dive curates the best writing across FilmStack for a comprehensive understanding of the state of cinema, one topic at a time. Ready to go beyond the surface? Subscribe and explore.

By Ted Hope

FilmStack Daily Digest

A collection of highlights from (and for) the FilmStack community, curated on a rotating basis from the community.

By Ted Hope

Dream of a Better World

Imagining a more democratic, just, and peaceful world through in‑depth conversations with filmmakers and authors about power, resistance, and hope in increasingly authoritarian times.

By Vanessa Hope

If you have not yet pledged to support our campaign to buy the 60% stake in Letterboxd being sold by its current owner, we would be mighty grateful if you could check out our page on Seed&Spark.

If you have already pledged—THANK YOU, WE LOVE YOU—please share it with someone who cares about the future of film / the internet / social media / business / democracy…you get it. 🧡 💚 💙

JOIN THE CAMPAIGN

Just over one month ago, Semafor reported that the majority shareholder of Letterboxd was looking to sell their 60% stake in the company. They suggested it could be acquired by another private equity group, or maybe a strategic buyer.

Anytime a company is for sale, prospective buyers start thinking about the company’s valuation and sale price—even though the sale price doesn’t always equal the valuation or the value. Warren Buffett once said, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

When a house enters the real estate market, sellers pick a price high enough to entice them to leave; but it isn’t just math. It’s math + vibes.

A family that has outgrown but loves their home, has warm memories there, and loves their neighbors might still need real incentive to sell. Homes regularly enter the market at prices high enough to make people scoff: sometimes they sell immediately and sometimes they sit on the market until the owners either lower the price or decide to stay.

Other times the home looks beautiful, but subtext skews the pricing strategy: residents have split up, the neighbors are a nightmare, or someone got a job in a new city with a relocation bonus. That’s when the real estate agent will start every write-up with PRICED TO SELL!

Companies are the same. If the owners of a beloved family restaurant, with decades of loyal customers and history goes on the market, a resident of the neighborhood and the forensic accountant at a private equity firm will probably assess the value of it differently. After all, in economics value is defined as the amount of benefit someone brings someone. If your family has celebrated every milestone at the same corner table for the last 20 years, that restaurant has a lot of value for you and you don’t care if its undermonetized relative to price.

Want to hear Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative discuss the campaign with Ted Hope, Amy Hobby, and Jon Reiss-8Above? Join us this Wednesday, June 3rd from 2-3:30pm ET / 11am-12:30pm PT and hear why we think saving Letterboxd just might save independent / NonDē cinema! Click button below to register and attend live or receive the recording.

6/3 Zoom Registration

The prospective sale of a company— especially a customer-facing platform like Letterboxd— is the same: there is a community-driven cultural view of its value, and a nuts-and-bolts commercial view.

On the commercial side, a potential buyer might focus on metrics like revenue, monetization, TAM / SAM / SOM, churn, growth rates, cash flow, or any number of other factors. A strategic buyer might buy a company they think complements its current business, or even decide to just shut down a competitor.

On the cultural side, a buyer might buy a business with great brand value for cultural cache because its a solid business decision and it looks good—like when Apple purchased Beats and immediately got cooler.

The binary between taking a commercial view and a cultural view is similar to the gap between the purely-financial-thinking of traditional private capital and the mission-without-money model that often sinks nonprofits.

What is unique about Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative’s business model?

As a public benefit corporation, we have the legal structure to prioritize a social mission while also delivering reasonable profit. That means anyone who invests in us understands that we are NOT pursuing profit through exploitation.

Nope. We’re using the good ol’ pre-internet formula for business success: putting our time and energy into building something good for all our stakeholders.

That’s it, that’s the secret. Just do the right things for the right reasons.

That’s why we are leading a 100% heart / 0% cynicism campaign to buy 60% of Letterboxd from its current private equity owner with a coalition of mission-first impact investors and the filmmakers and fans who make Letterboxd what it is.

We launched Intrinsic because we knew three things were true:

1. Social media and technology are indispensable for marketing independent films

2. The business model for tech companies optimizes for advertising and investors, not the communities who shape their culture

3. The community driving the culture has legitimate value

Our business model is unique because we laid the foundation with a different kind of exit strategy in mind: an exit to the community, instead of to private capital or an IPO.

We created a corporate structure that enables us to partner first with mission-first equity investors for startup capital; build our products and services and the communities around them; and then, when the community is ready to take ownership, to run equity crowdfunding rounds with Wefunder. The money we raise from those crowdfunding rounds can then be divided gradually, pro-rata, amongst any of our early investors who are ready to start selling back their shares to the community.

That’s how you optimize for an exit to a community of stewards instead of a firm of number-crunchers.

So…what IS the value of Letterboxd, both commercially and culturally?

Letterboxd has both commercial and cultural value to filmmakers: independent, non-dependent, interdependent, microbudget, narrative, documentary, arthouse, prestige, global cinema, festival darlings…you name it. If you make films, Letterboxd is serving value.

It has succeeded in reaching the sought-after Gen Z’ers and turning them into cinephiles. It has revived deep cuts and brought them back into the zeitgeist for valedictory spins. It has uplifted unlikely candidates for commercial success and sent investors a return on their money. And it has catapulted low-budget films that can’t compete on dollars into epic awards season runs.

Letterboxd’s decisions around its entry into streaming indicate a particular commitment to independent film over traditionally commercial fare. As Jill Goldsmith recently reported in her Deadline story about Intrinsic’s bid to acquire the 60% stake:

“New features like Video Store include a limited time only (30 days) shelf of films called Unreleased Gems that have shown at festivals or one-off screenings but haven’t yet gone to wider distribution. When a film joins Letterboxd Video Store, the company says, it sees an average 8x increase in platform engagement — watchlists, ratings, reviews, likes and diary logs. For Unreleased Gems, that jumps to 40x. Horror film It Ends was picked up by Neon eight days into its second Unreleased Gems shelf and released last year.”

If you are a film lover—maker or fan—you understand what it means for the generation already reshaping our economy to spend their (chronically online) lives reading and writing about which films they and their friends are watching.

You also know the value of word-of-mouth buzz, and that Letterboxd is the last place on the internet organic buzz builds around films without massive marketing operations.

Speaking to Filmstack’s own Anthony Kaufman in a piece for Filmmaker Magazine in 2024, Kyle Greenberg, head of marketing and distribution at Utopia said:

“In a media ecosystem dominated by corporate-owned trades, pay-to-play press coverage and a lack of interest in traditional film reviews, especially from younger audiences who feel they don’t represent them…it’s incredibly refreshing and important to have a platform such as Letterboxd that democratizes the conversation around film.”

In addition to the authenticity that attracts people looking for something beyond sponsored posts, Kaufman highlighted why film marketers see Letterboxd as different from other social media sites:

“Distributors also see Letterboxd as distinct from marketing on other major social media platforms. ‘As a paid media option, it couldn’t be more different from Meta,’ explained Magnolia Pictures’s head of distribution and marketing Neal Block. ‘You’re reaching a very specific audience segment that Meta often struggles to find, and reaching them cost-effectively,’ he added, referring specifically to ‘a young, diverse, cinema-literate, and—most important—enthusiastic audience.’”

It’s easy to read a statement like that and think it applies more to a group like Magnolia Pictures deciding where to spend its marketing dollars than it applies to NonDē filmmakers, so Intrinsic decided to look for some data so we can visualize trends and how they play out at different scales.

Where the vibes get mathy

Now, we wouldn’t be REAL nerds if we didn’t break down the data like we’re writing a peer-reviewed journal article. However, since we had about 24 hours to write this in the middle of running an ambitious crowdfunding campaign on Seed&Spark—

JOIN OUR CAMPAIGN

—we’re going to give you journal-style information, abbreviated.

WE GOT YOU DATA BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU. 🧡 💚 💙

1. Abstract (i.e. TLDR): Letterboxd has both cultural and commercial value to filmmakers, cinema, and fans. Culturally, it boosts the profile of independent films, democratizes film discourse, and has been a bright spot in a struggling industry. Commercially, it serves as a launching pad to financial success for independent films without big marketing budgets, helps independent films featured on its Video Store platform acquire distribution, and brings awareness to filmmakers and films both canonical and contemporary who would otherwise get swallowed up by the corporate machine. Most importantly, we found organic community momentum on Letterboxd can meaningfully reduce the marketing investment needed to break through.

2. Introduction: With 60% of Letterboxd on the market, Intrinsic decided to use our unique public benefit corporate structure to lead a mission-driven bid to acquire a profitable company from a private equity shareholder. We know—THIS IS AUDACIOUS. It will be hard. We might not succeed. Other buyers have enough cash sitting in a suitcase on their private jet right now. We know this, too.

   But we believe Letterboxd is valuable enough to independent filmmakers and films to make it worth the effort. We believe it represents cinema’s greatest chance at a rebirth in the digital era. But we know some folks are skeptical, so we want to help you look at some trends in the data.

3. Methods: We searched for publicly available information about independent films from the last decade.

   We looked at commercially successful films (those whose box office sales exceeded their production budget and marketing spend by a large enough margin to return profits).

   We searched for films deemed to have “underperformed” financially (those whose box office was less than their combined production budget plus marketing spend).

   And then we searched for films whose filmmaking teams and the press had singled out for their level of fan engagement on Letterboxd. This doesn’t mean exclusively well-liked films; it means the films whose reviews got the most likes, got added to the most lists, and experienced moments of organic virality. We identified ~10 films in each of these categories for which we could find more than one credible reference to its production budget or marketing spend (i.e. Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, IMDBpro, and articles in Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire, etc.).

   Data Confidence: While we did the best fact-checking available to us without access to actual balance sheets and budgets, we know these numbers are approximations. We are presenting our findings to illuminate trends we know match conventional industry understanding of production budget to marketing spend ratios, and to present a more mathematical model for calculating the value of Letterboxd to independent filmmakers. Again: these numbers, while fact-checked to the best of our ability without access to private data, represent trends in the industry and should be understood as a way to visualize the relationship between production budget, marketing spend, and box office sales as ratios, and to see whether Letterboxd user engagement changes any trends.

4. Results:

   The most commercially successful (by box office sales data) films of the past decade had average marketing spends equal to 244.3% of their production budgets. If we follow statistical best practices and throw out the top and bottom 5% (the outliers), the truncated average marketing spend adjusts to 204.1% of production budget.

1. But films with high Letterboxd community engagement achieved comparable rates of box office success at roughly half that marketing spend — suggesting that organic community momentum can meaningfully reduce the marketing investment needed to break through.

1. If we tally the marketing spend for the most commercially successful independent films of the last decade, the marketing spend is approximately $195 million. For ten films.

   If we add the $195 million spent on the successful films to the marketing spend for the films that underperformed ($230 million), the marketing spend for 21 films from the last decade (half overachievers and half underachievers) the approximate total marketing spend is $425 million.

   AND. If we compare the average marketing spend for the most commercially successful independent films (204.1% of production budget) to the average marketing spend for films with high-engagement on Letterboxd (116.8% of production budget), we see that films with high-engagement on Letterboxd achieved similar levels of commercial success with 42.8% less marketing spend.

   Applied to the approximately $425 million ad dollars spent on just 21 films, those 21 films could have saved in the ballpark of $181.9 million to achieve similar or better results if they had accessed Letterboxd’s devoted community of film fans.

2. Discussion: Now, as stated above, these numbers are not exact. We don’t have copies of the production budgets for these films, nor do we have advertising expense reports. We do have examples of public references to these numbers from industry sources and trades. We do have clear trends in the data. We know from our own work the approximate ad spend relative to production budget necessary to achieve commercial success. And even if we reduced the total ad spend by 20% (bringing it to $340 million), we would still be looking at a savings of more than $145 million.

3. Conclusion: There are lots of ways to think about value.

   The house where you sleep peacefully. The restaurant where you celebrated your biggest life event. The platform where you discover and watch culturally impactful films—or other people find the ones you make.

   These each command a price you’re willing to pay, and a value you get in return.

   We believe the value of Letterboxd to the independent film community is much higher than it is to a buyer who wants to aggressively monetize advertising to capture a financial return on the back of cinema.

   We know what the value of Letterboxd is to our community. We know what our values are. And we think filmmakers and Letterboxd are better off together.

If you are interested in this subject, please consider these earlier posts:

Please help promote this filmmaker-first Series: by 🔁 here!

For the second year in a row, The Popcorn List presents its Pop Up Series - taking place (mostly) throughout July, in 18 theaters across the country. Get a full list of the screenings at thepopcornlist.com. Ticket links will be added on the TPL website as they become available - stay tuned to Substack and socials for updates.

The Popcorn List has taken on a life of its own. The organizers have seized an opportunity to give films industry and audience visibility, by activating their networks - from festival programmers to cinema curators and beyond…a recipe that seems to be catching fire. You saw it here first (2024.)

Share

🍿 WHAT’S NEW FOR 2026?

In 2025, when TPL launched the Series, they really wanted to see if it would even work - would filmmakers be willing to participate? Would theaters be interested in booking a one night only “sneak preview” screening? Would audiences be excited? Luckily - the answer was “YES!” (You can catch all the findings here in their 3-part Wrap Report.) The Series included: 3 Films¹, by 3 First Time Women Directors, 1 POC Director and was screened in 10 markets.

Based on the data, TPL decided to expand the Series in several ways:

🍿Doubling Down: Curating the Slate

In their 2025 beta Series, TPL asked each of the 10 cinemas to play a pre-set package of three films. Based on their feedback, this year they decided to offer a slate of films that theaters could program from (they, after all, know their audiences best), and moved the series to July.

The 2026 TPL List included 25 films (up from 19 in 2025). TPL doesn’t consider itself a curator, but a “celebrator” of the art of programming, curation, and tastemaking. So to create a Series slate for cinemas to select from, theatrical programming expertise was necessary.

TPL enlisted theatrical programmers Ouma Amadou (Ragtag Cinema), Dr. Alicia Kozma (Indiana University Cinema) and Monica Castillo (Freelance Programmer), who assembled a balanced slate for 2026 that included both docs and narratives, a mix of comedies and dramas, diverse representation on and off screen, an Oscar-shortlisted Doc, 2 Spirit Award nominees, a Critics Choice & NAACP Image Awards nominee, an IDA winner, and Venice, Sundance, SXSW & other festival award winners - for a Fresh, Hot Summer lineup.

The 2026 Series includes: 7 Films, by 7 First Time Directors, 6 Women Directors, and 5 POC Directors (with 4 narratives, 3 docs, 2 international features) that will screen in 18 markets.

🍿New & Returning Cinemas

TPL pitched the Series to 48 cinemas, film societies, museums, and other venues around the country - sending out 91 screener links. In its second year, The Series has practically doubled its reach.

2025: 10 markets, 26 bookings

2026: 18 markets, 60 bookings (so far, confirmed + invited)

Participating cinemas include:

• Alamo Drafthouse Winchester (Winchester, VA)

• Amherst Cinema (Amherst, MA)

• Austin Film Society (Austin, TX)

• cinéSPEAK (Philadelphia, PA)*

• Denver Film at Sie FilmCenter (Denver, CO)

• Gotham Week (New York, NY)

• Independent Picture House (Charlotte, NC)*

• Stray Cat Film Center (Kansas City, MO)

• Leontine Cinema at Esquire Theatre (Cincinnati, OH)

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, TX)

• Nightlight (Akron, OH)*

• Palm Theatre SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA)

• Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ)

• Roxie (San Francisco, CA)*

• Sidewalk Film Center (Birmingham, AL)*

• SIFF (Seattle, WA)*

• Texas Theater (Dallas, TX)

• Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA)*

(If any cinemas want to join in - reach out - it’s not too late! TPL is happy to add more partners and hit the 20 mark.

*Denotes returning venue.

Share

🍿Marketing Campaign - A Communal Effort

4 weeks from the beginning of the July Series, with the release of ticketing links on our site and the trailer drop, the marketing campaign begins in earnest today! With the support of Product of Culture, they’ll once again create a marketing campaign for all 7 films across 18 cities, that’ll include collaborative promotion of each other’s films. Accordingly, 15% of box office earnings goes into a Solidarity Pool to be split equally among the film teams - for a mutually beneficial return.

🍿Here’s how you can help!

• Follow TPL on instagram @thepopcornlist - (and all the films too!) Like, comment, and share the posts.

• Join TPL in theaters! Bookmark thepopcornlist.com, and buy tickets for screenings in your city when they become available.

• Book a film - if you’re a cinema/exhibition programmer with slots for one-offs in July (or August.)

• Make a tax-deductible donation to support the campaign.

• Mark your calendars for a virtual Series in the Fall - to be announced soon!

🍿Check out the 2026 Fresh, Hot Summer Lineup:

THE FISHERMAN, Dir. Zoey Martinson, Ghana, 105m., English, World Premiere: Venice Biennale 2024, @thefisherman.film

In this Venice Film Festival-winning feast of magical realist comedy — aging Ghanaian Atta Oko sets his sights on finally having his own boat and becoming the envy of his village, he’ll just need help from a dead talking fish.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fisherman-2024-2/

Notable: : Winner, CICT-UNESCO Enrico Fulchignoni Award - Venice Film Festival; Nominee Outstanding International Motion Picture - NAACP Image Awards; Jury Awards, Best Director & Best Narrative Feature - American Black Film Festival

Recommended to TPL by: Paul Sloop, Cordillera Intl. Film Festival; Clint Bowie, New Orleans Film Festival

Screening at: Denver Film at Sie FilmCenter (Denver, CO), Gotham Week (New York, NY), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, TX), Nightlight (Akron, OH), Palm Theatre (San Luis Obispo, CA), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ), Sidewalk Film Center (Birmingham, AL), SIFF Film Center (Seattle, WA)

FUCKTOYS, Dir. Annapurna Sriram, USA, 106m., English, World Premiere: SXSW 2025, @fucktoysthemovie

A cursed young woman sets out on a wild fundraising adventure through Trashtown, USA, after she’s told by multiple psychics that she can break the curse by paying them $1000.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/fucktoys

Notable: Nominee Someone to Watch Award - Film Independent Spirit Awards; Winner of the Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate - SXSW

Recommended to TPL by: Andrew Peterson, Provincetown Film Festival.; Brian Hu, San Diego Asian Film Festival; Allegra Madsen, Frameline; Lauren Thelen, Nashville Film Festival

Screening at: Amherst Cinema (Amherst, MA), cinéSPEAK (Philadelphia, PA), Denver Film at Sie FilmCenter (Denver, CO), Independent Picture House (Charlotte, NC), Leontine Cinema at Esquire Theatre (Cincinnati, OH), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ), Sidewalk Film Center (Birmingham, AL), SIFF (Seattle, WA), Texas Theater (Dalllas, TX), Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA)

REMAINING NATIVE, Dir. Paige Bethmann, USA, 87m., English, World Premiere: SXSW 2025, @remainingnative

Remaining Native is a coming-of-age documentary told from the perspective of Kutoven (Ku) Stevens, a 17-year-old Native American runner, struggling to navigate his dream of becoming a collegiate athlete as the memory of his great-grandfather’s escape from an Indian boarding school begins to connect past, present, and future.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/remaining-native

Notable: Winner Documentary Feature Audience & Special Jury Awards - SXSW

Recommended to TPL by: Sunrise Tippeconnie, deadCenter Film Festival

Screening at: Independent Picture House (Charlotte, NC), Stray Cat Film Center (Kansas City, MO), Leontine Cinema at Esquire Theatre (Cincinnati, OH), Nightlight (Akron, OH), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ), Roxie (San Francisco, CA), Sidewalk Film Center (Birmingham, AL), SIFF (Seattle, WA)Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA)

SEEDS, Dir. Brittany Shyne, USA, 127m., English, World Premiere: Sundance 2025, @seedsthedoc

SEEDS is a portrait of centennial farmers in the American South. Using lyrical black and white imagery, this meditative film examines the decline of generational Black farmers and the significance of owning land.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/seeds-2025/

Notable: Shortlisted, Best Documentary Feature - Academy Awards; Winner, U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize - 2025 Sundance Film Festival; Nominee, Truer Than Fiction Award - 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards

Recommended to TPL by: Stephanie Owens, Sundance Film Festival; Javier Chavez, AFI

Screening at: Alamo Winchester (Winchester, VA), Austin Film Society (Austin, TX), cinéSPEAK (Philadelphia, PA), Denver Film at Sie FilmCenter (Denver, CO), Gotham Week (New York, NY), Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), Nightlight (Akron, OH), Palm Theatre SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ), Sidewalk Film Center (Birmingham, AL), SIFF Film Center (Seattle, WA), Texas Theater (Dalllas, TX)

SUMMER’S CAMERA, Dir. Divine Sung, South Korea, 83m., Korean, World Premiere: BFI Flare 2025, @summerscameramovie

Summer captures her first crush through her late father’s camera—only to uncover photographs that reveal his hidden past, sending Summer on a journey that transforms her understanding of love and family.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/summers-camera/

Recommended to TPL by: Beth Barrett, SIFF

Screening at: Alamo Winchester (Winchester, VA), Amherst Cinema (Amherst, MA), Independent Picture House (Charlotte, NC), Stray Cat Film Center (Kansas City, MO), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, TX), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ), SIFF Film Center (Seattle, WA)

TRASH BABY, Dir. Jacy Mairs, USA, 95m., English, World Premiere: SXSW 2025

Trash Baby is a coming-of-age drama that follows 12-year-old Stevie as she navigates growing up, getting out, and the art of finding beauty in the ugliest of places.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/trash-baby/

Recommended to TPL by: Ariana Farina, Dances with Films Festival

Screening at: Alamo Winchester (Winchester, VA), Stray Cat Film Center (Kansas City, MO), Leontine Cinema at Esquire Theatre (Cincinnati, OH), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ), SIFF Film Center (Seattle, WA), Texas Theater (Dallas, TX), Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA)

WTO/99, Dir. Ian Bell, USA, 102m., English, World Premiere True/False 2025, @wto99doc

An archival documentary that depicts the 4-day clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 40,000+ people who took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the WTO Conference and the WTO’s impact on human rights, labor, and the future effects of continued globalization.

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/wto-99/

Notable: Best Editing - IDA Documentary Awards, Nominee- Best Archival Documentary - Critics Choice Award

Recommended to TPL by: Ben Delgado, ReFocus Film Festival

Screening at: Alamo Winchester (Winchester, VA), cinéSPEAK (Philadelphia, PA), Denver Film at Sie FilmCenter (Denver, CO), Phoenix Film Society (Phoenix, AZ)

Share

The Pop Up Series is presented by mamafilm and The Film Collaborative, and made possible with generous support from Product of Culture and Simple DCP and our sustaining supporters Hope For Film and FACET. Tax deductible donations, which will contribute to the campaign costs, can be made here. Follow The Popcorn List on Substack to track the journey. Check out all of The Popcorn List films from 2024-2026 here.

🍿 The Popcorn List is a discovery and visibility project that amplifies independent films that deserve to be seen more widely; highlights the discovery nature of film festivals and the craft of film curation; and satisfies audience’s desire for story-driven movies.

TPL provides an opportunity for Films & Filmmakers, Distributors & Sales Agents, Film Festivals & Independent Exhibitors & Audiences. Through our various initiatives - including the Annual Lists and The Pop Up Series, we’re out to disrupt the outdated model, establish a new set of best practices and create a regenerative professional network within the independent film ecosystem. Learn more >

Copyright 2026, The Popcorn List

Way back when I started this newsletter, I frequently did “link posts” to stories I found elsewhere that I thought you might find interesting. This is a bit of a return to that… sort of. I called it “The Five” and “The Round Up” but when I did it, I limited it to just five links. I am not doing that today.

I am also pulling from FilmStack Daily Digest only… and only the links that deal with media consolidation and why we must stop it. Back in the old days there wasn’t a FilmStack Daily Digest to focus on.

36 links about the campaign to #BlockTheMerger and stop media consolidation!

I’ve done four posts there 100% focused on this issue of stopping further media consolidation. That’s twenty links for you. Plus I went through some of the older collections and found another 16 links on the subject. So that’s a total of 36 anti-media-consolidation links for you to snack on this weekend, or what’s left of it.

This is one of the most important issues facing all cinema lovers and makers. You can tell just by how much I’ve been linking to it. I mean if you stay silent, you can blame yourself when democracy crumbles. Or if you have friends who once worked in TheFKATheFilmBiz or adjacent to it, and now they can’t earn a living… yes, that will be on you too. How about when the time comes and you can find a truth telling news site? Yup, you will have yourself and others like you to blame.

FilmStack Daily Digest

The coming censorship state canaries are all singing the same song. Time to hum along.

FilmStack Daily Digest is your fast feed hookup to the land of cinema know how, know what, and all around go to. Show this matters to you and receive new posts directly in your inbox. 100% of funds received will go to create an Emergency Relief Filmmaker Crisis Fund…

Read more

14 days ago · 2 likes · Ted Hope

FilmStack Daily Digest

Let's not surrender the cinema we love to those who would reduce it to crap, okay?

FilmStack Daily Digest is a community-action — one for all, all for one, and let’s build something better together. To receive new posts directly in your inbox, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Did you know 100% of funds received will go to create an…

Read more

23 days ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Ted Hope

FilmStack Daily Digest

NonFilmStack Cocktail #22: Another Anti-MediaConsolidation ONLY collection

FilmStack Daily Digest is a rocket ship to the better place, the race car that gets there fast, the pogo stick to the moon. It is time you found it in your inbox. Start tomorrow by signing up today. You can do it for free, but if you choose to give 100% of funds received will go to create an…

Read more

a month ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Ted Hope

FilmStack Daily Digest

A Single Flavor NonStack Roundup Cocktail: Guaranteed 100% Anti-media Consolidation

FilmStack Daily Digest is a community-curated, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 100% of funds received will go to create an Emergency Relief Filmmaker Crisis Fund…

Read more

a month ago · 8 likes · Ted Hope

1. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/191614577/warnermount-merger-is-not-a-done-deal

2. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/196235161/sure-there-are-bigger-problems-in-the-world-but-dont-let-that-be-a-barrier

3. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/196235161/seriously-what-else-do-you-need-to-know-to-sign-on-to-the-blockthemerger-campaign

4. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/198409460/paramount-already-had-junk-credit-status-and-are-getting-downgraded-further-how-can-they-say-the-merger-makes-sense-they-cant-they-must-have-secondary-motives

5. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/198409460/america-has-proven-regulations-that-have-delivered-a-fair-competitive-environment-before-and-really-needed-now

6. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/198409460/these-are-small-minded-people-who-forgot-what-this-country-is-supposed-to-be-about

7. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/191686784/the-warnermount-merger-is-not-a-done-deal-not-even-close

8. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/191686784/watch-the-hand-behind-the-back-not-the-one-making-the-noise

9. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/191686784/who-is-funding-the-possible-consolidation-of-us-film-studios-and-why

10. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/194356129/is-consolidation-inevitable

11. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/191614577/check-out-ca-senator-adam-schiffs-hearing-on-saving-the-film-industry

12. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/191614577/ellison-pledges-to-create-jobs-but-hes-already-cutting-them

13. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/175301649/time-to-understand-why-media-is-in-the-state-it-is-and-what-we-must-now-do-about-it

14. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/183063167/do-your-part-to-block-the-wbd-merger

15. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/189551117/is-the-payoff-already-in-on-approving-the-paramount-warners-consolidation

16. https://filmstackdailydigest.substack.com/i/185776823/hey-filmstack-time-to-activate-speak-up-block-the-merger

Leave a comment

Pledge a donation now! Click this button and contribute whatever you can. Everything counts.

SaveLetterboxd

Can you feel The Change a comin’?

There are those that settle, that resign themselves. That’s not you, is it? It is those that do that got us in The Rut in the first place. But the rest of us are now climbing out and leaving that version of the world behind.

The gr…

Read more

Welcome to Ted Hope’s Substack. I’m…well, not Ted Hope.

My name is Alex Bailey. I write a substack called DIY Golems, which I cheekily refer to as ‘artisanal rants’ - essays about Film, TV, storytelling, writing, Non-Dē, learning to cook, magic and the way these are all, in my head, one thing. I’ve been an assistant to a partner at a talent agency, a sho…

Read more

I was thinking again on what is really needed to build a separate cinema ecosystem prioritizing the art, artist, and audience – and why it is so needed. I was reflecting on how I hadn’t added onto my list of necessary steps in building the NonDē Cinema Ecosystem prioritizing joy and having fun until late in the game. To me, that indicated I had no doubt neglected more of the obvious. That makes me happy. It is human. We are fools. And we sure do make a lot of mistakes. The humbling incidents speak volumes. They are great reminders.

And so there it was. Another key principle I forgot. And the topic of today’s ponder. Perhaps it is the first necessary step. Know thyself; be thyself. How do we learn who we really are? How do we recognize the origins of our behavior and make sure that our behavior and actions are truly chosen by us and not the environment or circumstances we come from? Can we recognize the real us in the construction of the self? Do we need to? How will it benefit us and our work? Will we ever be right? Does that matter? I think like most things it neither either/or or even both/and. We are all forever changing (hopefully) and yet we can approach this shapeshifter that defines us and our reality and truly benefit from it..

Mind you, NonDē Cinema need not come exclusively from those who desire to have their work reflect their values, but it sure does help. NonDē cinemakers take responsibility for building audiences and creating communities – and each of these processes are well-served by work that reflects the authors’ values. Talk the talk and walk the walk, and more are apt to join you. To express values, you need to form them and to form them, you need to know who you are, even as we and the world we are in are forever changing.

I think there are…

ten practices that help us determine whom we are

1. Reading, watching, viewing as much as we can;

2. Engaging in thoughtful discussion with others;

3. Writing, writing, and more writing.

4. Study and education with both teachers and students both.

5. Therapy

6. Quiet contemplation (including long walks by oneself, particularly in nature), meditation, and the fine art of “doing nothing”.

7. Deep appreciation (dare we say “love”) of many things

8. Comfort in the unknown and unknowing

9. Stay open to new things

10. Devotion to the practice

Is there something else I forgot? Care to examine them a bit closer with me now? Let’s look at all of them, shall we?

Read more

So in recent weeks, we’ve explored the physical spaces of cinemas as cultural gyms and designed membership models that build identity rather than just track transactions. But the most ingenious facility means nothing without the right trainers, programming, and management.

In this week’s issue, we’re building out the operational blueprint—cultural personal trainers who guide our narrative workouts, identity marketing that positions films as belonging rather than mere entertainment, and reformed distribution models that sequence our cultural fitness like a proper training program. Think of it as shifting from “what does our gym look like?” to “how does our gym actually run?”.

For the people in the film industry who’ve been flooding my inbox since the last instalment (hello!), consider this your actionable roadmap. For everyone else, it’s further proof that saving theatrical cinema isn’t about lamenting what’s been lost, but revolutionizing what comes next.

member recruitment

we desperately need cultural personal trainers

Every time a new Marvel movie drops, I watch the same tired ritual unfold. Some poor actor gets shipped to 47 identical hotel rooms to answer the same question about what it was like to wear the superhero suit. Studios blast generic ads showing approximately three seconds of actual film footage mixed with critic quotes nobody remembers. TikTok fills with one-off creators posting contractually-obligated excitement about movies they clearly haven’t seen or care about. The whole expensive circus collapses by Sunday night when the box office numbers come in, and we all move on to the next forgettable marketing blitz.

The beauty and food industries does the opposite (and quite successfully!). They don’t just hire influencers for one-off product launches – they build year-round partnerships where creators genuinely integrate brands into their daily routines and personal narratives. Take the iconic Remi Cruz, who has 2.5 million YouTube subscribers and somehow got her engagement announced in People Magazine. She’s built an empire by making her followers feel like they’re getting beauty advice from a trusted friend, not a marketing machine. When she talks about a product, it’s woven into her daily life - her morning routine, her food vlogs, her casual conversations. She’s a trusted advisor, not a marketing vector.

Now look at your favorite film podcaster or that YouTube critic whose taste you actually trust. They’ve spent years building deep relationships with their audiences, sparking genuine conversations about cinema, creating real communities around film. When they recommend something, their audience shows up because there’s actual trust there, not just paid promotion.

These people are our cultural personal trainers. They’re already doing the work of keeping film culture alive while the rest of us doom-scroll through Netflix wondering why everything looks the same. They just don’t have the infrastructure or incentives to scale beyond their passionate-but-limited audience. Sadly, and I know this first-hand, dedicated film channels with devoted audiences get treated like they’re begging for scraps when they request review screeners.

So here’s my idea: What if theaters treated these cultural voices like actual partners in rebuilding film culture instead of annoying parasites? That film essayist with 20,000 devoted followers gets a percentage when their audience buys tickets using their code. The horror podcast that’s been championing international releases while you were still watching Paranormal Activity sequels earns bonuses when their recommendations drive attendance. The local critic who’s built a following around underappreciated indies gets early access and resources to create deeper content that isn’t just “5 Easter Eggs You Missed in Inception.”

Read more

Read more