My name is Victoria. I’m a commercial producer based in New York City. I write the Substack Production Notes, where I explore the artistic process and the emotional waves of making a proof of concept, and ultimately, a first feature.

When Ted reached out to me to write for his newsletter takeover, part of me felt fear, mostly because I had no idea what I was going to write about. I sat with it for a few days, trying to figure out what to contribute that was both interesting and useful.

The world already feels heavy, and the last thing we need is more fear-mongering. But I want to talk about fear not as something to avoid, but as something to live through and coexist with. For most of my career, fear has been a constant presence. It used to hover around me incessantly, tightening my jaw while writing an email, or my eye subtly twitching from lack of sleep, knowing I would have to have a difficult conversation with a client.

Looking back, I can see the ways it shaped my career, which feels both unsettling and, in many ways, formative. I want to name different kinds of fears that we all feel in this industry, some that we talk about openly, and others we don’t. The point is to reflect inward, to recognize that we all have the ability to learn from and through fear, and that in many cases, it can clarify and sharpen.

1

Fear of Equipment

When I set out to write this, I had to ask myself what my first encounter with fear in this industry was. What was the one thing that made me pause, take a shallow breath, and quietly tell myself, “it’s too much, I can’t do this.”

Film equipment.

Yes, I know. Random. But in many ways, it’s not. Let me explain.

I remember holding the weighted camera body of a Bolex, feeling a sense of overwhelm around how to change the film in the camera bag. I was in graduate school, it’s 2010, and our instructor was whizzing through the instructions as everyone fumbled around. We were expected to film each other’s short films, and at the end of the semester there would be a practical test, where the instructor would set a timer and grill us with questions about the camera.

Since that class, there was always a coldness that would course through my body whenever the subject of equipment came up. It wasn’t something that came naturally to me—it was learned and studied. I was decent at taking photographs and making things look good, but technically, I couldn’t tell you why.

I guess I was a glutton for punishment, because for many years I was a line producer. I spent my days looking at budgets, talking through gear lists and lighting packages—it’s a wonder that I even made it through.

One day, I had a call that changed the way I thought about the technical aspects of film. And as I write this, I know there are directors of photography who are probably cringing, but it’s important for those who feel like their lack of knowledge around equipment is a barrier to entry.

I had a call with a director and a DP on a project for a major fashion brand. The director’s usual DP was unavailable, so she was paired with someone she had never worked with before. The first thing she said to him on the call was stern and deliberate, and I’ll never forget it:

“I’m not a gear head. So don’t expect me to get technical with you. I’m not.”

That was it. I had never heard a director at that level say something like that before.

It was a revelation.

I am a big believer in excellence and mastering craft. I told myself that if I was going to set out in this precarious industry, I had to fully immerse myself as much as possible. But at that moment, I quickly understood that two things can be true at the same time. You can know the technicalities of film production, but you can also not have a full grasp and still be able to articulate your vision clearly.

I’ve spoken to so many people looking to get into film without a production background, who have expressed their dismay at how intimidating the equipment is. But after that call, it made me realize that you must find a way to make peace without knowing everything.

Not knowing doesn’t disqualify you. It just means you’re at the beginning.

If anything, it forces you to get clearer on what actually matters: your point of view, your taste, and your ability to communicate what you’re trying to say.

*Not fear-related, but for some Bolex nostalgia: listen to Roger Deakins interviewing Barry Jenkins about film school, where he recalls shooting his first short on one.

2

Fear of the Unknown Career Path

This is a fear that’s openly discussed among many of us, and if you’re a follower of Ted Hope’s newsletter, I’m going to assume that you’re either working in the industry, industry-adjacent, or a filmmaking enthusiast in some capacity—which means this fear is a shadowy, familiar friend that looms over us constantly.

For years, I fashioned my career around having a full-time, stable job. I told myself that even though I wasn’t working on features, I could make do with working as a corporate producer or on branded content. It wasn’t the kind of work I wanted, but I was still industry-adjacent, and at least I could pay my bills.

As I got older, I became frustrated, because I realized the more I stayed in these roles, the further away I got from my real goal, which was to make a film. We do what we have to do to make a living, but it started to feel as if the gap was getting wider, not closer.

There was a lot of magical thinking during this time: the feeling that I would come across someone who would give me the money to make the film, give me permission to be a director, see something in me, and offer representation. I think a lot of us have gone through this line of thinking, hoping that someone would see us so that the thing could finally happen. And it only felt legitimate if that validation came from outside of us, not within.

But my philosophy around this has shifted over the years. Unlike being a doctor or a lawyer, where there is a clearer trajectory, in film there is none of that. Even if you went to film school there is no guarantee you can make a living in this industry.

Fear is the foundation of the unknown career path, a kind of test of the mettle of those who really want it. To be clear, there are many things wrong with this industry—many barriers to entry that are skewed toward a select few (more on that below), and a lack of financial support for the arts that is abysmal. Much needs to change.

But even still, the path is unknown, long, and hard, and those with the entrepreneurial spirit to reach out into the ether and grab it are willing to move through the unknown to get there.

I’m not saying to quit your day job, but what I am saying is that there will be a level of resistance you have to navigate on a consistent basis to get where you want to be. And as you move forward you start to notice the fear doesn’t go away. It just starts speaking in a different register.

3

Fear of Being Seen

There is no world in which I thought I would ever be writing publicly about anything. For many years, I had a very deep-seated fear of being seen. It was easy for me to fall into production, particularly producing, because so much of what I was doing was behind the scenes. It was a role that was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Another layer to this is that I was frequently the only Black person—let alone Black woman on set. When I was younger, I often internalized this, particularly when I worked as a corporate producer. I made myself small. I was too deferential. I second-guessed everything—every directive I gave, every conversation with a client. What I’m trying to say is, being the only one turned me into a kind of internalized headcase. Even in the most supportive environments, it can shape your psyche in very subtle, unsuspecting ways.

I’m going to throw out some percentages and numbers from the Annenberg Institute—just stay with me for a second:

• Across 18 years, from 2007–2024, out of 1,688 films, only 32 were directed by underrepresented women.

• Across those same 18 years, out of 1,891 directors, only 6.6% were women.

• The ratio of individual men to women directors is 8.7 to 1.

• The ratio of white men to underrepresented women directors is 46.6 to 1.

And despite all of this, underrepresented female directors have the highest median Metacritic scores of any group—yet they are hired the least.

When I was younger, I wasn’t aware of these numbers, it always felt like I was pushing against an invisible barrier, something I couldn’t fully understand. And now that it’s been articulated in stats, it makes sense why I, and so many others, feel this way.

It is a real fear to work in an industry where there is so little representation behind the camera. These are heavy, antiquated numbers for 2026, and they speak to how much work we still have to do.

And yet, in spite of this, we move forward. We continue to make work, and strive alongside the realities of the industry. Because at a certain point, you have to ask yourself what holds more weight—the statistics, or the desire to make the thing you feel called to make.

Once I understood the numbers, the fear didn’t disappear. If anything, it became easier to locate: do I need a system that wasn’t built for me to recognize me?

*We’ve all seen this report, but I’m posting it again. Read it.

4

Fear of Things Falling Through the Cracks

A few years ago, when I was working as an agency producer, I had the opportunity to work on a massive commercial for an extremely well-known brand. It was easily the hardest project I’ve ever worked on in my life, and honestly, it will probably remain the hardest. For a solid two months, maybe more, I lived in a kind of delirium, wondering whether or not we could actually pull it off given the extremely truncated timeline.

Somehow, we did. And I remember thinking: I never want to go through that again, but also, I can handle anything.

That is, until a small mishap on set, a broken piece of equipment, something I wouldn’t have thought twice about, turned into a very large problem.

The kind of problem that makes your entire career flash before your eyes.

After submitting the claim, I received a one sentence email from our insurer:

“Who certified these COIs (certificates of insurance)? They’re not certified on our end.”

It turns out the production company we were working with had created their own COIs with our name on them without us knowing.

Now, without getting too deep into detail, they weren’t necessarily wrong to do this. Some systems are set up in a way that allows third parties to generate their own certificates.

Ours was not.

Which meant that any certificate they created could technically be considered a forgery.

Which also meant that parts of the shoot were, technically, not insured.

I have been fortunate enough to never have a near-death experience, and yet in that moment, I’m fairly certain my soul left my body as I dropped to my knees, clutching my phone. I was certain this was the end for me, that everything I had worked for was about to come crashing down.

How could I not have known about these COIs?

I kept scanning my brain over and over, trying to understand how I could have missed it.

My greatest career fear, one I didn’t even know I had, had suddenly come to life. As a recovering perfectionist, having things fall through the cracks created a deep tectonic shift within me that I felt I would never recover from.

As the days passed, things came to a head, and I knew I had to talk to my boss. By this point, every higher-up at our client’s company knew about the insurance fiasco. I took accountability and let the chips fall where they may.

And during that conversation, something unexpected happened: my boss looked at me and said, “It’s fine, we’ll figure it out. I don’t expect you to be an insurance expert.”

Let me be clear, this story isn’t here to espouse the generosity of my boss or the fact that in most circumstances myself and my colleague would have been fired.

This situation was messy for various reasons. It took weeks to fully resolve itself and keep reputations and egos intact. But it did, somehow, resolve. And that’s the point. Even in the most extreme circumstances, things can still be resolved.

Every time I think about this story, I try not to think about it for very long. But I always ask myself: if I hadn’t gone through that fear, would I be the producer I am today?

*For a more extreme version of production risk, look no further than Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

5

Fear of the Future

All of us, at some point, have ruminated over our decision to stay in this industry. There are probably too many reasons to count why we should have left. But we didn’t.

Last year, I had more conversations about “the current state of film” than I ever had in my life. These are important conversations, and in some instances, long overdue. And like many things, it can be hard to see clearly when you’re inside it.

I’m a native New Yorker, and something I hear from other native New Yorkers, especially those who are older, including my parents, is: “New York isn’t what it used to be.”

At some point, it becomes a rite of passage to say this, casually, sarcastically, exhausted: “It’s not what it used to be…”

And like many things, for better or worse, cities grow, change, and evolve. The idea that something should maintain stasis, whether it’s growing in a direction you like or not, isn’t really growth. This idea is controversial even in my own mind, but I’m speaking about it philosophically. The belief that things used to be better is often colored by a thin layer of nostalgia and selective memory.

I feel a similar sentiment about the film industry. There are many directions it’s moving in that I absolutely hate and fear. We all know them, we’ve all talked about them: the Netflixification of film, mergers, the struggling production community in Los Angeles. The list goes on.

But something I try to remind myself is that through contraction and upheaval, movements emerge. New voices. New visions. New filmmakers.

Post–World War II cultural shifts and economic hardship led to the French New Wave. The collapse of the studio system and the rise of television led to the American New Wave. (Film historians, I am oversimplifying. Please don’t come for me).

We are in a contraction right now. It is still hard to see where things are growing because we’re inside it. So I try not to let that stop me from making films.

Just as I had a difficult time starting this, I had a difficult time ending it. There is no bow for any of these ideas to be wrapped in, nothing neatly tied together. We all know a version of these fears, and I hope you continue to move through them. That’s where new forms of filmmaking and new forms of art begin.

Victoria Miller is a New York–based writer and producer with over a decade of experience in film and branded content. Her work includes collaborations with clients such as The New York Times, Vogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, PepsiCo, Google, IBM, and Deciem.

She holds a Master’s degree in Film Theory and Criticism from The New School and is currently developing a feature film proof of concept through her production company, Permission Granted.

When I stumbled out of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, my body felt like a jellyfish, all nerve endings and no joints. My ears rang as if I’d just spent hours in front of a Marshall stack. I’m not a Timothée Chalamet stan, but I am an occasional Timothée Chalamet enjoyer and it is true, he does something singular here. He’s all petulant ego and manic ambition, which makes you want to both applaud and shove him into traffic. It’s exhilarating, it’s kinetic.

**Marty Supreme spoiler in the next two paragraphs**

There’s a scene midway through where Rachel—Marty’s childhood friend, sometime lover, the woman pregnant with what is almost certainly his child—gets shot during a botched attempt to steal money from a dead gangster’s pocket, and Marty rushes her to the hospital where she’s bleeding from a gunshot wound while simultaneously going into premature labor. Despite her yelling at him to stay with her while she’s in the hallway he walks out of the hospital to catch his flight to Tokyo for a ping pong exhibition match.

The film doesn’t soften this choice with a lingering shot on him looking conflicted, it just gives you a man refusing to let anything get in the way of his paddle, of performing a cold, calculating operation of what matters more and what needs to be sacrificed. When he eventually comes back after the match having hitched a ride home with the American soldiers who watched him play, he tells Rachel he loves her for the first time in the entire movie, then goes to see the baby through the nursery glass and breaks down completely, then sobs in a way that suggests something in him has finally cracked open.

**Spoiler ends here**

I went home and did what I always do when a movie stays with me: I went looking for the discourse. The discourse was, to put it mildly, an absolute disaster. Some saw it as a savage parody of American narcissism in its truest form; others found themselves aching for Marty, swallowed by the dream machine which was rendering him into a perfect object of aspirational fantasy.

My take was somewhere inbetween: the fact that he comes back doesn’t negate the fact that he left, nor does it undo the math he did in that hospital corridor when he decided his shot at being Supreme was worth more than being there while the mother of his child might bleed out from wounds incurred helping him steal money for his athletic career.

As I watched my next-seat-neighbor wash the movie out of his eyes with a Gatorade Zero, Chazelle’s Whiplash and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood immediately sprung into mind. It was at this moment that I realized, yes, I was thinking about Marty, but I was also seeing Andrew Neiman in Whiplash with his hands shredded and bleeding onto a snare drum. I was also seeing Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood collapsed in an oversized bowling alley yelling that he was finished into the space of his accumulated wealth.

Why did these three men—a mid-century ping-pong player, a contemporary jazz student, a turn-of-the-century oil baron—suddenly feel like kindred spirits?

This proposition might seem ridiculous at first. Their eras are too different. Their genres are too divergent. But the more I tried to compartmentalize them, the more they blurred into one horrifying composite: they perform the same surgical procedure.

So what if, and I’m genuinely asking here, the ping-pong paddle, the drumsticks, and the oil derrick are actually the same scalpel?

a grand unified theory on the american supreme

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My name is Dorez Douglas. I’m a film/TV Producer in Los Angeles. My producing partner is 2x Academy Award winner, Willie Burton. I’m pleased to be doing this HFF takeover to address why filmmakers need a producer.

Recently I had a conversation with a filmmaker friend about her short film project. She had a couple of issues with her cast and crew, but couldn’t afford a producer to handle it. I gave her a few suggestions which ended up solving the problems. Her situation reminded me of discussions I’ve had over the years - in classrooms, at networking events or film festivals - where someone asks me to explain what a producer actually does and why one is needed. Most of the time, people tend to believe three things: producers raise money, hire key talent, and handle the business side. And there’s truth in all of it.

But if that were the whole story, films wouldn’t collapse the way they do. Projects wouldn’t stall, visions wouldn’t fracture, talented people wouldn’t find themselves a year deep into something that just goes away without anyone quite understanding why.

GETTING THE FILM MADE

That misunderstanding has real consequences, beyond language. Because if you believe producing is primarily an administrative function, a logistical layer between creativity and commerce, you’ll underestimate what it takes to get something made. And more often than not, that underestimation is exactly what kills a project before it ever reaches an audience.

That’s what happened to me on my first feature. I won’t go into all the details - to protect the “innocent.” Lol But, let it be a lesson to you…only work with people who respect you, your experience, and who won’t let their ego get in the way. Otherwise, it’s going to be a constant tug-of-war and a disaster for the project. In my case, I wound up cooking and/or picking up food for the cast & crew, running errands, troubleshooting, preventing a crew mutiny and keeping the production from being shut down, only to receive a lesser credit than promised.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

Unfortunately, the producer credit, in the current landscape, has become so diluted as to be nearly meaningless, bestowed sometimes as courtesy or negotiation, occasionally as recognition, often as something in between. While a proper credit is still important, what also matters is whether someone took responsibility for the whole.

That’s the real definition, the one that holds across budgets and formats and decades: the producer is the person who refuses to let the film fall apart. Who sits with the tension between what was imagined and what is possible, and finds a path through. Who makes decisions others can’t or won’t. Who stays in the room when the room gets hard.

Here’s the truth of the matter: a producer is not just a role. It’s a function. And that function is what determines whether a film exists at all. A film is not a stable thing. It doesn’t want to cohere. It’s a system of competing visions, compressed timelines, finite resources, and human beings who are almost always under some form of pressure. Left to its own momentum, which is to say no momentum at all, a project drifts. Then it stalls…falls by the wayside and becomes something no one talks about anymore.

THE ROLE OF A CREATIVE PRODUCER

What a producer does, at the most essential level, is hold everything together. Not by controlling it. Not by dictating it. But by continuously making the decisions that keep things moving, resolving the tensions that would otherwise calcify into crises, and sustaining a shared understanding of why the work matters when that understanding starts to erode, and it always starts to erode.

But, first, let me backup a bit and explain that there are different kinds of producers:

1. Executive Producer

2. Producer (Creative)

3. Co-Producer

4. Line Producer

5. Associate Producer

6. Assistant Producer

I’ve been an Executive Producer, but I’m primarily a Creative Producer. So I’m focusing on that in this piece. I oversee a project from start to finish, script to screen. However, some people don’t respect a producer who isn’t bringing money to the table. That’s a big mistake. There are some things equally as valuable as cash. Many producers have connections to highly qualified technicians, A-List talent, editors, locations and more. The type of connections that are extremely attractive to investors. So, don’t discount the importance of someone who can deliver all of that to a project. (Willie and I have those kinds of relationships.)

When I first started building a career in the industry, there was only one system: The Hollywood Way. The Old Boys Network controlled everything. And their gatekeepers were like pitbulls. Being African-American and female, there was no way I was going to get my foot in the door, especially since I wasn’t willing to compromise my values.

Now, with the collapse of Old Hollywood, everyone has a chance to make their dream happen. That’s why I’m so glad my daughter told me about Substack and, as a result, I stumbled across the FilmStack NonDe (Non-Dependent) Movement. Courtney Romano and Taylor Lewis welcomed me into the fold. I had a wonderful online chat with both of them last month. They lit a fire under me, revived my faith in the possibilty of making movies outside the old system. Willie and I are fully onboard and will be assisting filmmakers (as producers or consultants) who are participating in the ND50 Films project this year. Ted has been an inspiration as well. Even after his long illustrious career, he hasn’t lost his passion for our industry. He has given me hope that a new way is possible, even for those of us who came up under the old system.

Although the job of a producer can be a thankless one, I forget all about the trials when a project is finally completed. But this position isn’t for everyone. You must be able to multi-task and to remain calm when challenges are swirling all around you.

THE JUGGLING ACT

While a director shapes the film. A producer makes sure there is a film to shape. That distinction sounds simple. It isn’t. Because the work of keeping something together requires a different kind of attention than the work of making it. It requires you to see the whole even while everyone around you is rightly focused on their piece of it. This is why it’s important that the producer and director have a tight relationship.

Being the producer requires you to care about the story and the schedule and the relationship between the lead actor, the director, the DP and the financier’s increasingly specific notes, all simultaneously, without losing the thread of any of them.

Most of this work is invisible, and that invisibility is not accidental. It’s the mark of producing done well.

When a creative disagreement between a director and a department head quietly resolves itself, no one thinks to ask how. When a location falls through three weeks before shooting and something comparable appears in its place, the momentum feels like luck. When a film comes in on budget without obviously compromising its ambition, the restraint reads as efficiency rather than a hundred small recalibrations that happened over months.

The better the producer, the less visible the work appears. Which is a strange thing to say about something essential: that its excellence is measured partly by how little evidence it leaves behind.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

There are conversations a producer has that will never appear in any credit block. A quiet word before a difficult meeting. A reframing of an impasse that gives both sides a way to step back without losing face. A decision, made alone, at the end of a long day, to adjust scope in a way that saves the idea without anyone knowing the idea was ever at risk. These moments don’t show up on screen. They show up in whether there is a screen to show up on.

This is worth saying plainly: every project has a producer, whether anyone is called that or not.

On a studio film, the producing function is distributed across multiple credited producers, line producers, UPMs, and coordinators, all of it structured and staffed. The infrastructure is visible. On an independent film, it’s usually one person wearing several of those hats, making the same decisions with a fraction of the resources. And on a short film made for a few thousand dollars by someone who would tell you they’re just a director, there, too, someone is solving problems. Someone is making calls. Someone is holding the vision together when everything is pushing against it. If no one is doing that, the project is just floating.

THE PRODUCER/DIRECTOR RELATIONSHIP

The project might still get made. Things made while drifting sometimes reach completion, occasionally even find an audience. But they tend to bear the marks of the drift, scenes that don’t connect, tonal inconsistencies that feel inexplicable, a general sense that the work almost became something but didn’t quite arrive. What’s missing isn’t usually the talent. It’s the function. It’s the producing.

At its core, the producer’s job is translation. Not in a reductive sense, not merely converting creative ideas into budgetary line items, but in the deeper sense of moving meaning from one domain into another without losing what matters.

You take a director’s vision, which lives in images and emotions and instinct, and you translate it into a plan: a schedule, a cast, a set of locations, a budget that treats money not as a constraint imposed from outside but as a creative instrument. Every dollar committed is a decision about what the film is. Every day on the schedule is a statement about what you believe the work requires. Casting is not just talent assessment; it’s a strategic act that shapes what the story can do. A location is not just a backdrop; it’s an argument about where this story lives.

WHEN FANTASY AND REALITY MEET

The producer understands all of this. They have to, because they’re the person responsible for the integrity of the translation. If the vision and the execution diverge, if what gets made bears only a surface resemblance to what was imagined, the film usually knows it. Audiences may not be able to identify the problem, but they feel it.

Producing is not the opposite of creativity. It’s what allows creativity to survive contact with reality.

This is worth thinking about carefully right now, in a moment when more content is being made than at any previous point in the medium’s history. The barriers to production have dropped. Equipment is cheaper. Distribution is more accessible. The means to make something exist in nearly everyone’s pocket.

And yet: more terrible or unfinished projects than ever. More burnout. More talented people who made one thing and couldn’t make a second. More work that gets started and stalls. More films that get made but don’t get finished in any meaningful sense, that sit on hard drives or disappear into the noise after a brief release.

The missing element, almost universally, is not talent. The filmmakers are capable. The ideas are often strong. What’s absent is the producing function, someone, or some part of the filmmaker, that knows how to take a project from conception to completion. That knows how to manage the gap between what you imagined and what you can execute. That knows how to finish.

There is a particular kind of aspiration that fills the creative space right now, a desire to direct, to write, to perform, to express. These are legitimate aspirations. But they are incomplete without an understanding of how to produce. The industry doesn’t need more creators alone. It needs more people who understand what it takes to finish.

That’s one of the reasons I tell new filmmakers to do a Proof-Of-Concept first. It’s the best way to prove you can finish a project. Find an experienced producer or mentor to guide you through the process, even if you have to pay them a small fee. Willie and I produced one a while back. It was for a feature, “Desire,” based on a book about a dysfunctional family desperate to escape a dangerous housing project where they live. A few years later, we shot a short film, “Voices,” based on a book of essays written by college students in a Creative Writing class. Both projects are on the same reel and available to watch on YouTube:

What I’ve learned over the years is when a producer does the job right, the production goes considerably smoother. We shot both projects in a few days and came in on budget.

We’re currently developing a few projects, including a documentary about a dynamic Nigerian man who formed an organization that provides free vision care services for Africans living in poverty. They have helped 50,000 patients. It will be our first time producing an international project. I’m happy to say that it feels great working with people who respect us and who believe in our ability to make this film.

It’s a quiet job, mostly. It doesn’t often look like authority. It doesn’t usually announce itself. But that role, whether visible or not, is what makes the work possible.

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https://dorezd.substack.com/tedtakeover

Dorez's Substack

My personal Substack

By Dorez Douglas

Ted Hope and Courtney Daniels have been collecting distribution case studies on FilmStack Daily Digest Substack for a while now. These are detailed, warts-and-all accounts from filmmakers about how they actually self-released their films.

Ted suggested I synthesise them into a series of meta-lessons that recur across the films.

You can read all of Ted & Courtney’s collected case studies here Distribution Case Study Masterlist v1.0

The case studies span four decades, from Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 to Union in 2024. Budgets range from $2,000 to $2.5 million. The films include micro-budget narrative features, impact documentaries, festival darlings, and a few that no distributor would touch.

What follows are the nine patterns I kept seeing recurring in the firsthand accounts of filmmakers who went through it.

1. Build your audience before you need them

The single strongest predictor of distribution success across these case studies was whether the filmmakers had built a relationship with their audience before the release.

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Taking over Ted Hope’s corner on FilmStack. Writing on your wall—hope I don’t get kicked out. Respect for what you’ve built here. Ted, you’re one in a million.

Now, do us a favor and subscribe to Sasha’s Filmstack, please!

Sasha Santiago's Filmstack

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As some of you know, I help filmmakers create their distribution strategy and help some of those filmmakers to execute their strategies (most recently The Librarians and Steal This Story, Please!) I evangelize, as essential to any strategy, picking one primary distribution goal, either: Money, Career, Change the World, …

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Please check out the prior ones she has shared with us:

THE “ALMOST NO BUDGET” APPROACH

After finishing post-production on What Other Couples Do (and still a few years away from making back the money we’d spent), I wasn’t immediately r…

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The end of one year and the start of a new one can be marked by a number of different things. December 31st is the most universal date, but every culture has its own. For the film business, only one event truly celebrates the year’s end and marks a new beginning: The Academy Awards.

I’ve been making independent films for over twenty years and have follow…

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I’m Steve Rickinson, Managing Editor of Modern Times Review, an independent European “cinepolitical” documentary magazine based between Bucharest and Siracusa and developed in close collaboration with editor-in-chief Truls Lie. Truls, who is Norwegian, brings three decades of editorial experience from newspapers and magazines, along with his own practic…

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I am what they call a “mid-career” ar…

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How do we leap into the abyss of a seemingly impossible future? Here are four film&life mini-masterclasses, courtesy of Herzog, Coppola, Jodorowsky, & my sister. I hope they inspire you to create in dark times.

[Note - I’m Ari Gold, and my new film Brother Verses Brother, execu…

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Intro:

I’m a first time filmmaker, making a documentary called “Voices for Change” with my son Ray Violett. I started my Substack I’m Making My First Film! back in April after having coffee with a friend, Steve Rogers, who has produced a docuseries on PBS for the last 12 years called “Here’s the Story”. Ray and…

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Just in case you’ve pledged to catch up on you FilmStack reading in 2026, these were my guest champs — and how much they were viewed. After all FilmStack is committed to transparency. Congrats all, and may the new year be a far better one.

And I should note, that the earlier in the year, the more time you’ve had to accumulate views…

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This is my first post in like 3 months or something as I’ve been mad busy making things. Might as well work the creeks out of my bones with a TakeOver post on Hope for Film, right?

Before I get down to business: FilmStack and NonDē. Good god man. You guys have been busy. When I dropped off, this was a space …

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In 1995, Nadja — an eccentric vampire movie written and directed by Michael Almereyda, produced by me and Mary Sweeney, and executive produced by David Lynch — screened in competition at Sundance. (The 4K restoration opens at BAM next month, Feb. 6th, and other cities.) Michael brought his Pixelvision camera to Park City and we arranged to talk to fello…

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“While we may not control what happens to us, we always control how we respond to it.” — Viktor Frankl

The day after our homes burned down, I called my Aunt Ondi. Through tears we consoled each other, lamenting that we were so far from Altadena, powerless to stop the fires that destroyed our beloved community, sad we could not be with each other. I …

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