For a quick primmer of what this series is about you can scroll to the bottom and then come back up.
ok onto the post
It was a consuming weekend, the kind that leaves you grateful and slightly wrecked.
So today was designed to be intentionally low-key. Fewer moving parts.
...that lasted about an hour.
🚀 23rd Feburary, 2026 🚀
Up at 7. Tea & quick walk. Emails cleared.
When you’re working from LA with Europe, the UK, and the East Coast, mornings are prime time. If I miss the window, I miss the window.
By 7:45 I was on Zoom with a director I’m working with across a couple of projects. We hadn’t properly caught up in a few days, so it turned into a two-hour sweep on post schedules, production planning, and the always slightly impossible task of mapping the rest of the year.
Post is starting up. Production is looming. Timelines overlap. It’s a juggle, ultimately a fun one. Not complaining.
Looking ahead is hard because film schedules in the doc space are particularly elastic. But you still have to look ahead. You still have to decide what the year feels like before the year decides for you.
We also prepped for an important call happening tomorrow with other producers on one project. There are calls you just get on and there are calls you prep for. Not scripting it, but going in with intention. Setting tone. Deciding what we want to lead with instead of reacting in real time.
After that, I dove into a branded short we’re producing. A new treatment had come in from our director so myself and the other producer went line by line in a Google Doc, which is basically the modern writer’s room. Well our writer’s room at least. Comments, and, tone adjustments. Unglamorous work but essential. It’s a whiteboard of thought. When Google brought in tabs to google docs that was quite a game changer!
In between, a quick session troubleshooting with the assistant editor on one of the projects in the UK. Corrupt files. The kind of thing that makes your stomach drop for a second, but there are all the backups. Multiple backups. Got it fixed. I can’t encourage having multiple backups enough. I tend to post supervise most of the films I work on, which means I’m sometimes deep in the weeds on this stuff. I don’t mind it. Staying close to how things are going technically means fewer surprises later.
Then time to get up and move a bit via some garden time.
It’s getting hot in LA again. That narrow band of perfect outdoor-office weather where I am is late January through early April. And it can close fast if I don’t make the most of it. My office is a converted garage in the backyard, and this is the sweet spot season. Birds in the background on calls. Air that doesn’t need conditioning. By late April it’s sunrise-until-noon-only territory.
I watered everything, rescued a few plant cuttings my neighbor had thrown out (a bit of a hoarder for this), and reminded myself to stand more. I’ve drifted away from the standing desk. Trying to drift back.
The a midday airport run.
My fiancée is heading to Europe for meetings, including an in-person with Film Fund Luxembourg on a fiction feature we’re prepping for later this year. Important conversations. Location scouting. Pre-pre-prep for prep. Silverlake to LAX in 35 minutes. When that freeway works, it feels like a miracle.
From LAX I shot up to West Hollywood for Slamdance at the DGA.
This is the second year after Slamdance relocated from Park City to Los Angeles, and it was a much needed move as the city hasn’t had a proper indie film fest on this scale. Today was a full conference day centered around NonDē thinking, Ted Hope & Co’s framing of the “non-dependent” era of filmmaking. Non-dependent not as rebellion, but as a collective, collaborative and ceiling breaking birthing of a new ecosystem (well to Ted & co it probably is a rebellion).
I’d been hoping to get there in the morning, but the day had other plans and I arrived just in time after the lunch break. I also got in a call with the UK editor to set up the edit logistics and workflow on my drive over.
The format was sharp, tight “dangerous idea” presentations, one after another, then a Q&A after each block. No rambling panels. Just provocations. I thought that was a really intentional highlight. Not getting bogged down with panels that slow and wander. These were timed 10 minute presentations backed up with punk rock music that play you off in the final 30 seconds and Dan Mirvish as the (timer)reaper, in costume no less.
* Donny Broussard dropping his Dangerous Idea (which I missed). Reaper on the left side.
What does it mean to build Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C simultaneously, not hierarchically, but as parallel distribution pathways? What does pre-distribution actually look like in practice? How do you build audience before you finish a film, instead of hoping audience arrives after?
Keith Ochwat talked about pre-distribution in a way that felt actionable rather than theoretical, the idea that finding and building your audience is something that happens alongside development and production, not just at the end when the film is done. Peter Broderick reframed audience strategy as something that starts in development, not at delivery. These aren’t new ideas exactly, but hearing them framed with urgency in a room full of people actively building outside the system gave them a different weight.
Some of the dangerous ideas I caught that are summed up on substack include
Jon Stahl “You are the studio”
Courtney Romano “The Radical Political Campaign of the NonDē Filmmaker”
Alex Rivera “Towards a national film board” no summary I’ve found yet.
Peter Broderick “Now Is The Time! Dynamic Distribution” same with Peter’s though much of what he touched on you can find in this talk he gave at TIFF.
also read this summary Thoughts On NonDē, Vol. 2 of 99
Franklin Leonard and Courtney Romano from FilmStack were part of the Q&A blocks. Dan Mirvish chimed in. Ted Hope MC’ing the whole thing. A mix of people completely outside the traditional independent system and people who know it intimately but are actively redesigning it. That tension is healthy. That tension is the point.
(I’ve written about the NonDē movement a few times here — this post is a good place to start if you want the fuller picture.)
Ran into a DP I’d worked with on a very NonDē doc, so NonDē we didn’t even know it at the time. Caught up with a few LA folks. Stayed for drinks aka water for me so I didn’t need to stand in line.
Afterward I drove back east, attempted a new(ish) taco spot, Taqueria Fontera (closed though), pivoted to Hot Tongue Pizza, then met an old friend from the USC Peter Stark Producing Program for a drink at the Red Lion. We tried the Cha Cha Lounge first. Wrong vibe on Monday nights it seems. The Red Lion is never the wrong vibe, exactly — but it’s never quite the right one either. It just...is.
On the way home I stopped to charge the car and watched short films while it filled up. That still feels futuristic to me. Charging as screening room. Parking lot as mobile office. Also queued up tracks for this Sunday’s jazz night — I DJ once a month at a tea speakeasy downtown called Bu Tea Den. Pulled selections off the hard drive. It’s wild what you can do from a parked car now.
Back home. Watched more films.
My film year runs March to March, so I’m in the final stretch before I put together my year-end list and soundtrack mix. Still need to finish If I Had Legs I Would Kick You, the Rose Byrne film, and I’ve got a screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab coming up on Saturday. A few other titles to get through. Then it’s time to decide what actually stuck.
That’s always the question, isn’t it?
Not what was “big.” Not what won. What lingered.
And somewhere between post schedules, Luxembourg meetings, NonDē manifestos, plant cuttings, pizza pivots, and jazz playlists, that’s the day.
The previous posts in this series are collected here in the “producer diary” section of the stack.
Welcome to the new subscribers. If you want to know what this substack is all about, start here and then work through some other older posts like this one and this one. Participate with your comments and suggestions. Share things you like and get your friends to stop by. Here’s another plug for the OG case study post which I’m constantly updating, so send me any case studies I’ve missed that you found useful! This past post about audience is a good companion to today’s reading.
This is a quick primmer of what this series is about.
I get the question “what do you do as a producer?” often.
One of my favorite quotes about this is from Larry Turman who was a mentor. He said “a producer is a person who causes a film to be made, and a good producer is a person who causes a film to be made well”.
I could (and will) write a more holistic answer to that basic question — something I can forward to the people who ask me 😅 — but here, I’m trying out a diary-like entry that lists what I did on a specific day. Maybe something as simple as a daily log will shed a light on what a producer does. I’ll give this a few tries and let’s see if this feels interesting to you all.
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