For a quick primer of what this series is about you can scroll to the bottom and then come back up.
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This is the third and final live dispatch from Getting Real ‘26. Day one is here and Day two is here.
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🚀 Thursday July 23, 2026 🚀
715a. Up. Emails. And catching up on the session I missed from yesterday’s conference about new economic models, only managed 20 mins so will finish up later.
10am. Keynote from Mandy Chang
A sweeping and considered summary of the documentary business over the last thirty or so years, from the late 1980s to now. Raw and honest, and worth you watching back on the replay.
The thing I’m taking away most is a question about language. We talk a lot in this field about gatekeepers, and that word carries a lot of weight, usually negative. What Mandy’s keynote reminds us is that the framing might be too constricting. The people we label gatekeepers are also providing a service. To films, to documentary as a craft, to audiences, to participants. Commissioners, programmers, broadcasters, curators...these are roles that involve judgment, taste, and advocacy as much as they involve power. Simply using the word gatekeeper flattens all of that. It doesn’t mean the power dynamics aren’t real. It just means the picture is more complicated than the word suggests.
1115am. What’s the Deal? Distribution Game Show
Had to duck out early for some work things but caught enough to appreciate what Chase Whiteside put together. A fun, lighthearted sidebar in an otherwise intense three days. People were laughing.
Around noon. Lunch around the corner at Marugame Monzo to hit some carbonara udon, it’s as tasty as it sounds.
Caught the tail end of a panel Boots on the ground on my way back in, will listen back to this in full later. Lots of doc star power continuing today, hellos to Kirby Dick, Diane Becker, Ina Fichman, Senain Kheshgi and a number of other filmmaker friends milling around between sessions.
1230p While waiting to go into the 130 session I knocked out a quick budget for a one-day filming trip that just came up for next month. Producer life doesn’t pause for conferences...apparently.
2nd update
130p. State of the Business. Moderated by Ted Hope
The last one was the best one.
This was both the most interesting and the most enjoyable session of the three days. Sometimes things are genuinely interesting but not that dynamically delivered. This was both. Ted Hope moderating brings a particular kind of edge and caffeine-driven energy that raises the room. The panelists, Sam Denby (Nebula/Wendover Productions), Sohini Sengupta (Doverlane), and Sky Dylan-Robbins (Video Consortium), are each building something real in exhibition and community, in filmmaker resources, and in creator-owned streaming. Lots of great things you need to hear so hit the replay online...please.
I left with something I’m going to write about properly next week so I’ll just plant the seed here. There was a lot of talk about marketing, merchandise, promotion, audience building from day one of a project. All good things. All necessary things. But I kept thinking that all of those words, as useful as they are, don’t quite capture what’s actually happening when they work. What they’re really describing is connection making. Connection is one of the most fundamental human needs. It gives us meaning, purpose, and value. As filmmakers we already know how to create connection through our work. The invitation is to extend that into how we build audiences for that work, how we show it, how we sustain the relationship with the people who watch it. I think this post about experience creation I wrote earlier this year is the pre-amble to what I’ll think through next on connection. oh and actually as I dive quickly through the old posts, this one “from newslettering 2 connecting” is a pretty good one too!
Marketing is not a dirty word. It’s just not quite the right word. Connection Making is closer to what this actually is.
One moment from the session that’s going to stay with me...someone in the audience followed up on Sam’s mention of challenge-driven storytelling as a format for social issue documentary work. What is the challenge that drives the story and invites the audience in? The example that got thrown out is people challenging themselves to out as many ICE agents as possible as a form of immigration social justice advocacy. Bold. Galvanizing. And honestly someone’s going to go make it.
Great panel. Great way to end Getting Real ‘26. More next week on the connection making thread. If you have any top learnings from the conference I’d love to hear about them.
310p stopped off at Cafe Dulce in little tokyo on way to the car for some treats.
315p hitting the 110 traffic back homewards via Pasadena. Dropping in on the market to pick up some goodies for a Bowl concert I’m off to tonight. Miyazaki x Joe Hisaishi.
430p I’m back home after a camp pick up writing this update I’m just about to post.
630p headed out to the Bowl to catch composer Joe Hisaishi play his music from soundtracks from many of his Miyazaki collabs. 50,000 people came across 3 evenings to celebrate his iconic scores. I’d somehow missed that he also scored many Takeshi Kitano films and the piece from Sonatine this evening was especially awesome!
The producer diary series is collected here.
Welcome to the new subscribers. If you want to know what this substack is all about, start here and work through some older posts. Participate with your comments and suggestions. Share things you like and get your friends to stop by.
This is a quick primer 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, 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.
The previous posts in this series are collected here in the “producer diary” section of the stack.
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