What I've Learned in One Year of Doing My Substack

This week marks the one year anniversary of my Substack newsletter. Publishing fifty posts in that time is nothing to sneeze at, even in allergy season. But I have an admission to make. I started out with a purely strategic intention in mind.

One year ago I was all set to do a crowdfunding campaign for my film Betty & Henri (& Me) and I badly needed to build up my paltry email list. Large social media followings are all well and good, but you can’t take them with you. Ownership is the key, and every subscriber to my Substack is automatically added to my email list

What I didn’t anticipate is that I would become so enamored with doing this, as I’d never thought of myself as a writer. I’ve been a documentary filmmaker most of my adult life, and a writer only out of necessity.1 But while it’s been far more work than I imagined, I’ve loved writing for you from the get-go. So much so that it’s turned my head completely around as to what form my film will now take.

I’ve learned a lot about writing for Substack in the past year, both from reading tips and advice from other Substackians (special shoutouts to Kristina God, MBA and Kristi Keller 🇨🇦) and through seeing firsthand what works and what doesn’t. I don’t claim to be an expert, but as a special how-the-sausage-gets-made anniversary gift to my curious, intelligent, exceptionally good-looking subscribers, here are some of the more useful lessons I’ve absorbed along the way.

1. Don’t bury the lead (which, fuck a duck, I’ve just done!). My Omaha, an extraordinary personal doc by first-time filmmaker Nick Beaulieu, which I produced with Nick, has been acquired by Independent Lens, and will premiere on PBS on October 5th.

In addition to the national broadcasts, the film will be available to stream for free on the PBS app and YouTube for a limited time. My Omaha couldn’t be more timely or urgent in terms of addressing the political and racial divide in this country, and we’re particularly gratified it will be seen widely in the leadup to the mid-term elections.

We’ve had to sit on this news for months, so I’m thrilled to finally be able to share it. Needless to say, I’ll have much more to say about the film and its making as we get closer to the airdate.

2. Be clear about your niche. This was drummed into me with iron mallets for drumsticks. Don’t write for a general audience. Be very specific about who your primary readership is, and how your Substack will address their needs. With mine, I share advice and anecdotes about personal documentary filmmaking, first-person storytelling and producing for film. However, naming it Getting Personal gives me latitude to make it as personal as I want. And it’s clearly getting more personal as I go along.

3. Write consistently. Another piece of wise advice I took to heart. Whether you post once a day (ha, are you kidding me?), once a week or once a month, do it regularly. I chose once a week and I’m proud that I’ve held to it for a full year.

That said, it’s gotten to the point where it’s unsustainable, especially as Betty & Henri (& Me) has transitioned from a feature doc to a serialized, multimedia narrative for Substack (at least, at first) requiring a whole new level of time management. My plan going forward is to publish Getting Personal every other week, and work on Searching for Betty & Henri 2 on the alternate weeks.

4. Trust in your voice. I may be a documentary filmmaker, but I like to think, first and foremost, I’m a storyteller. And as I’m not answering to anyone, Substack allows me to take my stories in all sorts of unexpected directions. If I feel like going down an intriguing rabbit hole, or meander a bit, or take a long detour from a list of lessons learned, well, so be it. For example…

Like many others, I lost my office space at the beginning of Covid. With no other place to store all my stuff, I wound up cramming 10 large boxes into my daughter Lucy’s old bedroom. However, now that she’s almost 8 months pregnant with her first child and anticipates needing to stay over once in a while, we agreed it would be lovely for her to actually be able to walk around in it.

So this past week I went through every box, keeping the hard drives and tape masters but tossing out almost everything else. I have to admit, though, I hesitated after dumping 35 years worth of business cards into a trash bag. Souvenirs of hundreds, if not thousands of wonderful encounters I’ve experienced at festivals, markets, screenings and industry events over the decades. And a poignant reminder of the many potential work collaborations I was way too busy to follow up with.

On an impulse, I reached into the bag and grabbed a bunch of random cards. I wound up recognizing only one of the names — Laure Parsons, Director of Home Media Sales & Marketing for Zeitgeist Films.

MAGNOLIA X-MAS PARTY, I’d scribbled on her card, but not the year.

It all came back to me in a flash. The Magnolia offices were jam-packed with film folks, the music was deafening and the free liquor flowed. I escaped into a quieter back room that stored hundreds of company dvds, noticed an attractive woman looking them over and introduced myself. We joked about walking out with a collection under our coats, talked for quite a while and felt an immediate connection.

Laure was super cool for a film exec, and when we’d cross paths occasionally over the next few years it was always an easy mix of bantering and business. But as so often happens in the film biz, we get overwhelmed with work and gradually lose touch with people we like immensely without even realizing it. How long ago was this? Fifteen years? Twenty years? It all begins to blur.

Curiosity overtook me and I decided to search my inbox for the date of our first email correspondence. December 14, 2007, it turned out.

I must have reminisced with Laure at the party about my film programming days back at Cornell, and we must have discussed her dream of being an art house programmer, because she began:

It was very pleasant meeting you the other night at the Magnolia party- as well as strangely thought-provoking. :-) It will be interesting to see how things play out in this little world of ours- maybe I'll find someone with a lot of money who wants to save us.

She’d attached a party photo of me listening to D.A. Pennebaker, with herself half-hidden behind Chris Hegedus on the right.

I responded:

Our discussion brought back intense memories of my post-college period of wanting to be a calendar house exhibitor in a more laid-back, livable city somewhere. Also got me thinking about life paths so often being determined by serendipity. We meet the right people at the right time and... whoosh!

I never did meet someone like you back then who might have tapped into the same dream and so veered back to the original filmmaking path (not complaining, mind you). But I hope you do. It’s a hard thing to do alone, and life’s always more fun when you have partners in crime. So I wish you all the best in that.

I jumped right to our last email, dated June 21, 2012. By then Laure was working for a company called xplusxfilms.com3 and we were trying to meet up for coffee, but our schedules weren’t aligning. The email was from me, and it read in its entirety:

Our online is scheduled for next week so i think it’ll have to be the week after.

No response from Laure. End of thread. That’s all she wrote.

So here it was, a little over 14 years later, and I couldn’t not see what she was up to. I googled Laure Parsons and up came a profile showing she’s Senior User Researcher at Joya Communications, “makers of the popular Marco Polo App.” It’s hard to tell if it’s current, but the last line accurately describes the Laure I remember:

“She is a neuroscience geek and endlessly curious about what makes people do what they do.”

Count me endlessly curious, too. I was sorely tempted to put all the business cards back in the original box — so many fascinating people I’ve come across, so many memories lost to time — but Lucy’s room needs all the space it can get.

I tied up the trash bag in a bow and brought it downstairs to the paper recycling bin.

5. Photos are good. Like this one I found tucked away in one of the boxes showing the author building his remarkable physique.

6. Videos are better yet. Like this one at Lucy and her partner Ernesto’s baby shower last Saturday. The kids grow up, indeed!

7. And a killer ending that ties everything together is best of all. Umm, uh, geez, when I can come up with one, that is.

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