I had a whole piece ready to publish this week about DCPs. But I could not get the fact-checking done before I had to leave for my uncle’s funeral, so I benched it and am now writing this from an airport in Phoenix. It is almost midnight. I have been on one planes today and I have a two more ahead of me before I get home.
I walked past a woman in the airport bathroom pumping milk for the baby she left at home while she traveled. Another woman, a complete stranger, stopped what she was doing to encourage her. Just like that. No one asked her to. She just knew.
I have been that stranger before, and I have needed that stranger before. Something about watching it happen tonight made me want to write to you.
We as filmmakers live in a similar club. We are the only ones who know the pain of frantically prepping at 3am for a 7am call time because we are indie filmmakers and we have to do it all. That shared experience means something. It means we already know how to recognize each other, and how to show up for each other. And right now, more than ever, that matters.
So let me tell you about Hunter Peterson.
Hunter went to USC and majored in film. He also, from the age of seven, wanted to start and run an airline. Last year he flew on Spirit Airlines for 24 straight hours just to understand what the budget carrier experience was actually like, and he documented the whole thing on YouTube.
Then last Saturday, Spirit Airlines officially announced its collapse after 34 years and ceased all operations immediately.
And Hunter did what filmmakers do. He told a story.
He posted on TikTok and Instagram with a pitch for all of America.
We could buy Spirit Airlines.
He said of the 44 million Americans who flew Spirit last year if we all pledged $45 the average cost for a flight on Spirit, it would be enough to buy the airline. He calls the vision Spirit 2.0. The idea is that pledge holders become co-owners with equal voting rights, no matter how much money they put in. “I really want to run this on behalf of the people,” he said. “I don’t want to own this.” As of this week, he has nearly 150,000 people committed to the plan, and the pledges keep growing.
The reason this went everywhere in 72 hours is not really about Spirit Airlines. It is about the fact that people are exhausted by being passengers in someone else’s machine. They want a seat at the table, not just a seat in row 34 (that is me by the way, I never pay extra so I always end up in the waaaaay back). The moment Hunter said “we could just own it ourselves,” something cracked open.
Spirit planes parked on the tarmac awaiting their fate.
I reached out to Hunter, because of course I did.
I have recently started calling this a digital handshake because I want you to have a name for it so you will actually use it. Walking up to a stranger at a festival or a networking event feels normal. Sending a message to a stranger online feels weird. It should not. The digital handshake is one of the most underused tools you have, and the filmmakers who are building real careers right now are the ones who stopped waiting to be introduced and started building their own communities and connections on their own terms.
The internet is not just a place to post your work and hope someone notices. It is a direct line to the people whose work changes how you think, to the conversations worth being part of, and to collaborators you have not met yet. That access is sitting right there. Most people do not use it because they are afraid of seeming weird or wanting something. So let me give you the fix for that one.
The way the digital handshake works is simple. You lead with what you can give, not what you want. That’s what I do every week here. I try and lend some wisdom to you so you feel less alone and that someone is in your corner.
A few weeks back I reached out to a filmmaker (hi Jeff 👋🏻) I had found on a list on Substack. I asked if he wanted to grab a coffee. When we sat down, I did not pitch myself or ask for anything. I asked about his project. I asked where he was in his process. He was heading into a shoot. So I offered to do a script read fro a post perspective and give him a few things to think about before his first day on set. That was it. No agenda. No favor bank. Just one filmmaker with specific skills shared with another.
That’s the whole move. When you reach out to someone, make it about them. Ask a real question. Offer something you actually have to give. The conversation that comes from that is always more valuable than any version where you lead with yourself.
I reached out to Hunter for this same reason. Not to pitch him anything. I reached out because I did not want him to make a mistake I have watched too many talented people make without anyone warning them first. One I had experience with and I knew I could offer help. He commented on my reel about this saying he was definitely going to be keeping the rights to his story.
The coolest “plane train” I’ve ever been on. Getting a front row seat to the tarmac.
The moment something goes viral, the offers come. And those offers feel like “a big break”. They feel like validation that everything you built was real.
Everyone in those Spirit Airlines comments was already calling for the Netflix documentary. And I get it. I have seen Oscar-nominated producers never make another film I spent years at a studio that understood this better than anyone, and made a very deliberate choice to never hand the full rights to their library over because of it.
The owner of that studio kept his entire team employed, housed, and working for years, not off any single hit, but off the rights he held onto when everyone else would have signed them away. He understood something that took me a while to fully absorb.
Distribution is not the finish line.
Distribution can be the moment you lose the thing you built if you are not careful about what you are agreeing to. No one will ever care about your story as much as you do. Not a streamer, not a distributor, not a production company. You. And once you hand those full rights over, you cannot get them back, at least not without a lot of money and some very difficult paperwork.
Signing with Netflix is not your big break anymore. Building an audience that belongs to you is. Those are not the same thing, and the sooner you really believe that, the better the decisions you make will be.
That’s what this one production company understood. They only ever sold their US distribution rights but kept all of their international rights, and have built a library of shows they continue to make revenue off of 40 years later.
If Netflix comes calling for Hunter, I hope he reads the fine print slowly.
Peace & Love art installation in the Miami Airport
Here is the thing I want to reframe for you, because I know how it sounds to say “you need to build an audience.” It sounds like homework. It sounds like one more thing you have to do on top of all the other things you are already doing at 3am.
So let me say it differently.
For the first time in the entire history of our art form, you can build a direct relationship with an audience without a single gatekeeper between you.
Short form to find your people.
Long form to share the work you actually care about.
That is not a minor development. That is a fundamental shift in who gets to tell stories and who gets to own them.
You are your own best advocate. That does not mean you go it alone. It means you build community with your peers, the people who are in it the same way you are, not in the hope that some A-list name will eventually discover you and open a door. The door is already open. The question is whether you are going to walk through it or stand outside waiting for an engraved invitation.
You do not have to build an audience. You get to. That is a completely different way to think about it.
The big Hollywood filmmaking machine has one prayer left, which is that you will be too busy, too tired, or too impressed by an offer to notice that you already have everything you need.
I have sat in rooms that most filmmakers will never get access to, which means I have seen what works and what quietly destroys careers that should have lasted. What I know is real.
You did not get into filmmaking to be cargo, some commodity that can be brokered and used up. You got in because you are a storyteller. So build the audience, finish the project, hold onto what you made, and do not wait for permission from anyone.
I am finishing this piece by talking to my phone as I walk off the plane that just landed in Atlanta, as I walk through the jet bridge, with people staring at me like I am some weirdo (the things I do for my 216 subscribers 😜). It is just past 10 in the morning and I have barely slept four hours in the past two days.
We had a medical emergency on the last flight. Medics boarded, and something unusual happened. For the first time ever while flying, the aisle stayed clear. People did not hop up and start scrambling to get their bags from the overhead compartments. They went quiet, the way people do when something cuts through the noise and reminds you what actually matters. They knew something greater was happening and they let it happen. They stepped back and gave it the space it needed.
That is the challenge I want to leave you with. Stop scrambling for the overhead bin. Stop treating the next offer or the next platform or the next opportunity for validation like it is the thing you have been waiting for. The shift that is happening right now in how stories get told and owned and distributed is the thing that actually matters. You do not have to fight for a place in someone else’s machine. You are allowed to build your own.
We all sat still on that plane while they helped a passenger and her toddler off. Everything went quiet. And somehow in that quiet it was easier to see what was real.
I think you already know what is real too.
I am still thinking about that mom and her little one, hoping they are okay and wishing her a safe and peaceful Mother’s Day today.
May you never stop fighting for your voice. May you never talk yourself out of putting yourself out there. And may you become exactly who you were always meant to be.
Until next time,
Shawna Carroll
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