Typically when I have an idea, I write down a quick summary or outline, whatever I have in my head at the moment, and then save that to come back to when I have a window where I can focus on it.

This idea happened in roughly winter or spring of 2025 ( I think). I got the idea on paper and then went back to what I was working on at the time.

Then last fall I sat down and gave it a dedicated 3-4 weeks. I got about 80 pages written.

Then another project needed my focus and I had to switch gears.

This script has been waiting since then. Almost a full year.

This week I sat down with the intention of finishing the third act.

Just getting it written so I had something to revise. And it’s happening. I stayed up til 3am the other night, not writing, just not sleeping. I didn’t connect the 6 hours of watching YouTube in bed to this script, I was just annoyed I couldn’t fall asleep.

Then I woke up the next morning and within minutes figured out the third act twist I had waited nearly a year for. I realized pretty quickly my brain had been writing in the background the night before and was grateful for the lost sleep.

But then I was cooked and all I could do was write scene summaries the rest of the day. No real dialogue or screenwriting. Just little paragraphs saying “This happens” “Then this happens” “And then this happens.”

Now I’m going to rush to the finish line. Write the bad version and give myself a script to edit next week.

When I say “new script, same process” I mean the rush through the third act.

I’m always tired by the time I edit the third act and I find I don’t write a third act I like until the final pass. Each detail that makes the third act feel like something comes as I revise. Almost never in the moment. My brain can feel the finish line and just wants to move on.

The dialogue feels prosaic. The action feels blunt. The story feels rushed. And then slowly I’ll expand, refine, illuminate and the third act will hopefully leave me and the reader feeling like something special occurred throughout this movie.

But not today. Today I feel tired, bored and like I’m doing homework that I wish was already done.

The third act focus is in front of me, and I’m looking forward to when it comes.

Maybe I need a pastry.

There are freelance businesses… and then there is Hollywood. Not only is it one of the most competitive businesses in the world, but truly, madly, deeply… no one is asking you to do it.

When I first got started, I was a Production Assistant and in between jobs I was unemployed. I used to see actors on late night shows who would occasionally answer, “What are you doing now?” with “I’m unemployed. Waiting for my next job.” The audience would laugh, but now I know, that’s actually true.

So from the age of 22 I realized I had to set a schedule for myself. I had to know what I was working on, when I was working on it, and what my timelines were.

Now I’m almost 20 years into life in LA and I’ve seen enough people do this job (and not do this job) enough different ways, that I’ve realized the scheduling is the first and most important thing.

You’re always juggling multiple projects, family, life and even different brains. Writing brain, directing brain, producing brain. A rewrite is different than an original. Notes is different than blank page. Etc.

For the last week I worked all day every day, from early morning to late night, on a rewrite for a movie that needed to be done quickly. Out of almost nowhere I had to drop everything, all work, almost all family obligations, and just become completely immersed in the world of a movie someone else had written to try to bring my best self to it.

I love doing that and I loved the last week.

Then today I woke up with a clear calendar and no plan. I need a new schedule.

If it’s not in the calendar, it won’t happen.

Need to read your pages? Put it in the calendar. Need to free write? Put it in the calendar. Want to have coffee with someone? Set the date. Need a day where you do nothing so your brain can wander? Block it out in the calendar.

My point is, today I have nothing in the calendar, so I’m writing on substack. But I’ve only had a career because the next thing I’ll do is figure out my schedule and put it in the calendar.

Being busy for busy’s sake isn’t a good goal, but managing your commitments and finishing what you start relieves anxiety and keeps you moving forward.

So now I’ll just have a coffee, maybe go for a run or wander around, and then figure out what it is I’m going to do next.

In fact, I think this is going to be kind of optimistic.

There is sort of an understood thing in Hollywood that the summer is a very tough time to make things happen.

The richest and most powerful people, aka the decision makers, spend a lot of their summer on vacation and it slows everything down.

This summer however, at least for me, has felt a little different.

But first let me set the stage:

THE HOLLYWOOD CALENDAR

I like to say that we have about 17 working days in the annual Hollywood calendar.

WINTER

When the year starts, everyone is just getting back from holiday, so best not to send out new stuff or push for meetings while people are getting settled.

Then there’s a quick window when things can happen before Sundance.

Then it’s Sundance. Gotta wait for that to wrap up and for everyone to get back and get over their flu/covid/hangover.

Then there’s a nice little window of a couple days where everyone is jamming.

SPRING

Things were starting to move, but now it’s SXSW and Spring Break. Hang tight.

Okay, we’re back and we want to get things done before summer.

Some people are gone for Cannes, but things mostly keep moving. And that’s important because once we approach Memorial Day, it’s summer.

SUMMER

Hard stop. It’s yachting season.

Anyone who can make a decision is gone for Memorial Day, then a quick check in before an extended Fourth Of July. Then it’s August and everyone’s wrapping up the end of their vacations before school starts.

FALL

Absolute dead sprint from Labor Day to mid-November. This is a great window.

Then it’s Thanksgiving. And well, now we’re in the holidays again.

See you in those couple weeks of January before Sundance starts.

Okay, but this year has felt a little different.

It started the same, but as the summer went on, it felt like more and more people have stayed engaged.

After a number of years of doing studio development almost exclusively, this spring I told my team I wanted to refocus on independent films.

I’m not done with studio filmmaking, but after years of development, I want to focus on making things and making them as good and as honest and as funny as they can be.

That means refocusing on independent film.

That’s made my summer busy.

Busy with my own writing, as I’ve been reworking scripts so that they can be made at an independent budget.

And busy working with other filmmakers on projects that were already in motion.

As a result, it is mid-August and I feel more energized, excited, and busy than I have ever felt in the summer in Hollywood.

I normally resist talking about anything actively happening, but in an effort to have this substack truly be a real-time bts blog:

Recently I had a 3 hour conversation with an actor/writer about their movie. It was our first conversation and not once did we talk about how to get the movie made. No strategizing about how to sneak it through the system.

The entire conversation was about how to make the movie into the best version of itself.

I left that conversation feeling excited about filmmaking in a way I hadn’t in a very long time.

Much has been said and written about the demise of Hollywood, and much has also been said and written about the hope that indie film will have a big revival in this time.

I have no idea.

I don’t know how much time people will realistically take away from their phones and what the appetite is to watch movies.

I don’t know what the economics look like in this era of consolidated media and social media.

But I do know that making movies is the thing I love the most, and for the first summer in a very long time, a lot of people in Hollywood have stayed in town and are working hard to make good movies.

Instagram Summer isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but maybe Hollywood Summer is rebranding and I think that’s a pretty good thing.

- Alex

On the final day I felt like it had been substantial enough of a rewrite that I gave it a new title. Something that was less cynical, more hopeful.

Ironic since I felt the voice of my writing pre-Covid needed to be updated to reflect the light leaving our collective eyes in 2020.

After all that, I found that by updating the voice to reflect how the world feels now, it also led the script into a more hopeful place.

Like literally “hopeful”. Not optimistic necessarily, but hoping there are better, more romantic, more beautiful days still ahead.

I switched the title and it felt like a new movie.

Who knows where it goes from here, but it felt good to rework an old, big idea and finish.

It felt hopeful… and I’ll take it.

I sent the new draft to my manager without reading it top to bottom. That’s not something I think I’ve ever done, but I trust him and was curious what response I’d get without my own review process.

He came back to me with three big notes:

• One of the two main characters arc was feeling like it was missing a back story that would clarify his story.

• It felt like we were missing a 2nd act set piece driven by the premise.

• He wanted to get a sense of what the outside world, beyond our main characters, thought about the premise.

Well, I had deleted three big scenes from the original script. Three things I didn’t have an immediate update for, and decided to just send the script without their replacement.

You can probably see where this is going.

Those three scenes covered:

• One of the main character’s backstory.

• A second act set piece.

• The outside world’s reaction.

I took his notes as a good affirmation of the quality of our teamwork as well as his skill and attention to detail as a reader.

And also, a reminder that the audience always starts the movie at zero.

I truly think this is one of the most amazing things about movies. Even though we all know the form, the tropes, we have relationships to the actors and we may think we know where it’s going…. Even though we’ve all seen thousands of movies and tv shows… we give each one a fresh chance.

Each movie creates its own characters, its own stories, its own world and when you remove information the audience doesn’t fill it in on their own. It’s just missing.

The great Garry Shandling used to say, “If you want the audience to know something. Just say it. Give them the information so they can enjoy the show.”

Next week I’ve got three new scenes to write.

Then they said, “But also Happy Pride to you!”

I was frozen. I don’t think anyone beyond a couple of close friends had ever said that to me.

And then I realized, they had seen my instagram, where one day a while back, I had taken the leap and added “they/him” to my bio.

7 letters and a backslash that I considered and worried about for an extremely long time.

This was the moment I didn’t know I had been waiting for. Where someone knew me for me, without me ever explaining myself.

It took a second to sink in. It felt… surreal.

I’ve thought for years and years about how to handle sharing my identity.

For a person who believes that in creativity there is no “right”, I’ve been determined to handle this the “right” way.

I have kids. I travel all over the country and world for work. So I worry about safety.

I don’t feel like my life, from the outside, looks like that of a nonbinary person (whatever that means). So I worry about judgement.

But, in this moment, I realized, regardless of all my fear, a fear that has made me at times feel like a coward… I’m happier when people know who I am.

I worked fucking hard to know who I am. To tell the people I love who I am. To be who I am. And so… here I am.

On some level I’ve always been aware I was queer, but I didn’t have the right words. As a kid this manifested in many ways, and I eventually gave up trying to describe it.

People would ask questions about my sexuality, and my canned response was, “If I was gay I would make more sense, but I’m not and so I don’t.”

Then one day I heard the word “nonbinary” for the first time.

It hit me like a wave. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” I would think. Not letting myself admit that I already had my answer.

Then that denial turned into a deep internal rage and depression. I knew the truth, and I was now lying to myself and I hated it.

Eventually, I let myself admit it to myself, but never aloud, and I thought maybe that would be enough.

It was not enough. The pain and depression intensified.

Then one day, my wife and I were watching Zendaya do the Proust questionnaire on Vanity Fair’s YouTube. After each of her answers we paused to ask ourselves the questions.

One of the questions was what would you change about yourself.

I blurted out “my gender”. Then panicked.

Drea looked at me, kindly, and said, “I see that for you.”

No judgement. No awkwardness. It made sense to her.

I realized I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

Within a couple days I decided to call a nonbinary friend. Before I told them what I was calling about they said they already knew. I said they couldn’t possibly. They said that they absolutely knew what I was calling about, but I had to say it first.

I told them. They said, “I know. I’ve known for a long time, but I had to wait for you to figure it out on your own.”

Poof. A release of pain inside of myself. A lightness I could never remember feeling.

I finished talking to my friend, came home, and told Drea.

She was happy for me. Happy for us. She loved me no matter what and hoped that this would help me with the pain she’d been watching me deal with.

It did.

Slowly but surely I told friends and family. Each time I felt better after, but always felt I would keep it to the close circle.

For nearly five years that’s the space where I’ve lived.

I know. Most of the people I’m close to know. And that felt safe. But eventually that feeling of keeping a secret, of still not being myself, of lying, continued to creep back up.

So then I decided to put my pronouns on my instagram. I thought, well at least new people I meet might see it, and people I’ve known a long time may stumble across it.

And you know what? It worked. Two people I didn’t know before I’d added my pronouns to my Instagram greeted me as who I am and it felt great.

Because of that moment, I realized that I have to be brave and be open and be myself.

Over the years, as I’ve been more open and more proud, it’s only ever gotten better and what better time to rip the cord than pride month.

So here I am. The same me I’ve always been, but happier now.

Thank you to all the queer people that have made the world a better place and thank you for helping me be myself after a life of searching.

Happy Pride.

5:30am wake up

6:00am start writing at coffee shop

8:00am go home to take care of our baby

11:00am take our baby for a long walk (also my exercise)

(If we have childcare that day I might get an afternoon writing session, but we are still in search of consistent childcare. It hasn’t been as easy to sort out as it was with our first kid.)

5:30pm dinner and bedtime routine with kids

8:30pm kids asleep

9:30pm bed

———

It reminds me of when I was at Funny Or Die.

I treated my sketches as my job, but movies were still my long term focus. So I got up every day before work and wrote in a coffee shop before I went to work and made FOD videos.

I’m enjoying this return to old feelings and processes.

After years of developing studio films, I’m planning to make my next movie independently.

As my focus shifts that direction, it’s affirming to have my life remind me of the last time I made independent movies.

Having film feel like a passion that I have to wake up early to chase, rather than a job I do all day, is a good reminder of how it should feel.

It’s not my preferred time of day, but it’s what my current schedule calls for.

I can switch into being a morning person pretty well after a few days.

Working on something entirely new, which is that I’m rewriting something quite old.

A script I wrote in 2019 is happily coming back to life, but needs some updating. Not sure if anyone else noticed, but a lot happened between 2019 and now.

On first read I was surprisingly happy with how well the story and characters held up, but there was some textural stuff that needed updating.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it feels like to do this work.

Reading myself from 7 years ago, reading my view of the world from 7 years ago.

The big things remain the same, but I am essentially adapting myself. Adapting my younger self to be exact.

It’s a little like I read someone else’s script for a re-write job and thought, “This is great. I can fix this without blowing it up.”

In addition to the textural and cultural updates, some things have changed in the structure of how I write. For example: I used to stack scenes in a way that I think is less elegant and surprising than how I do now. Especially when building reveals or climactic moments.

The rhythm is also slower than what I’ve been doing lately, but in a way that feels refreshing, and I actually don’t want to mess with that much.

In the time since I wrote this, I’ve written or fully outlined 13 movies and overseen the writing of 2 other movies as a producer. That’s a lot of evolution as a writer to return to what was, at the time, only the third screenplay I had ever written.

I want to embrace how fresh my style was at the time, while making it right for the filmmaker and person I am now.

There's a bit of thread pulling that happens, but there’s been a fun & revelatory process to it. This process feels like a nice place to put my mind at this point in time, even if only for a week.

The biggest thing overall is probably that I need to change the Drake references.

- Alex

“I’m starting an OnlyFans.”

That’s what I said to a few trusted people in my life recently.

To my surprise, everyone was relatively supportive, shockingly so considering some thought I was about to get naked on the internet.

My wife, very supportively, asked if the reason I was doing an OnlyFans was to do “sex stuff online”.

Honestly, great great wife.

Everyone had some questions.

Once I told them what I intended to do with it, all but one told me that Substack was the place for me. (Josh Salzberg, I have always and will always appreciate your enthusiasm for my ventures, OnlyFans included.)

DVD SPECIAL FEATURES IN REAL TIME

I learned filmmaking largely by watching DVD Special Features.

Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Anthony Minghella, Judd Apatow and my former boss and undisputed goat of DVD Special features, David Fincher, were some of the most influential.

The more that everyone shares on the internet, there has been an inverse relationship to how much filmmakers share with the audience.

This Substack is an attempt to fill that gap.

I want to share what the day in, day out life of a filmmaker looks like. Because making a movie takes years, and only a few months of those years are actually production.

I want to know what people wear everyday, how they approach their work, how many coffees they can drink before they get anxious, and what it looks like to put yourself through everything it takes to make art (I deeply deeply apologize, but I do see comedy and filmmaking as art and the people who make them as artists).

So I thought maybe, some people around the world, might want to know what I’m wearing, what I’m writing, how it feels, and why I’m doing it (I wish it was money, it would be so much easier if it was all for money).

Who is Alex Richanbach?

I am, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the only person with my name in the entire world.

So if you google me, that’s me.

But since you’re here (and I really appreciate that), here’s a little summary of my career.

It’s going to read a little bit like a resumé, but someone once told people that people don’t know unless you tell them, so here’s how I’ve made a career in Hollywood since I was 22.

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT

I started as a production assistant on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and then Step Brothers. (At some point I’ll write about how I got each of those jobs. Including taking a hint from Steven Spielberg’s bio and sneaking onto a lot.)

Then I bounced around from PA job to PA job.

I learned a ton about filmmaking, the structure of Hollywood, and how to drive around LA, but the hours made it functionally impossible to work on my own films.

I eventually worked retail at the Nike store at The Grove to give myself more time for filmmaking.

MY FIRST FEATURE FILM

I had gotten a couple of short films into film festivals and then I decided to make my first feature film for for $20,000.

The year was 2011 and the film was called We Are Young.

I wrote, directed, produced, did wardrobe, production design, a little bit of editing and starred in We Are Young.

My plan was to see if I could make a good micro-budget feature.

If people liked it, then I would have a career.

If they didn’t, I needed to find a different path to paying off my credit cards, but at least I would know where I stood.

While I was editing We Are Young, I got hired at Funny Or Die as a line producer.

They heard I had made a movie for $20,000 and figured I could produce sketches for $2000. Truly the break of a lifetime.

By the time I had finished editing my movie, I now knew a lot more people in Hollywood, so I rented a screening room at Paramount for around $1000 (I don’t think you can do that anymore), and with the help of a producer who liked the movie (Josh Church), we invited everyone we knew to come see We Are Young.

By the next day, I was a professional director.

I had a manager, soon after that I signed at CAA, and Funny Or Die allowed me to start writing and directing in addition to my job as producer.

FUNNY OR DIE

At Funny Or Die I got paid to learn to write, direct and produce sketch comedy, while also using my early mornings and late nights to continue to write long form.

I co-wrote and directed a pilot for a TV show and was able to turn my sketch experience into a commercial directing career.

I left Funny Or Die 4 years later with a movie in development with Adam McKay, and steady work as a commercial director.

IBIZA

After about a year of directing commercials I got the opportunity to direct Ibiza.

I had always loved Lauryn Kahn’s script.

We had known each other since we were both PAs on Step Brothers, and we made a ton of sketches together at Funny Or Die.

I was still prepping to write, direct and star in Idiots, the movie I had left FOD to make, but McKay was producing both movies and he gave me some great advice.

He told me that I should direct Ibiza, and if I still wanted to make Idiots afterwards, we would.

However, he thought after I got a taste of directing a big movie, with a real budget, I wouldn’t want to act anymore.

He was right.

WRITING CAREER

After Ibiza came out, I pivoted to writing.

I loved directing LK’s hilarious and beautiful script, but wanted to return to my original path as a writer/director.

I wrote my next movie, and was going to make it, then Covid hit.

I took those first few months of Covid as an honest break from filmmaking.

I watched movies, I thought about movies, but I had no interest in making them under quarantine.

Then as the pandemic continued on, I taught myself to write in classic studio screenplay structure. Something I had some understanding of, but had never studied.

The practice in structure freed me up.

I used to start every script with something I wanted to express about myself, but couldn’t always turn it into a movie.

Now I started every script by coming up with ideas for movies that I would want to see.

The self expression came in the execution rather than ideation.

In the 4 years that followed, through the process and routine I created for myself during the pandemic, I sold 4 movies to studios (3 as writer, 1 as producer).

SIX FOOT ONE

On election night 2024 I deleted Instagram off my phone.

I stayed off social media for about a year and a half while I thought about how I want to engage with the internet moving forward.

This Substack is part of who I want to be and what I want to do creatively at this point in my life.

As I said above, I learned how to make films largely by watching filmmakers who had great special features on their DVDs.

Musicians’ process is also highly influential to me.

LCD Soundsystem did a making of documentary on YouTube when they were making Sound Of Silver. John Mayer used to include his making of documentary on his CDs. Perhaps my all time favorite, and the inspiration for the title of this Substack, is Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two documentary.

I’m currently, and always, in the middle of writing a couple of movies, while trying to get a couple of other movies made, and occasionally directing commercials.

And as someone who loves it when other people share their process, I thought it was time I do so in a way that is more modern, raw and in the moment.

I’m going to share what I feel comfortable with on the public feed, but a lot of this will live behind a paywall so that I feel a little less vulnerable as I share my day in, day out thoughts and process.

There will be of pictures, videos, blogs and eventually livestreams.

I hope maybe even a film club, where we can watch and discuss movies on here.

All that said, we’ll figure this out together.

It’s a process and I’m excited to go through it with you.

- Alex