The submissions deadline for the 2026 edition of U.S. in Progress has been extended until September 10. American narrative feature projects in post-production seeking finishing funds are invited to apply. The event will take place from November 17 to 19, during the 17th American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland.

U.S. in Progress presents narrative feature projects in rough-cut stages to European buyers, festival programmers, and Polish partner post-production companies, with a pool of awards worth over $130,000. The program objective is to inspire American producers to work with Poland and offers a unique opportunity to network, learn, exchange ideas and find partners.

U.S. in Progress regulations and requirements:

• fiction narrative projects in progress (rough-cut stage)

• produced in the U.S.

• to reach at least 60 minutes of running time by November

• minimum 20 minutes of footage needs to be provided with the submission

Find more information on the U.S. in Progress website.

To apply, please send in the following information in one email to usinprogress@nowehoryzonty.pl with the subject line: “USinP Submission - project title”:

1. Title (or working title)

2. Synopsis (1000 words maximum)

3. Logline

4. Production info:

   • Director (with a short bio of 200 words maximum)

   • Producer (with a short bio of 200 words maximum)

   • Production Company

   • Production Countries (if other than US)

   • Talent

   • Production Budget

   • Secured Financing (as a percentage of budget)

   • Project Status

5. Screener link (minimum 20 minutes of footage of a features in postproduction phase)

6. Name and e-mail address of the submitter

7. Has the film previously been selected for or submitted to any labs, markets, or film festivals?

8. Where did you hear about U.S. in Progress?

The international committee will announce the selected projects by early October.

Enjoy this latest excerpt from our summer issue, and subscribe today.

There’s nothing erotic about westerns. Not because one wishes there was more bare skin, but because eroticism depends on mystery—on what’s unspoken and measureless—and the western admits none of that. The genre’s assorted gunmen, gamblers, widows, drifters, and doomed proprietors are usually given to cold calculation and risk assessment. The hero moves through a primeval space organized by reckonable variables. And freedom, where it exists at all, is either bygone (the homestead that’s been left behind, the lover back East, youth itself) or yet to come, somewhere just a little farther west. The leading men and women of the westerns put out by Universal in the 1940s and ’50s move in a perpetual present, but their attention is split between a past they’ve abandoned and a future they haven’t yet reached, and what seems like freedom is a provisional suspension between the two. The frontier leads not to the bedroom but to the balance sheet.

Across more than 60 years and nearly 30 titles—from John Ford’s Straight Shooting (1917) to Fred Schepisi’s Barbarosa (1982)—Universal Westerns looks at first like a heroic pageant. In fact, the series, organized by Dave Kehr and Steve Macfarlane for the Museum of Modern Art, is something more severe: a repertoire of recurring transactions and tests. These are films crowded with archetypes, but what matters is the clarity with which they’re arranged: who owes what to whom, who sees what, and which dangers can be named. The people in these films may drift and brood, but the camera is almost always damningly lucid.

My own relationship to the western genre has been noncommittal at best and uncomprehending at worst. Notwithstanding a few exceptions (The Naked Spur, 1953; The Gunfighter, 1950; Track of the Cat, 1954; and the Howard Hawks westerns, all of which were put out by studios other than Universal), the western of my imagination was an embalmed artifact of midday cable programming, sententious and simple. I had not shaken, until now, the prejudices of my 19-year-old self, whose newfound taste for European art movies of the 1960s and ’70s induced a punishing cinephilic myopia. By so strictly setting the terms of what was and wasn’t worth my attention, I denied myself the many pleasures to be had in the genre’s great achievements.

Subscribe now

What’s easy to dismiss as simplicity in these films is really a kind of formal intelligence. In the Universal westerns, clarity becomes strange. Ford’s Straight Shooting begins with the barest of instruments, a title card written in storybook vernacular: “There was a time when the western plains belonged to no man . . . ” The nursery-rhyme tenor of this introduction fits because the world it opens onto is childlike in the same way, a moral and visual universe so cleanly mapped that nothing in it is left to be puzzled out. Like a fable, it arrives already fully sorted, and it’s precisely this sustained lucidity that starts to feel uncanny.

The story, from a script by George Hively, about a hired gun who defends a family of homesteaders in a violent clash over water rights, pits inside against outside, watcher against watched, in a hard-edged grammar of stark oppositions that Ford would reiterate in The Searchers almost 40 years later. But here, thanks in no small part to cinematography by George Scott and an uncredited Ben F. Reynolds (who would shoot many more of Ford’s films over the next two years before going to work with Erich von Stroheim), those oppositions have a primitive graphic punch. There’s a deceptively smooth, proto–pop-art cool to the way Ford puts the town square’s storefront signs in the viewer’s face, as though every “HOTEL,” “BAR,” “WELLS FARGO,” and “RESTAURANT” exists to containerize the visible world, to stick labels on it.

The same sense of orientation seeps into the prolonged standoff near the end of the film, when Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey) and Placer Fremont (Vester Pegg) square off in the town center and Ford gives each gunslinger his own iris-enclosed close-up as they slink closer and closer to one another. The iris, with its little conspiracy of enclosure, suggests a peephole—or a view through the barrel of a gun—and a false sense of intimacy. The two men are too far apart to see one another’s faces with the clarity the camera grants us. It’s a revealing cheat: like the storefront signs, the close-ups turn space into information. Ford arranges the world for the viewer before anyone inside it could possibly see it whole, implicating us in the work of accounting.

The many doorways and open windows framing the landscape in Straight Shooting—the “wish you were here”–postcard notion of sentiment and space—hint at something that becomes systematic throughout the series. In these films, no prairie is without a boundary, no plot of land is without a history of conquest and incorporation, resulting in the stipulation of laws, codes, rules. And the rules, insofar as they shape what the characters do and say, translate most relations into some combination of commerce, measurements, and claims.

Subscribe now

Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), an impeccable picaresque that is as much about the passage of a rifle between hands as it is about drifting gunman Lin McAdam’s pursuit of his brother, is emblematic from its very first shot: the titular prized rifle framed inside a storefront window, drawing the fawning admiration of a chorus of children and, as an upward tilt soon reveals, a pack of grown men (“Finest one I’ve ever seen!”). Mann announces his terms immediately. He’s a deft marksman in his own right, guided by a need to see things clearly, to show us how his characters are bound to the things around them and how those bindings determine their fate.

Later, during a shooting contest, several minutes are devoted to McAdam (James Stewart) showing off his aim on a series of ever smaller targets: first, a bullseye; then, a silver dollar; then, a postage stamp. There’s a cold wit in Mann’s swift movement from a thing made for shooting to a thing made for the circulation of language, with the silver glint of money intervening between the two, as though three orders of the visible world have been reduced, one by one, to surfaces ripe for a bullet’s strike. The great joke of Winchester ’73 is that the world has already volunteered to become a target.

Subscribe now

So much of what we see and hear in these films comes to us tightly packed, pressurized, condensed. Behind every door in Dodge City is a shelf of dry goods priced, we’re told, a nickel a pound and a dollar a bushel. We may even learn the prices of the doors and shelves themselves, the names of the best suppliers in St. Louis, and how long it’ll take to have a new set made to order. In Bend of the River (1952), crossed-out prices mark a barrel of flour, each higher than the last. When a carefully prepared public hanging is interrupted in The Far Country (1954), the furious judge blurts out what’s really at stake: “Each step costs no less than twelve dollars per each! New gallows, new ropes, thirteen steps all counted out right and proper!” There’s nothing, it seems, that can’t be counted. Often, a figure from the Old World keeps the score, like some kind of actuarial Virgil, reminding the hero, as the British bookkeeper does in Canyon Passage (1946), how much money he has left or schooling him, as the bespectacled European doctor does in The Far Country, on exactly how many kinds of ulcers there are.

What does a child know about ulcers, or the dollar cost of a gallows-step? Buried inside the western’s many countable facts is a wide-eyed response to the world of grown-ups, one that has the effect of reducing us all to children. Watch, for instance, the two boys in Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage as their father, Ben (Andy Devine), commiserates with Logan (Dana Andrews) at the homestead dining table. Ben slams his fist down to make a point, and Tourneur cuts to the youngest boy, who is by this point in stupefied awe, nodding like he’s old enough to understand. Of course, he isn’t. Neither, the films seem to say, are we.

The pressure of all these cold, hard facts puts the typical western hero in an unusual moral situation. He’s a character hellbent on control, but with a deranged equanimity that borders on fatalism. When the residents of Jacksonville descend upon Logan’s store at the end of Canyon Passage, burning it to the ground in a fit of vengeful rage, he takes it all in with a calm so severe it nearly becomes another form of arithmetic: “There’s a thin margin between what could be and what is.” This attitude extends to any debt of gratitude, which the western hero can never fully acknowledge because doing so would mean surrendering his control over the land, over all human relations. “Say ‘thanks,’” Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman) tells James Stewart’s Jeff Webster in The Far Country, after she hides him from the law. “That’s a word I seldom use,” he replies. Later, he’ll change his tune, but only under lethal threat. Gratitude, when it finally comes, smacks of good-humored defiance: after listening to the town judge warn him of imprisonment and death, Jeff retorts, “Thank you very much. Thank you.”

The impassive outlaw, the drifter, the traveling tradesman who doesn’t return a kindness is the same person who won’t acknowledge his own history. Some figures are too large for the ledger book. Asked from whom he is running away, Stewart’s hero in Bend of the River responds, “A man by the name of Glyn McLyntock . . . I don’t think he’s gonna catch up with me. I think he died on the Missouri border.” The films take this evasiveness about the past and staunch concealment of the hero’s inner life for granted. But a hero who won’t account for himself has to be accounted for, or at least made visible in some other way. Eventually, the form will crack open entirely. We can see it start to happen as early as Canyon Passage, in which Tourneur introduces Dana Andrews’s Logan Stuart as though the frontier had been waiting for him behind a curtain: in from the rain, cleaned and costumed, then sent down the saloon stairs beneath a massive tasseled arch into a common room dense with trade gossip and spectators. No longer simply given, the hero’s clarity and authority must be staged.

By the time MCA under Lew Wasserman acquired Universal in the early 1960s, the economic incentives that gave the western its formal apogee in the 1940s and ’50s were coming undone. Over the next decade, television money and writer-director-star packaging made the industry less centralized, less secure in structure and taste. The western had previously depended on a stable cosmology of archetypes and pleasures, but those were now open to reevaluation. The unspoken contract between the film and its audience was soon rife with fine print.

Subscribe now

What Peter Fonda does in The Hired Hand (1971) isn’t simply revise the western but return to it after the old terms have become more complex, when all the familiar horses and hats and guns and landscapes are no longer self-explanatory. It’s a strange thing, stepping out into the hard, orangey sunlight of Fonda’s languorous desert vision after spending all that time with Ford and company. The western to this point has laid out the world to be seen, bending it perpendicular to our angle of vision, so that nothing can be missed. But Fonda’s film has the effect of bending our vision to fit the world, lending every hoofbeat, every campfire spark, every pop of the pistol an uncanny sense of déjà vu. Right from the start, the film’s woozy, over-cranked superimpositions of a lithe Harry Collings (Fonda) wading through a river in silhouette—part bearded Tadzio, part Loch Ness hippie—tells us that the tradition has been cracked.

Or, at least, deliriously warped. If the classical western freezes space, nails it in place by subjecting the frontier to a finely delineated set of facts and figures, then by the early ’70s almost all sense of orientation has been melted away. For Mann or Tourneur, the reaction shot almost always clarifies facts of geography and spatial orientation (the hero reacts to something out of the corner of his eye, and the film cuts to that thing). But The Hired Hand has no use for such a functional, one-to-one correspondence between people and things. Watch the way Fonda doubles up on reaction shots early in the film, when the sudden discovery of a corpse is handled not with the usual shot-countershot but with two consecutive close-ups of Collings and his companion, Arch Harris (Warren Oates), each in profile and facing the same direction. Fonda’s camera never shows us the body; it doesn’t need to. It’s as though the film has taken the snippet of the Gospel of Thomas that Arch reads after Dan is killed and buried and turned it into a creed: “The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

Philip French, writing not long after the release of Fonda’s film, noted the connection between the western genre and what he called “a pessimistic feeling about the fragility of American civilization and its problem in putting down roots.” For French, the ghost town is emblematic here because it becomes the one place where “the central characters are doomed to die or emerge shriven.” In our own time, this “pessimistic feeling” has found another form: namely, the “elevated” horror film, in which the ghost town has reached a state of immanence and in which dread is either domestic or dispersed into ambient trauma and grief. Perhaps the present glut of horror movies, many of them having zipped through the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline of recent years, will one day look as sealed and symptomatic as Italy’s waxen white-telephone movies of the 1930s, which perfected the comforts of the private world at the moment that the public one was being utterly dismantled, with fascism on the rise. What unites these films is not merely their style, but also their underlying premise, that all threats are ambient and, finally, illegible. The Universal westerns now seem strange, almost defiant, for believing the opposite: that danger, where it exists, can still be seen, trotted out onto the same plane as the rest of the world. That faith in the visible was never wholly innocent, but in a period of craven, counterfeit grandeur—and of an increasingly formless dread—these films look not naïve but newly severe.

“There’s a difference between apples and men,” Jay C. Flippen tells James Stewart in Bend of the River. A plain remark, almost a joke, except that the western’s whole moral order depends on that difference holding: apples can be priced, packed, and spoiled; a person isn’t an object to be counted or appraised. The Universal westerns spent half a century drawing that line—between targets and brains, banknotes and fists—until, finally, the line buckled under its own weight.

WATCH THE TEASER TRAILER

From Cannes-winning Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — popularly known as Los Javis — LA BOLA NEGRA follows three generations of men across pivotal moments in Spanish history, bound by pain, desire, and love. Carlos (Milo Quifes) longs to belong in a fractured Spain. Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) finds connection across enemy lines. And Alberto (Carlos González) uncovers a long-buried family secret — one that finally gives voice to truths the past tried to erase.

Starring Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau,
Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Julio Torres,
with Academy Award® Winner Penélope Cruz
and Academy Award® Nominee Glenn Close

IN THEATERS OCTOBER 16

FILMED IN 35MM. PROJECTED IN 35MM IN SELECT LOCATIONS.

____

“A work of staggering genius.
An impossible love story for the ages.”

—Indiewire

“An epic must-see.”

—Observer

“The arrival of major new filmmakers.”

—The Hollywood Reporter

“A new mythology being created
before your very eyes.”

—TheWrap

____

@LaBolaNegraFilm

Andrew Garfield stars as the leader of a ferocious rebellion against the tyranny of King Richard II.

Set against the true events of the Uprising that helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood, he forms an army of the people to face the King’s might in a fight for justice.

EDITOR’S LETTER

It’s unlikely that anyone would have considered the legacies of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry together if they hadn’t died on the same day, but the loss of both figures on Tuesday, both at the age of 80, let some unexpected resonances come to light. Both of them were consummate performers, exuding dynamic, extroverted, magnetic energy on stage and screen. But they were also extremely intentional about their presence in the culture, wanting to leave a meaningful mark rather than simply take up space.

In her remembrance of Curry in The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes recalls interviewing the Cheshire-born actor last year for an obituary of Tom Stoppard, a longtime collaborator:

Over the phone, Curry observed that Stoppard as a playwright had remained a kind of journalist, which he had once been. “That’s interesting,” I said, meaning it, and Curry’s response took me by surprise—dry and slightly defiant, but with an eggshell crack of vulnerability to it.

“I hope so,” he said, “because I don’t want to be the idiot child in whatever it is you’re writing about him.”

Such a self-deprecating aside tells us something about Curry’s own philosophy as an artist. He did not want to waste audiences’ time, and knew the opportunity to connect with them was precious. He brings a transgressive, fantastical glee to his roles that feels like an escape hatch from the drudgery of ordinary life: there is, of course, his powerhouse performance as Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), but he brought the same level of commitment and glee to a wide array of villain roles, including the fearsome Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island (1996). The relative cultural prestige of a project was also no hurdle; he brought his A-game to voiceovers and video games. Consider his impeccable, Russian-accented line reading in a cutscene of Red Alert 3, which received an entire Vice oral history: “I’m escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism: SPACE!”

Parton, for her part, is a legend for the way that she translated her values into action. Most of her obituaries lead with a stunning litany: in addition to her prolific music career, she started the Imagination Library charity to provide preschoolers with free books (in memory of her dad, who could not read); she established a theme park that has transformed the economy of Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up; and after wildfires swept through Sevier in 2016, she sent monthly aid payments to each family who had lost their home. She knew that actions spoke louder than words, which informed the focus she brought to her creative pursuits—she showed up on the set of 9 to 5 (1980), her first film role, having memorized the entire script top to bottom, wanting to show how serious she was, not a musician merely dabbling in movie roles.

Ellen Cassedy, a cofounder of 9to5, the working women’s organization that inspired Jane Fonda’s original vision for the film, penned a remembrance of Parton for The New Republic. She writes that Parton’s persona was key to the early success of the movement:

When a radio journalist asked [Parton] if she considered herself a feminist, she responded, “No, I do not. I think of myself as a woman in business.” Another time, though, when Time magazine asked her the same question, she said this: “I suppose I am a feminist, if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to.” Many participants in our movement felt the same way. They didn’t see themselves as part of the women’s liberation movement, but they believed passionately in fairness and equality on the job. Our organization worked hard to carve out a comfortable place for such women, and Dolly’s outsize presence helped us do it.

It’s been a long time since the period Cassedy writes about—she notes that, before 9 to 5 came out, the discourse tended to focus on whether gender-based discrimination in the workplace even existed—but her observation that Parton succeeded as a “bridge-builder” for her ability to successfully articulate her values across groups with different viewpoints speaks to why she was so beloved. It’s also why she is so indelible as a performer. Songwriting, musical performance, and acting all depend on an artist’s clarity of expression and desire to connect—but you can’t get to that point without something to say.

Subscribe now

2026 GOTHAM EXPO

The fifth annual Gotham Week Expo will bring together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative for interactive sessions under the theme of “The Creator’s Playbook: Building What’s Next.” The Expo will conclude with the all-new Filmmaker Presents: Final Cut, an intimate day of artist and industry conversations, for which tickets are now on sale and more details are coming soon.

AROUND THE GOTHAM

This month saw a couple of high-profile screenings involving our publisher, The Gotham Film and Media Institute. First up was the August 12 screening of Andrew Patterson’s The Rivals of Amziah King (2026), copresented with Black Bear at the Angelika Film Center. Afterward, Mike Hogan, our director of editorial strategy, was on hand for a Q&A with the director and stars Matthew McConaughey, Jake Horowitz, and Cole Sprouse.

This past Tuesday, The Gotham’s executive director, Jeffrey Sharp, moderated a Q&A with the filmmaker Katharina Otto-Bernstein after a screening of her new documentary, The Last Spy (2025), at Southampton Arts Center, introduced by chairwoman Simone Levinson.

Copyright ©2026 Filmmaker Magazine, All rights reserved.
MAILING ADDRESS — Filmmaker Magazine, 55 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

NEW YORK (August 27th, 2026) – Filmmaker’s publisher, The Gotham Film and Media Institute, announced today the programming for the 2026 Gotham Week Expo, taking place during Gotham Week, September 28th through October 1st in Brooklyn, NY, with a return to DUMBO, Brooklyn. The fifth-annual Gotham Week Expo will bring together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative to provide community and thought leadership on topics pertinent to film and media creators through interactive sessions under the theme of The Creator’s Playbook: Building What’s Next. This year’s Expo will also include a day of connections between nonprofit partners, colleges and universities, as well as a full day of Filmmaker Magazine programming.

Day one of the Expo Sessions will feature discussions on “Building the Work,” where attendees will gain practical strategies for navigating development, financing, and career sustainability. The day includes five interactive sessions on tax credit financing, accessibility-forward production strategy, designing a creative slate, career strategy and support, and expanding professional networks.

Day two will center on “Building the Audience” through distribution, exhibition, and impact strategy. Five interactive sessions will focus on sustaining engagement, impact campaigns, film festival strategy, independent exhibition, and distribution strategy. Attendees will walk away with actionable insights that reflect current industry shifts.

Organizations leading the Expo sessions include Art House Convergence, Art House New York, cinéSPEAK, Film Fatales, Film Festival Alliance, Filmshop, Full Spectrum Features, FWD-Doc, Ford Foundation, Minorities in Film, ReelAbilities International, and UFO.

Filmmaker magazine will host Final Cut: a full day of programming during Gotham Week, featuring intimate conversations with artists and industry professionals. One panel will explore how filmmakers can connect with audiences in an era of digital overload, centering artists, programmers, and distributors who have carved out alternative channels for reaching viewers. Elsewhere, leading filmmakers of the day will share insights into their process, building to a keynote conversation with an artist who exemplifies Filmmaker’s boundary-blurring creative values. This daylong workshop will take place on Friday, October 2, at the DCTV Firehouse in Lower Manhattan, and programming details will be announced on the Filmmaker Substack in early September.

Additionally, The Gotham will host Expo Connections where organizational and collegiate partners will promote their individual communities, programs and events. Project market participants, industry attendees and the general public are welcome to attend. Partners at Expo Connections will include Alliance of Women Directors, Black Film Space, BRIC, Center for Communication, DCTV Communications, Diversity in Cannes, Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, The Film Collaborative, NewFest, NYU Tisch Film & TV Department, Outlast Arts and Education, SVA MPS Film Directing Women Independent Producers, Writers Guild of America East, and more.

The Gotham will partner with the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) to kick off the first-ever “Made in NY” Filmmaker Listening Tour led by Commissioner Rafael Espinal and Deputy Commissioner for the Film Office Kwame Amoaku, and introduce the “Made in NY” Lounge, a new Gotham Week networking and meeting space. The Gotham-hosted listening session, taking place on October 1 at The DUMBO Loft, will be a free, informal discussion where NYC independent filmmakers and producers are encouraged to share direct feedback regarding production incentives, permitting, and City resources. It will be the first of five MOME-hosted filmmaker listening sessions to be announced in the coming weeks.

The Gotham and Gotham Week are generously supported by a group of loyal corporate, foundation, and government benefactors. The 2026 Premier Sponsor is Netflix; the Gold Sponsors are SAGindie and The Walt Disney Studios; the Official Venues are 26 Bridge and DUMBO Loft; and the Official Automobile is Genesis.

About the Gotham Film & Media Institute:

The Gotham celebrates and nurtures independent film and media creators, providing career-building resources, access to industry influencers, and pathways to wider recognition. The organization, under the leadership of Executive Director and award-winning producer Jeffrey Sharp, fosters a vibrant and sustainable independent storytelling community through its year-round programs, which include Gotham Week, Filmmaker magazine, The Gothams, Gotham EDU, Owning It, and Expanding Communities.

Media Contact:
gothamteam@ledecompany.com

Enjoy this latest excerpt from our summer issue, and subscribe today to receive our fall issue, shipping in mid-September.

By Kya Lou

Color timing, correcting, and grading are about building a groove. Listening to the rhythms. Finding harmony with the cinematographer. Exposing image fibers to a chemical bath or reproducing this process with film’s digital descendants. Knowing when to turn up the volume: pull back red, add blue, bring down the highlights. Can you run that back? Okay, lift the shadows a bit.

The labor of color originates from the mythical and deeply subjective qualities of chroma, from hue to saturation. When done right, color is produced with time. Time for feedback. Time to audition another approach. Time to sleep on it. Time for trial and error. Time to gather references—not simply for aesthetics, but as a gesture of care for processes and practitioners who came before you. Time to process how they did it and pull apart the skills of an ensemble, the sum of a team.

Yet, the craft of color is at risk because our current climate is not hospitable to doing color right. The practice now encourages surrender to the fast-paced absurdities of convenience capitalism, with color companies functioning like monopolies. Black feminist theorist Tina M. Campt has written about photographs as “deeply affective objects”; cinematographer Bradford Young has suggested “our relationship to color is based on emotion and memory.” These ideas favor gestures that require close attention, what Campt calls “listening to images.” It was by my own experience in the color bay, watching productions and ensembles unravel as our medium actively decomposes itself once again, that I began to let loose. Seeking to rig the system and restore color’s climate. Pivoting to the question: what can happen for the expanding field of motion picture if we tune out the noise and imagine other paths forward? Might a resolution start with mapping previous footsteps?

This direction led my research to orbit around film chemist Beverly Wood, the oracle of color. Dubbed “Kodak Bev” by her friend Julie Dash, Wood doesn’t simply listen to images; she is in sync with the cinematographers who sculpt them. Now retired, Wood has returned to her hometown of Chase City, Virginia, where she is actively restoring and fundraising for her beloved childhood theater, the Mecca—the same theater where her parents met for some of their first dates. Her profound contributions to silver retention—also known as the bleach bypass technique—cover a wide array of processes that leave hints of silver that are normally washed out. From Se7en (1995) to Belly (1998) to Birth (2004) to Pariah (2011), traces of her labor remain embedded in some of the most visually striking films produced since the 1980s, earning the cult-like esteem of Harris Savides, Roger and James Deakins, Malik Sayeed, and Darius Khondji.

“I miss the sounds of the machines,” Wood once told me over the phone. It was as though she was speaking to me across the laboratory’s vanished cauldrons, which were now jammed into the quiet software installed on my own metallic box. The conditions she described echoed in my ears when I quit working full-time as a colorist two years ago. The erasure of those sounds marks more than a technological or creative shift; it alerts us to the decomposition of a medium in need of a new pulse.

With the enthusiastic support of the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation in Detroit and its executive director, Taylor Renee Aldridge, I invited Wood to participate in a public program on April 23, 2026, at Periodicals, a magazines store and concept shop in Detroit. The discussion contextualized color as one of the most transformative processes within the anatomy of postproduction—alchemizing the return of an industry organized around patience, stewardship, and collective inquiry.

The renowned cinematographer Bradford Young, who was fortunate enough to work with Wood before her retirement, rounded out the gathering. Young spoke with the artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller about Wood’s indelible mark in 2019. Their dialogue, later published in Miller’s 2022 monograph, Michael in Black, helped map the genesis of our program.

Before the sold-out event, Wood and I met for lunch at Norm’s Diner. She ordered the soup du jour. I was of course reminded of “Soup du Jour,” the title of a November 1998 American Cinematographer article that cited Wood as a key interlocutor within color science. It was as though the universe was commanding me to get in sync with her.

Together, we talk about film density, creative lineage, and the weather of color: how chemistry and labor shape not only the aesthetics of an image, but also the emotional cadence and climate in which it lives.

Subscribe now

KYA LOU: How did you two first meet?

BEVERLY WOOD: It was [on] Pariah where Bradford and I first met. I had heard his name before, but I hadn’t yet seen his work. Someone from our New York office called and said, “One of our really important clients is coming to town. Dee Rees and Bradford Young are coming out for color timing.” So, I made sure I was there. I remember sitting in the theater watching the sessions and thinking, This young man is extraordinary. Then, years later, I saw Mother of George [2013], and I completely lost my mind. I already knew Bradford was talented, but that film operated on another level entirely.

Bradford is incredibly talented, but he’s also gentle and deeply respectful of his crews and collaborators. That isn’t always common in this industry. I remember having a conversation with [cinematographer] Robert Richardson about Bradford after [Young shot] Ain’t Them Bodies Saints [2013]. Bob said to me, “That guy is going to put all of us out of work.” And, honestly, I understood exactly what he meant.

BRADFORD YOUNG: I always talk about lineage. Lineage is important—both your blood lineage and your creative lineage. Before I even met Beverly, I already knew her work. Anybody I admired as a cinematographer had some relationship to her. When I first saw [Jonathan Glazer’s] Birth, I remember thinking: somebody Black had to be involved in this image, somehow. There was something happening in the exposure, something happening in the density and emotional register of the image that I recognized intuitively. I wouldn’t be here without Ernest Dickerson, without Malik Hassan Sayeed, without Arthur Jafa, without Haile Gerima. Those people opened doors for me artistically and spiritually. So, by the time I met Beverly, I already understood her reputation. She revolutionized the relationship between cinematographers and the laboratory.

A film lab used to feel mysterious. It smelled like chemicals and vinegar, and all you really cared about was consistency. Was the density right? Was the humidity right? Were the prints stable? Then, Beverly changed everything. She transformed the laboratory into a collaborative space where cinematographers actually felt seen and protected. She wasn’t just technically brilliant—she understood how to communicate with filmmakers emotionally. That changed the entire culture.

Subscribe now

BW: From my perspective, the laboratory was always about stewardship. A cinematographer would come in carrying an idea—sometimes photographs, paintings, books, [visual] references, or simply a feeling they were trying to achieve. My responsibility was to create a technical environment stable enough that I could confidently help them realize that vision. That meant understanding the chemistry, understanding the print process, understanding density, humidity, timing, consistency—everything. Because otherwise, how could I look a cinematographer in the eye and promise them that the print they were seeing today would match the print they saw months later?

People often romanticize film laboratories, but they were factories, large-scale industrial operations. At one point, we were making thousands upon thousands of release prints. Entire reels were being printed separately—one thousand copies of reel one, one thousand copies of reel two, and so on. The work was about trust. Filmmakers would walk into the laboratory carrying what felt like their child. They were handing you months or years of labor and asking you to protect it. And yes, over time, many filmmakers became my friends. But before friendship came confidence. They needed to know that we cared as deeply about the image as they did. At the same time, experimentation was essential. Sometimes, we genuinely did not know exactly what would happen. People talk now about “finding out” in creative practice, but honestly, that’s exactly what we were doing back then, too. We were pushing processes beyond their intended uses, discovering new visual possibilities through accidents, failures, and technical limitations. That was part of the excitement.

BY: You also have to understand what a film lab actually felt like. For younger people, laboratories are almost mythical now. There were technicians in lab coats moving through dark corridors.

Entire sections of the process felt hidden or inaccessible. Most cinematographers didn’t necessarily expect the people running the lab to be emotionally available. We only cared whether the lab was consistent. And then there was Beverly. Beverly completely changed how cinematographers experienced laboratories. If you bring Arthur Jafa, Malik Hassan Sayeed, Darius Khondji, or Ernest Dickerson into this room, they’ll talk about Beverly as though she was the lab itself. She transformed the relationship. Most labs were occupied by deeply technical people obsessed with chemistry and process. They cared intensely about getting things right, but labs were not necessarily people-oriented environments.

Then, Beverly arrived—this brilliant Black woman with extraordinary technical intelligence who could also communicate with filmmakers emotionally. She could look at an image and immediately say, “You’ve got too much magenta in there. Pull it back a quarter point.” And because it was coming from someone you trusted completely, someone you felt genuinely cared about your image, you listened. That changed everything. It wasn’t only about silver retention or ENR processing. It wasn’t just about technical breakthroughs. It was about changing the culture around image-making itself.

Subscribe now

KL: It’s meaningful that we’re having this conversation in Detroit—a city historically shaped by industrial labor systems. Y’know, I often think about Detroit in relation to Los Angeles, especially over the past decade. Los Angeles has been profoundly transformed by changes in the film industry: the pandemic, labor strikes, shrinking productions, streaming economics, and the acceleration of digital workflows. We don’t really have time to be in the thick of the process like we used to. It used to take massive ensembles to finish color on a film. Now, the majority of that labor has been consolidated or erased from the process entirely.

BW: When digital workflows first appeared, I completely understood why cinematographers embraced them. Imagine shooting all day and not seeing your images until the following morning. That was standard practice during the photochemical era. Digital eliminated that anxiety.

In the old days, cinematographers would come into the laboratory at four or five in the morning to preview their dailies before the studio screenings. They’d sit with timers and technicians discussing density, contrast, color corrections— everything. Those sessions were incredibly collaborative. I loved hearing cinematographers talk with one another in hallways after screenings: “How are your dailies looking?” “What are you doing with your blacks?” “What stock are you shooting?”

There was a real community embedded within the workflow. Digital workflows changed all of that. Suddenly, a cinematographer could be shooting in Saudi Arabia while the director reviewed footage in London over Zoom. The immediacy made sense technologically, but it fundamentally transformed the emotional and collaborative rhythms of filmmaking.

And once cinematographers realized they could color-time images instantly instead of waiting days for prints, I knew the industry was going to shift permanently. Film still exists, thankfully. Cinematographers should always have a choice. But once the ARRI Alexa arrived and cinematographers saw how good the digital image could look, the transition accelerated dramatically. At the same time, studios realized they no longer needed to manufacture and distribute physical prints at scale. That changed the economics of the entire industry. I retired partly because I recognized that the business had become something fundamentally different.

BY: There is something liberating about digital. I shoot less film now for practical reasons. Part of that is because the knowledge base around photochemical workflows has largely disappeared in the United States. The apprenticeship culture that once sustained laboratory knowledge simply doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. The labs don’t necessarily have the personnel or accumulated experience required to support the kinds of risks we used to take. And filmmaking itself has become increasingly industrialized and accelerated. We are all trying to squeeze catharsis into an industrial process. That process can be violent. Everything moves faster now. There’s less patience, less tolerance for uncertainty. But uncertainty is exactly what made film beautiful. With photochemical filmmaking, you exposed an image and then had to wait for it to reveal itself to you the next day. The image would tell you what it wanted to become.

That unpredictability—the organic instability of film emulsion, grain, density, exposure—produced emotional textures impossible to fully calculate. That’s what I miss. Kodak itself could never completely predict how silver halides would behave at the microscopic level. Every frame carried slight variations and instabilities. For me, those imperfections are spiritually nourishing. Digital workflows can be extraordinary, but they rarely give me the same feeling. When I overexpose film by several stops and then recover the image photochemically, the way the blacks decay, the way grain blooms, the way contrast fractures—that instability becomes expressive. It’s alive. And honestly, I’m only making films for experiences like that.

Subscribe now

KL: Sinners [2025] is a great example of emotional density in contemporary cinema. When I watched the film in theaters, I was struck by the fact that not everything “matched” on a technical level or the rigid commercial sense people often obsess over. For example, not every angle pulled from the same exact palette. Camera A might have more magenta than camera B, which is something that’s often critiqued. But the aesthetic realm was so densely imbued with emotion that it dispensed with the need for traditional technical consistency. What Autumn Durald Arkapaw achieved in Sinners wasn’t perfect technical consistency. She authored a new way of mastering perfect emotional density. And that’s far more valuable than any current visual trend.

In contemporary color culture—especially commercial color culture—people become obsessed with reference images. They arrive with hundreds of screenshots from ShotDeck or references from other films instead of generating their own visual language. They want their work to resemble someone else’s image rather than discovering their own relationship to color. References should just be a stop along the route, not a final destination. I appreciate Sinners for embracing its autonomy within color science and film density. I think Arkapaw is a key architect in shifting that discourse.

BW: Density is both technical and emotional. Technically, cinematographers and timers are usually trying to work within the straight-line portion of the characteristic curve—where color reproduction behaves most predictably. But filmmakers constantly push beyond those “ideal” technical zones in pursuit of feeling. I remember working with Harris Savides on The Yards [2000]. The first print came back extremely dark. The timer wanted to brighten the image because he was worried about grain and detail breaking apart. But Harris said, “No. That’s exactly what I want.” He had exposed the film specifically for that feeling. Once we adjusted the timing and embraced the lower-density image instead of fighting it, suddenly the movie transformed. The grain became expressive. The blacks became smoky. The image became emotional. That’s what great cinematographers understand. Density is storytelling.

BY: When I watched Sinners in IMAX, what I noticed wasn’t technical perfection. I noticed pain. Certain shots carry the exhaustion and pressure of production inside them. You can feel it embedded in the image. And sometimes, those moments become the most emotionally alive parts of a film. There are sequences in Sinners where the density oscillates dramatically—milky blacks, sudden shifts in contrast, moments where the image almost falls apart. But that instability creates emotional movement. That’s the thing digital workflows often try to eliminate.They prioritize uniformity. But cinema isn’t cabinetry. Sometimes, the most powerful images emerge from instability, imperfection, and risk. That’s where spirit enters the frame.

Subscribe now

KL: While we’re on the topic of density, we also have to talk about Belly, which might be the single most referenced film in modern color sessions. It completely changed the visual language of contemporary Black cinema. And before Belly, there was already the groundwork Beverly had laid through silver retention processes and radical approaches to density and contrast. So much of 1990s motion picture aesthetics came through Beverly’s work.

BW: I want to say something very clearly: I would be nothing without the cinematographers. The reason I was able to accomplish anything meaningful is because cinematographers arrived with their vision. They would bring paintings, photographs, books—references from art history—and ask, “How do we get there?” That excited me because I was a troubleshooter. I loved solving problems.

With Belly, Malik Hassan Sayeed came in knowing exactly what he wanted. The silver-retention process helped place the image into the emotional zone he was searching for, but the power of those images came from the way Malik photographed the film. His compositions were extraordinary. And Hype Williams understood instinctively how radical those images were. Years later, my niece—who had studied architecture at Berkeley—started naming individual shots from Belly to me from memory. That’s when I realized how deeply the film had entered visual culture. If you watch Belly, watch it twice. First, watch it for the story. Then, watch it with the sound turned down. The images alone are extraordinary.

From the director of JASON BOURNE, Paul Greengrass brings you THE UPRISING, starring Andrew Garfield in the true story of a commoner whose righteous fury ignites a rebellion against the corruption of the Crown.

Experience the epic tale which inspired the legend of Robin Hood.

Only in theaters September 11.

Sophie Lewis is used to getting noticed by all the wrong people. The Philadelphia-based author, essayist, and academic is known for her writing on family abolition and the communization of care; she published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, in 2019, and has been batting away panicked critiques of her work from the right, the center, and sometimes even the left ever since. That same year, she found time to watch two buzzy horror movies written and directed by Ari Aster: Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Lewis published a piece of feminist film criticism about the way they depict (and critique) the nuclear family for Commune, a lefty magazine, and then continued about her business of interrogating the nuclear family, writing more thought-provoking books, and dreaming up new ways of deconstructing the patriarchy. For a writer this prolific, the essay was a blip; as she shifted her attention to her second book, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, there was only so much time to consider things that go bump in the night.

That essay—cheekily titled “The Satanic Death Cult Is Real”—would come back to haunt Lewis in ways that she couldn’t have imagined. On July 4, 2025, about a dozen people gathered outside of the Prairieland ICE Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, for a noise demonstration in solidarity with the people imprisoned inside. That evening, a police officer was injured when one of the protestors discharged their firearm; 18 people were arrested in connection with the protest. The ensuing crackdown and ongoing legal saga has resulted in nine people—Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, Benjamin “Champagne” Song, and Elizabeth Soto—being sentenced to more than a combined 500 years in prison thanks to the Trump administration’s eagerness to pin the protest on “antifa members” and use the Prairieland case as a precedent in its ongoing war on dissent.

What does any of this have to do with Sophie Lewis? She was left wondering the same thing when she woke up one day this past February and received a request for comment from a reporter.

One of the Prairieland defendants, Sanchez Estrada, had been arrested and convicted for the alleged crime of moving a box of zines after the protest, which he had not even attended. Among the materials in the box was a copy of Lewis’s Ari Aster essay, which had apparently spooked the feds enough to include it in their display of evidence. At some point after its 2019 publication, her essay had been printed out and stapled into a zine, then made its way to Texas (which, to be clear, Lewis takes as a compliment). As far as she can tell, the title was enough to draw their suspicion, though, as she later wrote for The Intercept, “There is a rich irony here: My little horror movie review was introduced to prove a conception of antifa that—like many of the monsters we scream at in horror flicks—isn’t quite real.”

In a conversation conducted from opposite sites of our shared city (she’s West, I’m South), Lewis told me more about her reaction to that dreadful news, the themes and insights that are actually present in her essay, and the Satanic death cult we should fear for real. As every horror film foretold, the call is coming from inside the house.

Subscribe now

Kim Kelly: I am a wimp and don’t actually watch horror, but I do enjoy reading plot summaries of and film criticism about horror. So, for what it’s worth given the current situation, I really liked your review!

Sophie Lewis: Thank you. Horror is a great genre for thinking about class, carcerality, proletarian desire, and revolutionary feminism, [and]—I don’t need to tell you, obviously—my essay about Hereditary and Midsommar has nothing to do with the state’s horrendous Prairieland antifascism prosecution.

KK: You published it in 2019. That was basically seven hundred years ago!

SL: I mean, that, but also, the only reason the anarchist zine format of my essay made it into the case file is because of its title: The Satanic Death Cult is Real. It genuinely seems like the cops were like, “Aha! This is it. Antifa is confessing that it exists, and that it is a Satanic death cult!” It’s the same way that Jordan Peterson thinks of Karl Marx’s early Gothic poems, which put words about summoning the devil in the mouth of a fictional figure (who might be modeled a little bit on Karl’s young self, wooing his girlfriend Jenny).

KK: Did you even know this essay had been made into a zine?

SL: Yes, absolutely, I was very psyched it was made into a zine. That one and, I believe, a couple of other things I’ve written have been zinefied by the comrades at haters cafe, much to my humble pleasure and gratification.

KK: What an awful feeling it must have been to see your work dragged into this ugly mess. The prosecutors would’ve been much more freaked out if they actually read it and saw what you’re implying that the Satanic death cult actually is…

SL: Exactly. It’s the family, my guy. The private nuclear household.

KK: Right, the content is so much scarier than the title if you’re a chud.

SL: Exactly. Like all capitalist universal values, [it] is built on destruction—in this case, the family form as we know it could not have emerged without all the violence of enclosure (to make private property possible), colonial genocide (to make kinship bourgeois), reproductive stratification (along class and racial lines), and patriarchal terrorism against women and children, queer people and disabled people. In a certain sense, it’s almost like the essay has, thematically, nothing to do with the case, but also everything to do with it, because it’s a case that is all about protecting the nation—whose “cellular” building block is the capitalist family—from threats to its borders that come from migrants and trans people. I’m almost offended that they didn’t read it; they would have had so much more to go on. [Laughs.]

Subscribe now

KK: One takeaway from the actual essay: you essentially say that it’s easier for people to believe in demons than to admit that the nuclear family model isn’t working. Why do you think that is?

SL: Ooh, great way of asking that question. One way of answering it would be to say that the demons are the externalized representations, channelings, and incarnations of what isn’t “working” in the family form (although I might also ask … working for whom?). The family is naturalized in our culture to the point of seeming like a law of the universe. So much ideological effort flows into telling us over and over again that there is one way to be, and it involves the form of the couple, privatized health care, and a kinship concept centered around biogenetics. We feel like we are fundamentally manufactured by our families and would not know who we would be or could have been in a scenario where how we were made had been different. We understand the limitations, the brutality, and the scarcity of family, but we fear that any alternative would be worse or that no alternative actually exists. So demons become quite a comforting psychical option. Instead of the violence coming from inside the house, we can tell ourselves they are coming in from the outside and preying on something that would and could be fundamentally good—the family—if only it could fight off or exorcise the demons.

KK: It also occurs to me that the very people who held up this essay as an evil thing are now breaking up Prairieland families themselves, whether it’s via deportation or incarceration or criminalization. It’s ironic, in a diabolical way.

SL: Well, exactly! “Ironic in a diabolical way” is exactly it. I talk about this a lot in Abolish the Family, and in an essay called “Destroy the Family to Realize Its Promise.” Abolition is not simply destruction, though, but that’s the whole history of the family: states and ruling class powers destroying families in order to impose the family [on others].

KK: As you write in the essay, “To abolish the family, these images seem to whisper, would be to abolish the self, to unmake one’s very face. That process could, potentially, be as beautiful as it is terrifying.”

SL: I was thinking recently about how “better dead than red” really was a thing. People proclaimed proudly from pulpits that they would rather their sons and daughters died today, as God-fearing Americans, than tomorrow someday as godless communists—which seems relevant to that quote you pulled, somehow. We really are in, or at least some people really are trying to put us into, another red scare.

EDITOR’S LETTER

“Not beautiful images, but necessary images.” Robert Bresson’s truism has been on my mind this week following the breakout success of Niu Lai (2026), a deeply surreal animated movie from China that has become the sleeper hit of the summer.

If your Reels algorithm has not deemed you susceptible to this sort of thing, let me catch you up. Niu Lai (which translates to “The Cow is Coming”) is a coming-of-age tale about a young calf, named Niu Lai, who must learn the power of self-reliance to brave the wider world. He befriends a skylark and a leopard along the way, though the twists and turns of the plot are challenging to describe because of the film’s heavy reliance on dream sequences.

But this doesn’t even begin to capture the way that Niu Lai looks. The animals wouldn’t seem out of place in an early PlayStation game, and their proportions don’t make a ton of sense. Niu Lai’s leopard friend is extremely stout, only a third of Niu Lai’s mom’s height when standing upright, on two feet (which, for some reason, these quadruped characters sometimes do). One extremely memorable dream sequence sees Niu Lai gently jumping upward and taking flight toward a tree, locking eyes with the camera as he hurtles forward like Superman, the film’s pulse receding to slow motion. Ed Power of The Telegraph compared these visuals to Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” video—directed by Steve Barron, and groundbreaking at the time for its early use of 3D animation—which features an eerily similar moment in which a blocky character takes flight, diving headfirst into his TV set.

As of this writing, Niu Lai is estimated to have grossed the equivalent of $2.25 million on a budget of a few hundred dollars. The film was made by just two people: Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang, a son and mother duo. Xin works in interior design, so they animated the film in the architecture program SketchUp, which may explain why the settings—particularly the trees—have fairly detailed 2D approximations of shadow and texture, giving you a sense of real-world things without convincingly replicating them. The film opened quietly in Chinese theaters with no marketing, but, based on everything described above, it became an online meme pretty organically. Now, movie theater workers have begun drawing their own posters in lieu of formal promotional materials.

Many mainstream outlets have framed Niu Lai as 2026’s answer to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003). There’s the “so bad it’s good” element, and then there’s the timing of its release—in a moment of disgust with AI slop, Niu Lai serves up a singular, brashly convention-bucking, clearly human vision. A useful foil for Niu Lai’s visuals might be Video Brinquedo, the Brazilian animation studio that became infamous for its ripoffs of Pixar and DreamWorks movies. Ratatoing is their take on Ratatouille (2007) if you really squint—there are mice, sure, and the movie is set in a restaurant, but the animation software used here can’t hold a candle to Pixar’s technological capabilities. Ratatoing’s 40-minute runtime also felt much longer than it was because of endless, distended, proto-Lynchian dialogue sequences between the mice. Randomly, there is a moment when the mice break into song and dance, Busby Berkeley–style.

This is where the comparisons to Niu Lai end. The logic behind Ratatoing seems to be: if people like this much better movie that features animated mice, then surely all they need to flock to a movie are the barest signifiers of that very same thing. An online viewership mined comedy from the spectacle of such a bizarre, very corporate-brained failure. In contrast, Niu Lai is closer to outsider art. Its rough-edged animation flows from the earnest pursuit of a single idea—it’s just that what that idea is may not be super legible to viewers. This lets the film thrive on a certain mystery of human intention. Perseverance, too; it took five years for Xin and Sun to make the movie, teaching themselves the basic building blocks of filmmaking and animation over that time. Sun even wrote and performed an original theme song.

There’s also an infectious delight in seeing something that so gleefully bends the accepted rules of filmmaking. Niu Lai breaks from the recent vogue for photorealistic animated features, or the imperceptible way that realistic CG effects are woven into live action movies. In that light, the flying sequence comes across as expressionist—animation makes this kind of imagination possible, liberating characters from the laws of physics, allowing us to realize something stranger and truer to dreams.

Subscribe now

Copyright ©2026 Filmmaker Magazine, All rights reserved.
MAILING ADDRESS — Filmmaker Magazine, 55 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Director Alexander Ullom and producers Carrie Carusone and Evan Barber arrived at South by Southwest in March 2025 with low expectations. Their scrappy horror-hangout movie, It Ends, had been a rollercoaster ride to make, but after five years of spotty funding and multiple reshoots, their sheer willpower ensured the film was finished. “We were just a bunch of children that were like, ‘Let’s go make a thing,’” Ullom tells me over Zoom. “And so, of course, the first time it didn’t fucking work at all.”

The premiere at SXSW was one victory, but securing distribution was a longer battle. It Ends finally arrives in theaters this weekend via Neon, about a year and a half after the SXSW premiere. Since the pandemic, the traditional path for a successful independent film—premiering at a festival, securing theatrical distribution, and eventually releasing on home video or VOD—has become less accessible. Without a robust distribution infrastructure to count on, and when it takes more energy for your film to stand out from a crowded field of new titles, many independent filmmakers must also be their own producers, social media managers, publicists, and theatrical bookers—usually for free. “I was living in a one-bedroom with three other guys so I could cut down on rent and be able to take more time off [work],” says Ullom, looking back on It Ends’ production and completion period.

A world premiere at a buzzy festival sounds like the golden ticket for a low-budget horror movie by three recent graduates of Florida State’s film school, all the more so given the rave reviews that It Ends received from both critics and audiences afterwards. Barber remembers seeing the queue for the film wrapping around the Alamo Drafthouse building, with some people getting turned away. So far, everything that was supposed to happen was happening. Until the momentum stopped.

Even though the reception at South by Southwest was “very positive,” says Ullom, “what we didn’t expect was the kind of marketplace we walked into…I don’t think I heard of a single MG [minimum guarantee] that was over $50,000, even from mainline distributors.”To Ullom’s point, he and his producing partners heard no word of interest from distributors for months following their successful festival premiere. Further awards and accolades on the genre circuit—including New Orleans’ Overlook Film Festival, Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, and even an opening night slot at Film at Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies Festival—didn’t seem to move the needle.

“At that point, this blow-up of Gen Z filmmaking hadn’t happened,” Carusone reminds me, alluding to the recent success of Obsession and Backrooms (both 2026). But, Ullom adds, “distributors also hadn’t realized that Gen-Z was inheriting the economy and mainline viewing habits.” It’s easy to overlook the fact that Gen Z has not had any semblance of a firm foothold in the film industry until a few months ago, and films like Backrooms have had an impact on where production companies go to scout for new talent. Now, distributors and production companies are trawling the depths of Reddit to seek out fan communities built around specific sub-niches, on the hunt for the idea or meme that might yield the next box-office miracle.

Subscribe now

At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Letterboxd announced a new venture that could potentially circumvent this mire of traditional distribution. Their nostalgically titled project, the Letterboxd Video Store, was, in CEO Matt Buchanan’s own words, “a potential new path to audience connection for filmmakers and sales agents seeking visibility and momentum.” Using a traditional VOD model, it would offer a wide range of films for rent directly through Letterboxd’s desktop interface.

Since Letterboxd is a social network, it’s easy to gather information about what its members are talking about, what they’re watching, and, crucially, what they want to watch but can’t. To find films for their Unreleased Gems section, an aptly named “shelf” reserved for new films caught in the limbo between their festival run and a distribution deal, Letterboxd took a more emotional curatorial approach in selecting films for their inaugural drop. Rather than harness wider market data, Letterboxd looked inward and conducted what essentially amounts to a very detailed vibe check. As Buchanan told The Hollywood Reporter, “the selection process is directly tied to specific films our members are asking for—via watchlists, ratings, reviews and so on.”

Letterboxd announced the first “drops” on December 8th, 2025, which included a selection of repertory titles, like Todd Haynes’s second feature, Poison (1991), and recent festival films with strong community support that were still awaiting distribution, all available to Letterboxd users in 23 countries including the US, UK, and Canada. Pricing varied, too, with older films set at traditional VOD rental prices (between $3.99 and $9.99), and new films fresh off or still on the festival circuit set at a premium (around $19.99) and only available for a one-month window to “extend the film’s festival life.”

Meanwhile, through the summer of 2025, Ullom and his producers were still hoping that the amazing turnout at SXSW and ongoing outreach by their executive producers, who Carusone says “were pushing for us in the background,” would be enough to make something happen. What they hadn’t factored in, initially, was a well of online support that had yet to be tapped.

During a meeting on the Universal lot, Ullom happened upon a Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) promotional event populated with prominent movie influencers he recognized and followed online. “I call my manager and I’m like, ‘Hey, if I get kicked off the Universal lot for hopping a fence, is that bad for my career?’” he recalls. On an impulse, he convinced security he was an influencer who got lost on the lot and suddenly found himself on the inside, amongst these new movers and shakers that studios rely on to generate online hype and, hopefully, ticket sales. It turns out, Ullom recalls, they had been wondering when they would be able to finally see It Ends in theaters.

Ullom hadn’t expected this interest in the first place, and he certainly didn’t expect for those same influencers to take up an unofficial campaign of online support for It Ends. “The online horror community really championed and uplifted us,” he said. “They started posting about it, which they spread to each other.” One of the influencers at the event was the popular horror creator and screenwriter, Nicolas Curcio. On July 12th, shortly after the event, he posted a glowing video endorsement of It Ends on his Instagram and TikTok that went semi-viral. In the video, he calls the film the reason “why I love doing what I do. This is why I love independent film.” As of this writing, the video has been viewed over 970 thousand times across both platforms. Compare that number to the seven thousand and 35 thousand views on different videos he posted around the same time, offering everything from screenwriting advice to hot takes on the new Superman movie, and you can understand how much the shoutout meant to Ullom and his producers. And, Ullom recalls, it wasn’t long after this that Buchanan, Letterboxd’s CEO, saw the influencer Kit Lazer’s emotional Letterboxd post about the film.

Subscribe now

To those who aren’t regularly trawling the platform’s comment sections, the Letterboxd Video Store looks like an experimental hodgepodge. The periodic announcements of new Letterboxd Video Store titles (following the December drop, a second set of titles were added to the Unreleased Gems shelf on April 29th, and a third arrived on July 1st) are not always the films that have won the splashiest awards at festivals or have major stars attached. The whole point of the Unreleased Gems shelf is to spotlight films that are struggling to stay in the conversation or, in the case of It Ends, are just beginning to drive conversations on the platform.

The news that It Ends would be included in the first Letterboxd Video Store drop came on December 8, 2025. Ten days later, on the 18th, Neon announced it had acquired It Ends for theatrical distribution in the summer of 2026. “A lot of it was Letterboxd and the people posting about the film online,” he said of the rapid turnaround with these announcements, “but a lot was also Neon wanting to support an up-and-coming team and filmmaker.” For now, It Ends remains just one of two solitary cases in which Letterboxd’s unconventional VOD opportunity preceded a theatrical deal (earlier this year, Altered Innocence distributed the Chilean Cannes prizewinner The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, 2025, in a handful of theaters) and, thanks to Neon’s industrial footprint, it will certainly have the largest reach.

This unorthodox trajectory from VOD to theatrical raises questions about audience retention. “An equivalent to seeing the line wrap around the Alamo Drafthouse was seeing that the film was one of the four top trending movies on Pirate Bay,” says Barber of this unintended byproduct of their film’s sudden online availability. At one point, where and how people watched the film was less important than people’s ability to see it at all; Carusone adds, “Alex used to talk about dropping it on YouTube.” On the subject of whether people who’ve already rented It Ends will turn up to watch it in the cinema, Ullom takes the wider view. “I’ve never been super nervous about it because our Letterboxd debut wasn’t a smashing success—it’s not like all of America has seen this movie or heard about it. [But] if you’re tapped into what’s going on in the indie film scene or the festival market, then you’ve probably heard of it.”

Ultimately, they want the film to speak for itself. “Hopefully, we’ve made a package deal, where the reason to go see it in the theater is so that on the walk back to your car, you’re having a conversation with your friends about it,” says Barber. Carusone is optimistic that the appetite for the theatrical experience is widespread. “I’ve seen in the film industry, in general audiences, and in distribution companies this desire to go to theaters again. There’s such a saturation of online content that we’re being pushed into wanting to be in physical spaces experiencing things.”

“I think we’re in the midst of a large turning point with audiences,” concludes Ullom. “It helped that our film is kind of a genre movie…I don’t think there’s institutional support for independent filmmaking that doesn’t have genre in it yet. I would put us like three to five years out [from that]. This new wave of independent filmmaking is coming, and we just got lucky that the door’s opening is for genre movies right now.”

Copyright ©2026 Filmmaker Magazine, All rights reserved.
MAILING ADDRESS — Filmmaker Magazine, 55 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

“An All-Star Ensemble.”

– AFI

[WATCH] Inside the On-Screen Chemistry of Emmy® Nominated Ensemble
Emmy® Award nominated Lead Actress Keri Russell, Lead Actor Rufus Sewell, Supporting Actress Allison Janney, and Guest Actor Bradley Whitford discuss the dynamic relationships at the heart of Season 3. Reflecting on standout scenes, collaboration on set, and the trust built between the cast, the conversation explores how their chemistry shapes the emotional tension, humor, and complexity of the series.

_______

“A masterclass in storytelling.”

– Decider

[WATCH] Debora Cahn & The Cast on the Emmy®-Nominated Writing
The cast of THE DIPLOMAT celebrates the writing of Debora Cahn - from their favorite lines to the unapologetic, fully-realized characters she puts on the page. They reflect on the joy of performing her signature blend of farce and high stakes, and how her writing captures both the public faces her characters wear and who they truly are behind closed doors.

_______

Emmy® Nominee - Keri Russell

LEAD ACTRESS

[WATCH] Keri Russell Shines
On the heels of Keri Russell’s Actor Award win and Emmy® Award nomination, watch Creator Debora Cahn and THE DIPLOMAT cast rave about Russell’s dynamism and how it carries the series.

_______

For more on THE DIPLOMAT, visit series.netflixawards.com

YC: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special

Watch MY MOM JAYNE: A FILM BY MARISKA HARGITAY

COPY/PASTE CODE:
CTL242R8

“Hands Down, the Best TV Show of the Year.”

- Esquire

[WATCH] BEEF: Creator Diaries - The Vision & Creative Origins
Behind the distinct creative vision of the most nominated Limited Series of the year. Emmy®-Nominated Creator, Writer, Director, Showrunner & Executive Producer Lee Sung Jin explores the themes, creative process, collaboration and craft behind the groundbreaking series.

____

“Prime performances by
Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan.”

- The Hollywood Reporter

[WATCH] Netflix FYSEE Unplugged
Emmy® Nominees Lead Actor Oscar Isaac and Lead Actress Carey Mulligan discuss bringing their characters to life in BEEF, developing their on-screen chemistry and drawing on their history of creative collaboration.

____

“A sharply observed, virtuosically acted and artfully shot study of human behavior at its ugliest.”

- TIME

[WATCH] Shot By Shot Breakdown
Emmy®-Nominated Supporting Actor Charles Melton & Director Lee Sung Jin break down the ER scene in Episode 4.

[WATCH] In Conversation with Youn Yuh-jung & Lee Sung Jin
Emmy® Nominees Creator, Writer, Director, Showrunner & Executive Producer Lee Sung Jin, and Supporting Actress Youn Yuh-jung discuss her portrayal of Chairwoman Park in the newest season of BEEF.

______

For more on BEEF, visit series.netflixawards.com

In Roberto Bolaño’s vaunted novel 2666 (2004), a Chilean professor of philosophy attempts to recreate a Marcel Duchamp readymade from the artist’s short stay in Buenos Aires in 1918–19. Possessed by an impulse that seems not entirely his own, Oscar Amalfitano—one of a number of academics in the book searching for the disappeared (fictional) German author Archimboldi—hangs a geometry textbook on his clothesline. The piece’s accompanying instructions say to let the wind “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.” The original was a wedding gift to Duchamp’s sister.

Lorena Alvarado has heard the Bolaño reference point applied to her debut feature, Lost Chapters (2024), before. “The Bolaño comparison can be a bit misleading,” Alvarado told me. “In a few places, my film has been described as a detective story, which I don’t really think is accurate. It’s a very, very, very subtle search. There is a mundanity to it, like the searches or the interests in our everyday life.”

Lost Chapters is indeed a story about the search for a lost author, à la Bolaño, but one enmeshed with the mundane fabric of real life. Alvarado’s family members play versions of themselves: her father, Ignacio (Ignacio Alvarado), a bookseller; her grandmother, whom she calls Mamama (Adela Alvarado), and who is losing her memory; and her sister, Ena (Ena Alvarado), Lorena’s stand-in, who has just returned to Caracas following an extended period abroad. Most of the film is shot in Mamama’s real house, where Alvarado spent much of her childhood, and in a warehouse out of which Ignacio has really been operating his business, having shuttered the bookstore due to the political situation. There, Ena finds a postcard referring to the first Venezuelan novel to ever mention oil, potentially written under a pseudonym by the mysterious real-life Venezuelan author and forgery artist Rafael Bolívar Coronado.

“The project actually started as a documentary about my father’s bookstore,” Alvarado said. “I started shooting interviews with him and other booksellers in Caracas, but I got bored with the documentary format. I wanted to explore the memory of the city through books, and then, as my grandmother has been living with this process of memory-loss for a long time, I recognized that it could be beautiful to explore that as another element.”

Like the best docufiction films, it is difficult to say whether Lost Chapters is more fact or fabulation. Alvarado’s feature has the feeling of either a feature or a documentary for which the director merely neglected to close the figurative windows, allowing the real world to breeze in. Though Lost Chapters is composed with a Mondrian-esque sense of geometry, Alvarado insists that few shots were planned.

“I had a very rough idea of the story I wanted to tell, but no dialogue,” she says. “I think at some point, I tried to storyboard, but I realized it was useless, because I was working with real people, real moments. I had to let life dictate the shots.”

Subscribe now

As noted by Richard Brody in his rave review for The New Yorker, Alvarado’s camera pays peculiar attention to the inanimate objects of the house—books, knickknacks, photographs. “Alvarado’s achievement is nearly animistic,” he writes, “turning objects from icons of life into living things themselves, infused with the being of those who live with and care for them.”

Alvarado and José Ostos, her director of photography and childhood friend, cannot help but find heartfelt and mysterious significance in every nook and cranny of Mamama’s house. One representative shot holds on a wall-mounted shelving unit separated into one hundred or so square compartments, each with its own toy or figurine, some knitted, some ceramic, many bearing the markings of a well-loved inanimate life. As the shot lingers, one begins to notice some empty compartments, but just then the wrinkled hands of Mamama reach up to replace the missing pieces.

“We’ve really lived out the Venezuelan diaspora in a personal way,” Alvarado tells me of her family. “My grandmother had eight children and 20 grandchildren, and seven out of eight of those children have lived in that house, often with their own children. But today, almost all of my cousins have emigrated. The house is packed with objects that people have left behind, and they have this ghostly quality of containing the energy of people that are no longer there. It’s sad and beautiful that the objects are more permanent than the people. In the Venezuelan diaspora, the grandparents are often the ones who stayed, so my grandmother has become the caretaker of all these mementos and memories.”

Parallel to the search for Rafael Bolívar Coronado, Ena also searches for a poem often recited in fragments by Mamama. She attempts to teach her grandmother the lines:

Everything is the same

like that one afternoon.

The garden is enriched

by the same roses

and the same sun

drenches the same things

with a soft clearness of starlight.

But Mamama’s grasp on the language is fading; Ena realizes that the work of memory must fall to her father and herself, that they must grab what they can from the morass encroaching everywhere. The Venezuelan political situation is implied to be one catalyst of this loss, but it only ever enters the frame obliquely, as in a newscast delivered by a colonel, who warns of a coming storm.

Alvarado credits her own archival impulse to Ignacio: “My father, the bookseller, collected this album of mementos that he had found inside books. He had this album of love letters, presentation notes, even a telegraph from the president. There were nude photos, a flower.… It was a beautiful collection of this vast collective memory.”

Lost Chapters lives in this tense intermediary space, paying loving attention to one’s surroundings while remaining painfully conscious of their impermanence in one’s life, and of the frustrating traces that will remain when paths inevitably part. There’s horror and sweetness there: one scene shows Ena and Mamama laughing as the latter struggles to remember the poem; the next shows her wandering off into an uncertain and dangerous night. The spells of forgetfulness that were caught on camera, Alvarado emphasizes, were real.

Subscribe now

Ignacio sums up his mother’s routine in one scene: “Emptying a drawer, filling it, closing it, the same thing she always does.” The constant rearranging and rehearsing of the half-forgotten poem are poor bulwarks against the tide of loss. The real-life Ignacio, for his part, has endeavored to create The Museum of the Venezuelan Book, a curated selection of the rarest and most important national tomes from his bookstore. “I’d like to clarify that the ‘museum’ is more like a room inside of a house,” Alvarado laughs. While those who remained in Venezuela hold onto what they can, the younger generation gets used to letting go in the diaspora.

“I’ve moved so much that I’ve really had to detach myself from objects,” Alvarado says. “You can’t carry all the things you love with you.” Filmmaking has taken Alvarado from Emerson College in Boston to New York, to Los Angeles, and most recently to Barcelona, where she has begun work on a semi-sequel to her debut, following Ena after her move across the Atlantic.

In Lost Chapters, equal attention is paid to object and human, drawing our eye to these strange things which attract our curiosity and repel our understanding. The work of Rafael Bolívar Coronado might be one such thing.

“Related to 2666, and the first chapters about the characters obsessed with Archimboldi, I’ve discovered this huge cult following for Bolívar Coronado,” Alvarado says. The writer, active in the early 20th century, used as many as 600 assumed names, some belonging to established Venezuelan poets, others entirely fabricated. He wrote seven Cronicas de Indias, historical accounts of travelers to the New World, which were later discovered to be totally anachronistic, the work of an imposter, before dying in a flu epidemic in 1924. The search for Bolívar Coronado amidst these forgeries mirrors Alvarado’s broader investigation, standing in for the stubborn traces of life that cling to what’s left behind, beckoning and frustrating us—the documentary in the fiction, and the fiction in the documentary.

Like Duchamp’s geometry textbook, Lost Chapters is a film hung on a clothesline, the world blowing through it, and it is at once affirming and terrifying that the little bit of life carried on that breeze permeates everything.

FYC: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special

Watch MEL BROOKS: THE 99 YEAR OLD MAN!

COPY/PASTE CODE:
7D7D3VCY

“INCREDIBLY COMPELLING.”

- Vanity Fair

“DIRECTED WITH CLEAR-EYED PRECISION
BY ALEXANDRIA STAPLETON.”

- New York Amsterdam News

[WATCH] TRAILER HERE

[WATCH] FRANKLIN LEONARD AND ALEXANDRIA STAPLETON DISCUSS THE SERIES

EDITOR’S NOTE

As soon as I started at Filmmaker, I knew that Samy Burch’s screenwriting had to be the subject of a major print feature. Incredibly, she made her feature debut with the screenplay for Todd Haynes’s May December (2023), surely one of the great films of the decade. Her writing stands apart for her abiding interest in the mysteries of human behavior—and it helps that she is quite funny.

For this week’s editor’s newsletter, we’re unpaywalling my interview with Burch from the summer issue. This month, cinemagoers can see two new, very different films scripted by Burch: Kent Jones’s Late Fame (2025) and Dave Green’s once-shelved Looney Tunes movie, Coyote vs. Acme (2026). Read on to learn more. And for a Filmmaker crossover event, guess which comedian featured elsewhere in the summer issue also appears in Coyote vs. Acme. —Chloe Lizotte

After a decade of working in casting and writing spec scripts, Samy Burch buckled down to draft the screenplay that she hoped would be her breakthrough. She was intrigued by the tabloid controversy surrounding Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher convicted of the statutory rape of one of her sixth-grade students, with whom she had conceived a child, only to marry him after her release from prison. There’s a low-hanging, Lifetime Original Movie–version of this script, but Burch had a better idea: she imagined a version of Letourneau several years down the road, settled into domestic life with her now-husband and children. This woman’s equilibrium is disrupted by the sudden arrival of a Juilliard-trained actress, there to study her mannerisms and familial dynamics while preparing to play her in a movie.

This screenplay became Burch’s first produced feature: May December (2023), directed by Todd Haynes, which earned Burch an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a bolt-from-the-blue arrival for the young talent. In an otherwise pretty unimaginative moment of Wikipedia-style biopics, here was a writer interested in questioning the process by which real people are turned into fodder for a Hollywood movie.

This summer, two more films scripted by Burch will be released. Her screenplay for Late Fame (2025), directed by Kent Jones, transposes an 1895 Arthur Schnitzler novella to present-day New York. Willem Dafoe stars as a postal worker who has largely forgotten his past life as a downtown poet, but is rediscovered and worshipped by a self-consciously artsy gaggle of NYU Gallatin students and hangers-on. (There is a lovely meta resonance with Dafoe’s history in the downtown scene.) She also wrote the film-industry cause célèbre Coyote vs. Acme (2026); the Wile E. Coyote film was shelved by Warner Bros. in 2023 for a tax write-off, prompting a widespread uproar. After a limbo-like few years, the film was acquired by Ketchup Entertainment and will finally debut in August. James Gunn and Jeremy Slater also got credits on the story, adapted from a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, but Burch was the sole bylined author of the script, which represents a substantial overhaul of previous drafts.

No matter who directs, Burch’s authorial voice always comes through. We learn about characters through the way they behave rather than what they say, and they bring a depth of personal history to the screen. But these films aren’t downers: Burch has a deft sense of humor and a curiosity about the parts of our lives that don’t add up. Even when given the keys to a legacy property like Looney Tunes, Burch’s personality and intellect are evident—these days, not many family films would trust kids to follow a plot about a zany corporate conspiracy inspired by the myth of Sisyphus.

I spoke with Burch about her summer to come and why it can be a blessing in disguise for movies not to know what they want.

Subscribe now

CHLOE LIZOTTE: Around the time that May December came out, you said something in an interview that stuck with me: “In this era that we find ourselves of extreme oversimplification, I have found myself craving the difficult.” What does craving the difficult mean for you as a writer?

SAMY BURCH: It’s a bigger thing, really, in culture, more than just movies. There is a tendency to want to understand what a character is about, or what a film’s tone is. I see that kind of response to movies all the time. There’s this critique: The movie didn’t know what it wanted. But maybe that is what it wanted. There can be a certain amount of curiosity in the process of watching a film. Generally, I am drawn to stories or characters that are more complicated. In the case of May December, the bigger elements of a story like that—sexual abuse, the woman not being the victim—prompt interesting questions. Things don’t follow a pattern that we are told is the pattern.

CL: You grew up in an industry household—your parents worked in casting and film development, right?

SB: I grew up in production offices with my mom, a casting director, to the point where I go, What was I doing there? Why was I hanging out every day after school in the offices of Vegas Vacation [1997]? Probably, it wasn’t right for me to be there, but I learned so much. Casting is a really fun room in production offices. There’s a lot of hope in that room, but then there’s a lot of dark, destructive, anxious, bad energy in the waiting room.

That gave me a sense of the specific lens through which my mom watched every movie, which was only really about, Are these actors honest? I remember being very young and sitting under my mom’s desk and hearing 100 actors come in to say the same lines, over and over. That probably did something to me; I’ve written a lot of roles where actresses are playing actresses. Even later, when she was working in the South for local casting, every single part was make or break—she cared so much, even if the actors had just one word, like “hi.” Some people come in and there’s a click: they’re right, and you know it.

Subscribe now

CL: You’ve talked a little bit about your journey to May December, wanting to write a script to shop around to agents after working in casting for a long time. How did that lead to something like Coyote vs. Acme?

SB: It actually all happened at once. After I graduated college, I was writing specs for a while. May December was probably my eleventh or twelfth feature that I wrote. This was a period of ten or twelve years, and every time I got an idea that I felt was worth the pain of writing it, I would start fresh. This idea was the same—as for getting it out there, it was really just luck. I didn’t have any representation, and I had been working on this thing with Kate Berlant….

CL: You made some shorts together in college, right?

SB: I actually grew up with Kate—I wrote plays for my friends, including her, when I was in high school. She has always been the funniest person in the world; I’ve seen videos of her doing impressions at like one or two years old, fully formed. I met my husband, Alex [Mechanik], at NYU, and he has always been obsessed with comedy. We made these shorts with Kate and John Early, and it was so fun; this was right when they first met.

So, through this thing with Kate, I met a producer, Alex Plapinger, a friend of a friend of hers. He asked me, “What else do you have?” We had this general [meeting], and he read May December and said, “This is great.” He set up some meetings—the two he set up were my current managers, Ben Rowe and [Gabrielle] Lewis at Untitled, and Dave Green, who directed Coyote. This was January of 2020, all within a couple of days, this crazy moment when the train goes on a different track. I know people are always hustling and sending stuff, and I was never good at that, but I went from having no real way to get to these people to finding myself in a general director meeting with Dave. I ended up pitching on the Wile E. Coyote movie—though, I was like, I’m not gonna get hired to make this kids’ movie with legacy characters based on a dark script—but then I got hired off the spec script.

CL: So, this was all before May December?

SB: Yes. There were a couple of weeks where I was going to Warner Bros. to work on Coyote, and then everything shut down. Right around then, Jessica Elbaum and Will Ferrell came on as producers for May December, and then everything crazy happened in lockdown: meeting Todd Haynes on Zoom, meeting Natalie [Portman]. I didn’t actually meet a lot of them in person until stepping on set. But it meant that, for a long time, I was working on both simultaneously—I would do a draft for Coyote, and then a draft for Todd. Later on, the end of the actors’ strike in November of 2023 nearly coincided with the premiere of May December, which meant all the actors could come, but it was also the day that Warner Bros. shelved the Coyote movie. And now, Coyote and Late Fame are coming out the same month. It’s very strange.

Subscribe now

CL: Could you speak more about collaborating with directors across these projects? From Todd, to Late Fame—directed by Kent Jones, who’s so cerebral and a deep cinephile—to Coyote, which is a studio feature with legacy characters.

SB: I’ve been really lucky so far. All of the directors I’ve worked with have been really thoughtful, kind people. Kent was actually my idea: I loved his film Diane [2018] and his film criticism, as well. Something about the story of Late Fame… I thought he would be a good match, and when Killer Films came on board, he was talked about from the get-go. He’s thoughtful and also very funny—we would talk, and he would give notes, and it was very easy. Sometimes, he would write certain line changes, but there would also be times where I would go, Is that him or me? There was something very natural about the process, and then the film came together very quickly.

CL: How did you come across the Arthur Schnitzler novella, Late Fame?

SB: My sister’s boyfriend recommended it to me. I connected with the main character, Ed, right off the bat. Obviously, Arthur Schnitzler’s writing is incredibly modern and goes down very easy, but it’s also very funny. So, it was as simple as that, and it was in the public domain, so I just wrote it on spec. I’d outlined it the summer before May December shot and finished it up in January of 2023. I held it because the writers’ strike happened—I hadn’t sent it to anybody. Later, I was telling Pam Koffler about it at the New York Film Festival when I was there for the May December premiere—which is so funny because of Kent [Jones, who had been the director of the festival from 2013 to 2019]—and she encouraged me to send it to her. There was an overlap with working with Killer Films on May December, so I never had to stop working with Pam or Christine [Vachon], which was nice.

CL: So, this really all happened for you while you were on the May December circuit. Did that experience affect the way you think about future projects?

SB: I’m trying to be thoughtful about the next things and keep my ear to the ground. I want to make sure I’m heading in a direction that I want to go—for me, it’s easy not to do money movies that don’t seem like they aren’t going to be very good, or that I wouldn’t even be good at doing. I try to think of someone like Todd, who is very in touch with the muses, where he goes, What now? What is interesting to me right now?

Subscribe now

CL: It all has to align creatively, but I’d imagine that’s challenging in an industry like this. Late Fame is very poignant and wry on the subject of a creative life amid industry realities, albeit in publishing. And then, Coyote is about a different dynamic—following this industry outcry, it’s finally getting a renegade release.

SB: Coyote is also the first movie I’ve written for hire. I was mainly working with Dave, and then Chris DeFaria, the creative producer, would share notes. Dave and I would talk about something, and then they would ask the animators to work on it, and you would get to see something a few days later. It was a good lesson, where I was just pitching to see what would happen.

But it was Dave’s movie, and these are legacy characters, and you’re dealing with the studio. It’s a lot of voices. There would be Zooms where it would be a bunch of squares, more than The Brady Bunch, so I never really got a real-world sense of the whole, enormous group. And then, on set, there was a puppeteer [David Barclay, of The Dark Crystal, 1982], really just to give Wile E. a presence on set since everything was animated later and Will [Forte] needed someone to act with. The crew included a lot of craftspeople in Albuquerque, out in the desert.

CL: Has this experience opened up new ways of thinking about writing or filmmaking for you? Writing for a family audience must have been new, but your script is still sophisticated, riffing on the myth of Sisyphus.

SB: Yes, all the specs I was writing were dark comedies that got a little more human as they were going along. But I have always liked classic Disney animated features and the Hayley Mills era. This is also a legal thriller for kids, based on the New Yorker story: there’s something subversive about it, even while carrying the torch of Wile E. Coyote. In a way, I learned that I don’t know where the walls are of what I actually can do.

CL: I went back to the New Yorker story. It’s interesting that the basis of this film is a parody of a legal document—a reconstruction of what happened to the characters, in the same way that May December and Late Fame ask the audience to imagine the past.

SB: There are all these echoes of the past, the chasing of the Road Runner. It’s some kind of hologram of the history of these characters. In one of my favorite scenes, Will Forte and Wile E. are having an argument. It’s really dramatic and really sincere. There’s something that I hope works on an honest level and moves people, but then there’s this flash of the absurdity of what’s happening. There are these moments in the other films, too. Maybe it’s more tonal, but often two things are happening at once in the experience of watching something. In Late Fame, there’s that scene when Greta [Lee]’s character performs poetry, and you sense every woman that Ed has been infatuated with, the lingering effects, the patterns. The women in these films channel ghosts of other women. You start to feel this memory that we don’t get to see.

Subscribe now

CL: In the Late Fame novella, we’re so much more in Ed’s head than a film could ever be. I’m wondering about the shift outside him that your film makes. It’s equally about the culture of the arts in New York over the course of his life.

SB: That present-day shift just immediately felt like the thing to do. Before Willem, the character was a little bit older, so it was a different New York history, but then Willem came in with such a richness; he really did show up in New York in SoHo at that time. But I also certainly hope that no one sees the film and thinks, Yep, this is an accurate depiction of the young people. I hope that they stand on their own as being very particular people. There are shadows of people that I’ve met through the years—like, boys with tiny handwriting, you know? [Laughs.] But I always tried to keep Ed cocooned in this way. There are a lot of quiet moments with him, but there are also a lot of moments that are so uncomfortable. This suit he’s putting on, whether it’s in the praise he receives, [or] when he starts to like it, and then when he starts to lose it a little.

CL: There are a lot of disconnects—that pivotal conversation with the literary agent, played by Jake Lacy. He wants Ed to write a memoir, but Ed thinks the meeting is about publishing an anthology of his poetry. It’s not actually a conversation about revitalizing his body of work.

SB: When the audience has writers in it or people who are taking meetings with executives, some of those lines from Jake—who is so funny and great in Diane; I love the Kent Jones multiverse—these lines get really good laughs. We get used to it, and this is somewhat of an oversimplification, but that’s how things are; that’s how things move and are sold. Who are you? How can I sell you? My outline for Late Fame was more: How is Ed feeling about himself?

Copyright ©2026 Filmmaker Magazine, All rights reserved.
MAILING ADDRESS — Filmmaker Magazine, 55 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201