I usually do my best to keep these conversations honest, but fun. Focused on the beauty and wonder of making, and the genuinely remarkable opportunities that working on a thing you love 70 hours a week, for four years, can afford you.

But I wasn’t feeling so fancy-free when I ventured up to 65th Street earlier this year. I was in the midst of casting our lead for PRIME MATTER, facing thousands of submissions from eager actors who hoped their appearance in this indie film would somehow be “their break.”

And the futility of the raw numbers was getting to me — probably because I’d spent so many years on the other side of that equation, fantasizing, “this headshot is really gonna make me stick out this time.”

Looking at that endless sea of faces, and reading all the submission notes about how their personal lives had so perfectly prepared them for the role of a truth-challenged psychic medium who believes the world is ending, I couldn’t help but become consumed by my long-standing obsession and conviction: that the ONE THING all young makers need to understand is the one thing that no one seems to teach them — that art and commerce are not and will never be one in the same.

So when I got the inevitable question from a wonderfully naive student — “How should we pick scenes for showcase so agents and managers sign us?” — I told him what I actually thought:

A number of the grad students solemnly nodded along. A few even took notes. Most of the undergrads tuned out somewhere around “global market.”

And I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have listened to me either. I’d have looked at me and thought, “yeah, maybe for you, loser. I’m gonna be a fucking star.”

I’ve found myself returning to this episode a lot over the past few weeks.

As Dane nears the first rough cut of PRIME MATTER and we inch closer to the moment we stop being creatives making a film and transform into sales people selling it, I’ve recalled how difficult that transition used to be for me — especially in the years right after school when I regularly found myself in situations where I was defining myself as an artist, but clearly being treated as a commodity by my entertainment industry employers. Sometimes that meant being flown first class without asking for it (NICE!), and sometimes it meant being asked to understudy a role not on my original contract for “the love of the art we’re making as a team…” and an additional $70/week (NAUGHTY!)

Sometimes the results, like that 1st class ticket made me feel good. But more often, I found that my confusion — about whether my value was as a unique and individual artist, or as a replaceable but distinctly value-defined commodity — mainly just hurt my feelings. Especially when I thought we were doing one, but it turned out it was the other.

I think back on this and wonder, was there something that someone could have taught me while I was in school about this very thing? Something that would have saved me so much confusion and heartache?

I’m not sure — it can be hard to hear what feel like harsh realities when you’re otherwise living in a celebrated and rarefied environment that you think you earned on your merits — which is exactly what it feels like to be chosen as a member of an incoming Juilliard class.

I’ll never forget the horror so many of my fellow first years felt during our first week of school, when Edward Albee — a man most of us revered — came to speak to the whole Drama Division. Someone asked, “What advice would you give to young actors getting ready to enter the professional world?” His advice:

Not exactly the inspiration we were looking for. And that was Edward-fucking-Albee.

I’m just a guy who was lucky enough to work on a few amazing plays, a couple great TV shows and then managed to punch way above his weight as a producer on a couple independent films.

Why would these students have listened to me?

Maybe the problem isn’t that it shouldn’t be said however. Maybe it’s not even that it should be said in a different way. Maybe the problem is that it just isn’t said enough by enough different people.

The industry, and I say this without judgment — isn’t here to make art. It isn’t here to reward talent either. Its purpose is to create economy by producing an entertainment product and selling it.

Television was invented to sell soap, for Christ’s sake!

That doesn’t mean the stories it produces can’t be creative, or interesting, or culturally valuable — that’s just not a requirement for their success. The requirement is ROI, in cash or eyeballs (which roughly compute to some amount of cash).

The industry, as the word itself implies, has a responsibility to COMMERCE, not to CREATION.

So why do we allow young makers to so blithely believe that the professional world they will be entering on the other side of their creative training is one that will reward their artistry rather than treat them as a resource that is either in high or low demand based on market preferences?

Well first off, because no one wants to hear it. Because it sounds dehumanizing. Most actors, my younger self included, think of themselves as unique individuals with unique talents. Being told that you’re something else isn’t so much fun. This is why I used to hate getting auditions for cop parts or lawyer parts — because I was offended by how little artistry they required. Now I love getting those auditions because I know exactly what to do to keep myself in the running for a few bucks and a day or two on set without having to drive myself crazy over it.

The other reason is that, as far as I can tell, there are economic advantages for THE INDUSTRY to promulgate the idea that working as an artist is a luxury and one that you should feel lucky to pursue, since it creates leverage across the supply/demand chain of hopes and dreams that have kept the industry running for as long as it has.

And lastly, because this classification actually applies to all levels of performers working in the industry — even ones you think it wouldn’t apply to. So it can just feel like it’s part of “paying your dues.” Which it is, but not because you haven’t earned your stripes (mixed metaphors here we go!)

A number of years ago I was talking to an associate who was an international sales agent. If you don’t know, their job is to buy and sell films in various stages of completion on the international market based on the perceived value of the film’s package, which usually means genre, producer, director and NAME TALENT. I was trying to get a film made (the same one that fell apart before BRIGHTWOOD, and then again before PRIME MATTER) and I was pitching him names for a lead.

“Boom. I’ve got it,” I said. “Jesse Plemons. He’s a legit amazing actor. Perfect for the part. And definitely recognizable.”

“Too ugly. Won’t sell in China,” my pal snorted.

WHAAAAAAA?!?! This was Jesse Plemons we were talking about — a bona fide star in my actor-addled mind. How could he be “too ugly” to sell anywhere, and also why would the fact that he is, make him unbankable here?!

The answer: Because even Jesse-fucking-Plemons is a commodity.

And at that particular moment, the market didn’t price him high enough to make him a convincing reason to finance the film.

I should point out that there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a commodity. If your price is high it can feel great. That first class ticket made me feel special and like I’d done something unique to deserve it — even if it was just a baked in line item on a long multi-year studio budget.

But when your price is low, it’s really easy to get your market value confused with your personal value.

Which is why it’s so important, I think, to call it what it is.

Because doing so allows us to understand more explicitly that we are not personally the thing we’re selling, and our value isn’t exclusively determined by the market — even if our price is.

It lets us be both artists and commodities (or business people if you insist), but doesn’t ask us to be both, simultaneously, and at all times.

I do often wish we lived in a culture that more explicitly valued art for art’s sake.

There’s nothing I love more than coming upon something that was made for no reason at all except, “why the hell not”, and made with zero expectation or requirement that it generate income. But making art takes time and effort, and if you aren’t lucky enough to have the economic freedom to spend large chunks of your time on things conspicuously not designed with commerce in mind, it can be a challenge to pursue.

And yet.

Art gets made. Every day it gets made.

A friend of mine has made something like 120 little sculptural collage faces out of everyday, disposable materials. Why? Just cause. And before you ask — they’re really good. I’d pay to put one on my wall, and I bet you would too.

Another friend writes bizarre essays and poems under a pseudonym and has somehow actually garnered a following and fan-base. But despite my suggestions otherwise, they stubbornly have resisted every urge to commodify it. Why? Cause it’s for the LOLZ, and turning it into a business (or a commodity) would take a lot of the fun out of it for them.

So go ahead. Make art. And make commerce.

They are two sides of something, and they both have value and, in my view, are necessary. And while I may not phrase it exactly the way I did the last time I was up at school, I will continue advocating that we have a responsibility to the current and next generation of makers to give them the vocabulary so they can navigate between these two worlds with more ease than I did.

—Max Woertendyke
Back in Brooklyn, 8/31/26

And there is no better production than a wedding done right.

Which this one certainly was.

Hosted at the absolutely wild Madonna Inn (#iykyk), it was a weekend full of parades and oysters and crafts and bountiful creativity, but above all else, LOVE.

I enjoyed it — as did all the guests — to no end!

If you somehow haven’t noticed, I spend a lot of time thinking, talking and writing about MAKING and DOING.

But underneath that, it is LIVING that serves as both the raw source material for ALL MAKING, and the reason to bother make anything at all.

A few weeks ago, at IndieStreet Film Fest (where my doc WOMAN IN THE SKY was screening), I had the pleasure of watching Seth Porges’ (who also made CLASS ACTION PARK), latest film, SANTACON — about the most despised event in NYC and how it started as something entirely different.

One of the subjects of the film, who also attended the screening was a guy named Rob Schmitt — who inadvertently dreamt up some of the biggest cultural events of the past several decades, SantaCon and Burning Man included, through his involvement with something called The Cacophony Society.

The Cacophony Society wasn’t something I was familiar with prior to the film, but as far as I can tell it was primarily a group of goofy, irreverent, often inebriated, and occasionally hostile pranksters who got together to do weird shit they thought was funny and/or fun — such as dress up as a group of delinquent Santas and cause public wonder (and chaos), or costume themselves as salmon swimming upstream against the Bay to Breakers Race.

A sort of non-political, non-sensical, 1990’s accidentally Dadaist project.

But when I asked Rob why he bothered to do all that, and how he felt about having been involved in the creation of events that have grown into things so far removed from the original ethos of their creation, he just kept saying a version of the same thing: “I’m so grateful that I got to meet such interesting people, and that I got to have fun making things with my FRIENDS.”

At a time when the idea of a FRIEND just for the sake of plain old interpersonal relationship (rather than ‘reach’ or for ‘the follow’) is perhaps not as ubiquitous as it used to be (especially among artists and makers who must fight so hard for eyeballs in our attention economy), and when the idea of LIVING for the pleasure of doing so (rather than achieving some level of ‘success’) is perhaps under appreciated, I found something about Rob’s answer simply profound.

And while I am in no position to parse the absolute sincerity of it, I liked the spirit of it enough — and think that we MAKERS could probably all benefit from a few more FRIENDS, even if it came at the expense of “colleagues”, “collaborators” and “customers” (although I also believe we can have them all!) — especially in an economic environment that feels generally hostile to the development of non-commercial creation.

And so, in that spirit, and frankly for a little bit of convenience’s sake, I felt the best thing to do this week would be to share some pics of LIVING.

So enjoy the pool, the goblets, the costumes, and the look of unadulterated enjoyment in the company of friends, families and strangers who all came together to celebrate the LOVE on display this past weekend at my sister’s wedding!

— Max Woertendyke
in San Luis Obispo, 8/24/26

On the off-chance you’ve not had enough you can revisit the full arc here…

In this, the latest installment in my increasingly random and irregular series, “Things My Teachers Taught Me… Some of Which I Listened To,” I’m tackling two seemingly opposite, but ultimately very related lessons I learned at the hands of Wendy Waterman, a speech teacher who played a very large role in my first and second years of training at Juilliard.

A fan of the Mid-Atlantic accent and die-hard adherent to Edith Skinner’s Speak with Distinction, Wendy had very little patience for contemporary habits of speech. Vocal fry, upward inflection on anything besides a question, mushy consonants. She was adamant and unforgiving about the precise shape the soft palette and tongue were meant to form when molding vowels and was almost violently passionate about the necessity of a “two-finger drop” — which for anyone who wasn’t there, meant we were supposed to emit sound from a mouth that always opened as wide as the barrel of a literal “hand gun” and never anything smaller.

Try it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I know for a fact that many of my classmates found the particular rigor and exactitude she demanded old fashioned, culturally irrelevant, and out-of-date. Seemingly, so did the school as the number of hours we spent working on speech this way decreased during my time there, and had already decreased significantly from years past.

And in many respects, they were right. Much of what we were being taught may have been required to shine in an Audrey Hepburn or Jimmy Stewart comedy, but it didn’t seem all that relevant to the latest HBO drama series or cult-show down at Rattlestick.

A JOKE about speech!

Three grad actors — one from Yale, one from NYU, and one from Juilliard are all auditioning for the same role…

And yet, I often found her way of working — highly formalized, muscular, physical, external rather than internal, disciplined rather than intuitive — to be a marvelously effective framework anytime I had to work on characters that lived a far ways away from who I was as a human being. Which is exactly what I had to do the excruciating summer between my first and second years, when I found myself at Chautauqua as part of their grad acting theater company.

A very pretty, but extremely strange place — an erudite, wealthy, cultural and religious sanctum literally fenced off from the very working class, Newport-smoking, pick-up truck driving locals that surrounded it — I felt out-of-place (on both sides of the fence); generally ill-at-ease and lonely.

That feeling was only exacerbated by the roles I was tasked to play. Functional, expositional and on the edges of the narrative, they seemed unimportant to me and terribly far from the spotlight I so strongly craved. (No small roles, my ass…) Even worse, they weren’t the types of characters I was comfortable playing — which meant I doubted my ability to tackle them successfully.

The worst offender in this mold was George in “The Philadelphia Story.” The patsy of the play, he appears in a few scenes — structurally there to create given circumstances, deliver backstory, and offer a target to the competitors for his affianced’s heart, who unsurprisingly outclass and undo him with every turn.

I didn’t like having to play the role — it made me feel unimportant. And I didn’t understand the world of Main Line Pennsylvania where it all took place — which made me feel dumb on top of it.

Thankfully, Wendy stepped into that void, demanding that my plosives were precise, and my vowels fully formed. She’d hand me literal PAGES of notes after a run, pointing out every time I’d made a “dark L” (yes, that’s a thing, and it’s not some Lovecraftian creature).

Her notes were primarily technical, and it’s possible that if I’d been playing a role I relished, they may have felt suffocating. But given the circumstances, they gave me something to AIM at, for which I was extremely grateful.

Most interestingly, the more fully I took those technical notes — the more definite my \ɔ\ became for instance — the more something akin to a character began to reveal itself.

The more specifically I spoke, the more specific George became, which made me more confident, which made the version of George I was playing more uniquely mine. Rather than an imitation of John Howard’s rendition in the 1942 film, my George became a self-made, hardworking man who never really felt in place in the erudite and gated sanctum of Tracy Lord’s heart.

One might think that the takeaway here could be, “follow a defined formula and structure and you will find freedom within it.” That wouldn’t be wrong, but it also wouldn’t exactly be what Wendy taught me either. Because as anal as she was about the position of a tongue, she also taught me something entirely different:

“THROW THE DISHES UP!”

When she yelled this at us during class one day, it was in relation to a story she’d shared about a play, somewhere, sometime in which a character, full of vim and vigor in a climactic scene, made her exit, but not before throwing a stack of plates they’d been holding in their hands.

In the earlier iterations of this scene, the actor playing the part had always thrown the dishes DOWN!

But despite doing so with comedic verve that should have drawn chuckles from a lost puppy, the audience refused to laugh. Try as she might, they wouldn’t even guffaw when she chucked the dinnerware directly at the floor.

Never that is, until she decided to “THROW THE DISHES UP!” instead.

Now the cynics amongst you might think, “well yea, it’s obviously funnier to throw the dishes up. So what? Le duh.”

Which is true.

But why?

I think it’s funnier because it introduces a moment of suspension: that millisecond at the top of the arc when those plates hang in the air before crashing back down to earth. When you throw the plates down, there can never be any doubt — they will certainly and instantaneously shatter on the floor. But when you throw them UP… well who knows for sure what could happen in the interim?

“Throwing the dishes up” introduces both risk and mischief; a naughty little glint derived from the fact that neither the audience nor performer 100% KNOWS what’s going to happen next…

But we do all have the chance to ANTICIPATE that whatever it is… it’s going to make a loud crash!

This suspension — the moment of curiosity, of wonder or uncertainty — is at the heart of all great stories. And it is rigorous discipline, commitment to practice and technical prowess that allows a maker to successfully communicate that story. Once again, a project can only exist where resources and vision overlap.

See #1:

I haven’t spoken with Wendy in some time. I know she’s since retired from Juilliard.

But she sent me a note earlier this summer, responding to an email I wrote all the way back in 2013 telling her she “had to check out” this article about linguistic regionalisms in the US:

“I will—sounds cool.”

I hope all those “L’s” were as light as could be.

—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 8/18/26

We already know very few strangers will watch your film if no one “definitely recommends” it to them.

And we know that no one can recommend it if they don’t know it exists.

We’re also all smart enough (right?) to know that people don’t just magically become aware thanks to a magic Awareness Fairy (the fairy’s 2nd cousin, Algorithm, sometimes helps, but never reliably and only on his own terms).

We know that studios spend millions to generate awareness of their products, and that many successful independent releases spent the near equivalent of their production budgets on marketing.

(Don’t take my word for it, check out ’ essay about just that)

StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry

What it costs to self-distribute and promote an independent film

Marketing is a key part of any film’s success, but training and case studies are much more likely to focus on the filmmaking than on film promotion…

Read more

2 months ago · 35 likes · 1 comment · Stephen Follows

So what else can an independent producer do without a few extra hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around… besides rolling the dice on tonight’s $905 million dollar Powerball drawing and hoping for the best?

Because whatever the challenges, audiences must be MADE aware —by luck, effort, skill or cost if you want your film to exist in any meaningful way.

Last week’s Awareness Audit ran thru the many tools and platforms we’re currently using to raise awareness of PRIME MATTER.

Some, like weekly posting of #BTS on primematterfilm, are relatively low touch and designed to celebrate the hard work everyone did to capture this film while also ensuring that the never-satisfied-maw of the IG algorithm remains aware of us — even while we don’t have anything to actively promote just yet.

Others, like this Substack, serve a more nuanced purposes, geared more towards process, public experimentation and “brand building” than direct sales conversion.

In both cases, I think what I’m doing is working just fine for now:

The engagement numbers fluctuate on insta and could always be better, but I really only set the posting schedule up 3 weeks ago and am still figuring out how to best juice the system. The strategy will surely evolve over time.

For the Substack, of course I’d like it grow faster and find wider reach, but I’ve also resisted doing the ONE thing that would be most likely to encourage that: sending out an email to my personal mailing list and asking people to SUBSCRIBE directly.

At first I refrained from doing so because I was terrified of being that guy who told everyone he was writing a Substack to only quit two essays in. More recently I haven’t done it because I’ve had to lean on the email list for a few other announcements (such as news about my documentary WOMAN IN THE SKY, or festival announcements for other projects I’ve produced over the last year), and I really don’t want to spam my peoples.

Given that this is 26th essay in as many weeks and I haven’t sent anything to my email list in about 5 months it’s probably time (for those of you subscribed here who are ALSO on my mailing list… you’ve been warned!)

Either way, both of these platforms are fundamentally about sustained public presence — designed to ensure that people don’t forget about PRIME MATTER even though most of the work being done on the film is currently happening far from the public eye in a dark editing bay.

Other campaigns — such as “Tell Us Your Ghost Story” or “The Believer-Type Quiz” — are meant to be point-of-access for brand new engagements; semi-gamified (there’s that word again) micro-experiences related to the themes and ethos of the film rather than its plot. These campaigns are designed (at least in theory) to introduce people to the film in a time where there can be no direct call-to-action to buy it while also harnessing their engagement to create MORE engagement, and ultimately more AWARENESS. They are also my personal favorites because I think they’re the most creative.

I love the whole concept of the “Tell Us Your Ghost Story” campaign — it feels spooky and world building, and brings creative voices from potential audiences into direct conversation with PRIME MATTER and the creatives behind it. It allows for a diverse swath of ghosts stories, rather than exclusively reflecting the kind of ghost story we put in our movie. And above all I think it’s fun!

So… how come no one is doing it?

I first mentioned the Ghost Story campaign on LinkedIn, Insta and Substack a few weeks ago. None of the posts got great engagement, but they weren’t terrible either. A few dozen LIKES, HEARTS and “Sound cools” across platforms seemed like a decent start to a soft-launch of this idea.

But of all the people who engaged that way, only three actually ended up recording ghost stories: a fellow member of New Day Films, a younger writer/director I’d recently met through a mutual contact, and an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years.

The 50 posters I put up in Williamsburg fared even worse. Despite the fact that the pull tags on many of them were fully torn off, as if by rabid ghost storytellers desperate for a place to weave their yarns, I got ONE unsolicited ghost story — in text — which is the least interesting way to then display it.

So what’s up with that!?

Do people just like ripping tags of flyers for fun?

Is it just actually a shitty idea?

*I* think it’s cool, but I’m the epitome of biased and besides I already know the movie exists!

If I just saw one of these posters on the street without context, would I care? Would I be intrigued? Maybe I’d think “ugh, another poster,” or “well that’s dumb,” or “great, more stuff people are trying to sell me!”

Most likely though, I wouldn’t even notice.

So it’s possible it’s a dumb idea (you guys can tell me if you think so), but I’m more inclined to think it just hasn’t found it’s footing yet. And since the only thing it’s costing me is my own time and a few bucks for printer toner, there’s a much stronger reason to keep going than quit.

In that case, though the question still holds — why didn’t people ultimately record their stories?

What if everyone who grabbed one of those pull tabs DID want to leave a ghost story? What if they even followed the link to the ghost story capture portal? What if when they got there however, they didn’t like what they saw: it was too complicated. Or impossible to see legibly on a phone screen as they speed walked under the scorching midday sun?

Maybe what was wrong wasn’t the idea, but the execution?

The reality is that I have no real way of knowing what the pain points have been. But I do I know that I’m not ready to give the idea up… so I did the one other thing I could: I decided to ITERATE.

Below is a diagram of everything I thought I got wrong in my first build of the ghost story portal, and some of the things I got right:

Looking at it now with a critical eye, I see that many of my original decisions were made without consideration for the “audience” of this campaign, and instead focused on what I personally wanted out it for myself. Interestingly, the same advice I give about crafting movies — think about your audience — is the same advice I neglected to take when building this out.

So, what do I think sucks about the original iteration of the portal:

1. My eyebrow’s too local and excludes potential storytellers by making it seem like I am only looking for Williamsburg stories. While I do believe that hyper-local IRL activations are the coolest way to get people invested in something, this campaign is fundamentally a digital one, and since the internet has no borders, why should I?!

2. ”Share your ghost story with us.” — such a passive and non-instructional header. It’s neither a question that encourages a participant’s engagement, or declarative enough to register as a command.

3. Email Capture Function — I dreamed this idea up with the explicit purpose of “capturing emails.” I felt so strongly about this that when one of my oldest friends (and committed reader of this Substack, thanks!) told me he wouldn’t submit because he wasn’t interested in giving me his email (we both know I have it in 500 places already), I told him, “Then it isn’t for you! The whole point is emails. Emails emails emails!! If I don’t get them than what even is the point!? (I didn’t use so many exclamations on the day I swear). But if my best friend wasn’t going to play because of e-mail gating then why on earth would a stranger?!!!?!?!?!?!! (appropriate number of exclamations) I now believe that email capture is an optional secondary goal, far superseded by the primary goal, which is to capture the GHOST STORIES themselves.

4. Too many options of how to record — my first attempt tried to make things easy by giving endless options! Wanna type your story? Cool! Maybe speak it instead? Great! Or how about a video? Super cool! Soliciting videos from strangers is an objectively terrible idea, and faced with too many options, it’s often easier to just quit — especially if you weren’t that interested to begin with.

   ---

Armed with above list of all the things I’d come to hate about my first iteration I set off to update the portal in ways that I felt minimized friction and reprioritized an audience experience rather than my stated desires.

The biggest changes were:

1. Removing the locality of the eyebrow, widening the geographic map significantly

2. Opted for direct call to action with the “Record your ghost” command.

3. Added short and subtle encouragements and a time limit to help ease any anxiety about “performing” and make the telling of the story easier for a participant.

4. Got rid of the video option entirely, and strongly de-prioritized text as a means of inputting a story, leaning fully into the audio as the preferred story medium.

5. Removed all email gating — there is still an option to share email or social media handles, but it comes after the story has been submitted and is entirely optional.

With the re-designed portal now active, it’s time to re-introduce it back into the world — by writing about it here, posting about it on Instagram and LinkedIn, by printing more flyers to hang up later this week.

We’ll see if it changes anything!

You can see the portal for yourself, and RECORD YOUR OWN GHOST STORY — Everyone has at least ONE! here, at the newly minted PRIME MATTER website, which will be another information and AWARENESS hub, and another tool to add to the audit.

https://primematterfilm.com

—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 8/10/26

But creating a movie that people are willing to risk their reputation by publicly advocating for really only matters if people know it exists in the first place. Which brings me to what I think is the second part of successfully releasing any independent film: AWARENESS.

In some ways you might even argue — from a commerce perspective — that awareness is MORE important than a “definite recommend”, if only because it must pre-date it. After all nobody can tell anyone to watch something they’ve never heard of.

So, in the spirit of transparency, this week I offer you a full audit (with minimal commentary) of all we here at PRIME MATTER are attempting to do to bring awareness to the film. Next week, I’ll dig into a few of these things in more depth and pull back the curtain on what I think is working, what I think is currently failing (and needs to be changed), and what I just don’t have any idea about yet — but it seems worth continuing for the time being, even if it only ends up being for shits and giggles in the final accounting.

PRIME MATTER AWARENESS AUDIT

Below is a list of most of the tools, platforms, mediums, events, ideas, etc. that we are currently employing in an effort to make people aware that PRIME MATTER exists. Given that we don’t expect the film to be viewable — even for festival or invited screening audiences — until Q1 2027 at the earliest, my hope is that these efforts, and whatever else I come up with along the way will have a compounding effect… but unfortunately for me, I don’t have a psychic medium who can tell me whether that’s true or not… yet.

This Substack — “Prime Matter: Art, Commerce and the Process of Making”

It is true that I enjoy writing this Substack every week. And it’s also true that I genuinely hope what I write about is interesting to other makers, creators, and anyone interested in the complex relationship I perceive between art & commerce (hence the title of said Substack). But it’s also as true that it is consciously designed to bring awareness to both Noble Gas Media generally, and PRIME MATTER specifically. I, like everyone else here, like that I get actual contact information for people who subscribe, meaning I can reach them off platform if for any reason Substack decides to vanish, or become utter trash.

— As of today, I have written 23 posts, have 84 subscribers (7 of which are paid), and 194 “followers”

Social Media

I primarily engage with two social media platforms when it comes to promoting awareness of PRIME MATTER (if I had a clone, I’d do more):

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was my primary platform for writing about what I now write about here, and frankly my engagement there has suffered for it. Alas. Nonetheless, I appreciate a platform whose purpose is explicitly and openly self-promotion and I’ve genuinely met handfuls of very interesting, supportive and helpful people there. Geared towards building awareness for Noble Gas Media and myself as a producer, creator (and eeeek, dare I write it… “thought leader”), PRIME MATTER is currently my flagship project and therefore a regular topic of discussion. For eg. during pre-pro, I drafted a weekly “Things we did this week” post which in my humble opinion is a cool and honest record of one way to make a truly independent film.

— I have no idea how many LinkedIn posts I’ve made, but it’s a butt ton and I currently boast 1,809 “connections”… of which I regularly interact with 30-40.

Instagram

I manage or co-manage 4 different Insta accounts, all of which have separate, but overlapping audiences:

• @woertendyke — my personal instagram, dedicated to what I call “glitches” or the weird funny little things the world puts in your path, and of course personal self promotion. Often used to repost or post stories about PRIME MATTER (1390 followers / 553 posts)

• @noblegasmedia — my company instagram, explicitly for the promotion of creative projects I make under the Noble Gas Media banner, of which PRIME MATTER is the current focus. Tagged as a collaborator on all PRIME MATTER posts and where all Substack essays get (or should get) posted as well (108 followers / 60 posts)

• @primematterfilm — the film’s insta. Currently scheduled a month out at a time to post a minimum of one BTS photo/week until we know where our premiere will be. Will also be the landing spot for various other awareness campaigns mentioned below such as “Tell us your ghost story” and “Believer type quiz” (320 followers / 20 posts)

• @brightwood.movie — the instagram from Dane Elcar and my first feature. Interestingly our first post on that account wasn’t until the week of the film’s US premiere — clearly a last minute effort. Obviously focused on that film, I’d like to figure out how to move as many of these followers as possible over to primematterfilm since they seem like they’d be among our warmest potential audience members. (2,668 followers / 126 posts)

Social Gamification Campaigns

I don’t really like that descriptor: “gamification”. It makes it sound cheap to me, but it IS essentially what the following things are: game-like campaigns I dreamt up whose purpose it to get potential audience members interested in the film through some other activity that is thematically and conceptually connected to the film. Of everything listed here, these are by far my favorite ideas — and also the ones that I think I need to tweak the most if I want to successfully execute on them (more on why next week).

• “Share Your Ghost Story With Us” — currently active with a semi-soft launch, this activation asks people to “share their ghost stories” with us and hopes to: 1. create an affinity for the film, 2. develop a localized community of potential audience members, 3. capture willing participants direct contact, 4. create UGC that can encourage more people to participate and become AWARE of the film. As the soft-launch, I’ve written about it a few times and taped up about 50 flyers in Williamsburg, BK which is both where I live and where the movie takes place.

• “Believer Type Quiz” — this is actually the first time that I’ve shared the existence of this campaign as it has not officially launched yet. This activation asks participants a series of 8 questions designed to determine their “Believer Type” and “Sub-Type” which correspond to archetypes, which in turn correspond to specific characters in PRIME MATTER. A true “game” and hopefully fun enough to have some potential virality, this campaign aims to bring general awareness of PRIME MATTER to a larger community beyond “independent horror film fans” and capture direct contacts along the way.

Live Events

These are all “in-process” — or to be slightly more honest, still in the “conceptual phase” — but the idea behind them all is the same: get relationships OFFLINE and INTO THE REAL WORLD instead.

I’m obsessed with this idea of hyper-locality being the antidote to the increasingly enshitified global reach of the world wide web, and while IRL events, by necessity, have a smaller reach than the potential of social and digital engagements, they are also REALER and not gatekept by an algorithm designed by a major tech company to capture as much of your time as possible.

They also seem like the funnest ways to actually create communities of people who would be interested in the movie and would therefore be most likely to “definitely recommend” it to their friends — especially if they already feel invested in the experience we hopefully build around it.

“Ghost Story Event” — the IRL version of the gamified campaign above, we are looking to create the framework for a repeatable event that showcases 2-3 short ghost story films (from filmakers other than us!) and feature 2 live storytellers sharing their own ghost stories. Other possibilities are live tarot or psychic readings, a “Share Your Ghost Story With Us” booth, and endless possibilities for collaboration with other local creators, small businesses, etc. I am beginning to reach out to local venues and stores that I think could be great partners for something like this, and if YOU have any ideas I’d love to hear them too!

“Micro-Screenings of BRIGHTWOOD” — one of the places we shot many of the SFX shots for PRIME MATTER was a basement we turned into a DIY production studio. I have considered hosting a weekly or bi-monthly live screening of BRIGHTWOOD in that space as a means of continuing to bring local awareness to THAT film while also helping spread the gospel of PRIME MATTER. I don’t really know what the ROI on something like this would be — the micro cinema experts here on Substack can probably give me a better idea — but it could be fun?

The Traditional Stuff

The above is the primary stuff that we currently have kicking around — either in reality or at least vividly in my head — but of course it is also only a snapshot of the current moment. As we get closer to release, whatever that ultimately looks like, we will of course utilize some of the more traditional avenues for AWARENESS as well:

• We’ll hire a publicist and try to get reviews in both genre and major general publications

• We’ll reach out to the hundreds of #horrortok and youtube creators who do reviews of films and ask them if they’d like to see the film

• We’ll do paid advertisements

• We’ll pitch interviews to podcasts and local periodicals

• We’ll submit to a few major festivals and see if anyone bites who can actually move the needle

• We’ll attempt to get the film into the hands of people fancier than us who will hopefully be willing to “definitely recommend” it to their other fancy friends and colleagues who can pass it along to some of the “kingmakers” that do still exist in this realm.

  ---

What’s sort of fun — and sort of terrifying — about all this is that there’s really NO WAY to know if any of it will work the way I hope it does.

The industry and the market is shifting soooooo fast — much of what we learned during BRIGHTWOOD’s release in 2023 is already outdated or on its way to being so — and anyone who says they KNOW what it’s going to be like in even 6 months from now is almost certainly lying, alarmingly clever and insightful, or just plain lucky.

But what I do know — and this has always been true — is that NO ONE is more interested in the outcome of a film than the people who made it and the people who invested in it — creatively, emotionally, financially. And if we want anyone to care about the things we make, then we have to care enough to make them aware of them, and the only way to do that is to go ahead and actually try to do that.

So we’ll see together how it all goes. Thanks for being part of the journey. Next week, I’ll tell you all the ways I think we could be doing it better already.

— Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 8/3/26

During that conversation Goetz, whose company specializes in insights gleaned from pre-screenings, asserted that OBSESSION’s long and exceptionally strong legs were likely the result of “a very strong definite recommend…” which as he explained, correlates directly “to the opening weekend multiple, meaning how much it ultimately performs on top of the opening weekend.”

Now, it may now be your turn to ask me what rock I was living under, because despite doing this for a number of years now, this was the first time I’d consciously registered and appreciated the concept and necessity of “a definite recommend” so clearly.

It didn’t hurt that Goetz clearly knows what he’s talking about. OBSESSION has surpassed $450 million in global box office and is somehow still performing (with weekly audience drops holding in the 25-30% range thru Week 8 of release). It doesn’t take a genius to look at that data and know that people are definitely recommending the film to their friends, who are in turn definitely recommending it to their friends who are definitely recommending it to… you get the idea.

And while striving to be OBSESSION is perhaps the moment’s worst independent filmmaking cliché — not to mention that PRIME MATTER is a very different kind of film for a whole slew of reasons — it would be foolish to not acknowledge the benefit we might derive from being strategic about encouraging our own “definite recommends” once the film is released.

For independent films like PRIME MATTER that are unable to muster studio level marketing budgets and don’t have millions of fans already baked into the equation, WORD-OF-MOUTH is the ONLY way to successfully get your film in front of enough eyes to allow it to have real cultural and economic impact. And it is the only thing that successfully pushes a long tail, sustaining sales beyond the initial burst at the film’s release. Because word-of-mouth is essentially just an assertion of whether something’s good or not.

But rather than “good” being defined by some abstract or aesthetic creative principle, it’s defined by a simple straightforward question: does the audience like what they see enough stick their necks out and tell other people that they MUST go see it?!

Simple, right?

But how do we get it?

While it’s almost certainly not the language he would use, Dane is aiming for those “definite recommends” as he edits the movie.

He DEFINITELY wouldn’t have used this language when he was writing the script, but he was fundamentally starting the process back then too.

In both cases, the goal is to create an overarching experience of the film — derived from its characters, plot and theme — that is most likely to elicit a strong and enjoyable emotional response from the audience — whether that be curiosity, excitement, dread or something else entirely. This response, more than any other aspect (genre, recognizable talent or lack thereof, etc) is what I believe drives viewers to go forth and proselytize on the film’s behalf.1

But it’s not enough to just give audiences a good time. We also need to make sure we're giving them the good time we advertised.

Suggest to an audience that they are getting one thing, but instead give them another — even if the other is something they may have enjoyed under other circumstances — they are likely to be disappointed or pissed.

For examples, I’m a big fan of both WEST SIDE STORY and THE MEG. Both great. But very different. If you tell me I’m getting Jerome Robbins and The Sharks, but instead give me Jason Statham and a shark… I’m not going to enjoy it the way I should.

Which is why we have to align the way we communicate about a film with the experience an audience derives while watching it. The more in tune these things are, the more likely the audience is to walk out and feel they need to help spread the word.

In the final stages of post-production on BRIGHTWOOD I held a number of test screenings; both small group IRL screenings and individual digital screenings, so I could hear directly from audiences about how they experienced watching the film.

The purpose of those sessions was never to know whether viewers thought the film was “good” or not. Not only is that kind of feedback functionally useless, most of our test audiences were friends, family and colleagues, who would have felt poorly giving us anything other than the most positive spin (with some notable exceptions; you know who you are. As do I… and I’m grateful. Really!)

So instead of asking them to affirm us, we asked them to share their experience of watching the film and describe it to us.

Some of the questions we posed were:

• What were your favorite scenes or moments and why?

• Were there any scenes or moments that felt unnecessary or specifically didn't work for you and why?

• If you were asked to describe the film in one-three sentences, how would you do that?

The answers to these questions told us something far more important than whether people thought the movie was “good” or not.

They told us whether the movie the audience was watching was the same one that we thought we’d made. If what we believed we were communicating in fact correlated to what they were experiencing.

What we learned not only led us to make some small, but very significant changes to the cut, but it also informed EVERYTHING in terms of how we spoke about the film and how we defined it when we brought it to market.

And while BRIGHTWOOD certainly has its detractors, it has a lot of fans too. People who saw the film we made, experienced it the way we had intended it to be experienced, and shared it with their friends… and clients.

So, while Dane is working on increasing the percent chance of getting “definite recommends” from audiences once the film is available, I, and my fellow producers, are in the process of the other half of that: DEFINING THE EXPERIENCE and BUILDING AWARENESS, which are technically two distinct and separate functions, but which are intrinsically intertwined.

It’s also exactly what I’m attempting to do every week here on Substack — and on other platforms and in other arenas every week — define the film we’re making and make people aware that it exists so that by the time it’s finally done and available (probably in early 2027) we’re not just throwing the film out there and hoping for the best.

Prior planning does pay dividends afterall.

—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 7/26/26

PS — in case you’re curious this is one of the audience surveys we used when doing early test screenings for BRIGHTWOOD.

“I’ve been in this game for years, it made me an animal
It’s rules to this shit, I wrote me a manual
A step-by-step booklet for you to get
Your game on track, not your wig pushed back”

- Notorious B.I.G.

Back when I first started this, in the dark cold recesses of a February blizzard, I teased the existence of a list of PRINCIPLES that undergirded my entire “Philosophy of Making.”

I even went as far as to number and name them. Out of order of course to suggest that there were more than the four I listed and (hopefully) entice folks to stick around till I revealed them all, thereby solving every dilemma and challenge anyone has ever encountered while MAKING.

So if you were one of those folk intrigued by the hook, today is your lucky day!

Because below are in fact TEN PRINCIPLES of MAKING in all their recently organized glory. They’re not the original list of principles I was imagining back in February, and they are certainly not occupying the same order that I teased, but that’s because I didn’t really have a full list back when I started.

But now… I actually kinda do.

Derived directly from the experience of trying to articulate, in essay format, for twenty-one weeks straight, what MAKING means to me, why it matters, what it’s for, and how I do it, this list is the most current representation of the guiding principles I find myself returning to again and again, week after week, as a producer, creator, essayist and maker.

They are not chiseled in stone. They were not handed down from a mountain top or passed along by a burning bush. They may speak directly to you. Or they won’t. They are actively works in progress — tweaked and refined until the moments before their publishing — molded from soft clay and far from infallible.

But I do believe they’re useful. And accurate.

I hope you’ll agree, but I’d be just as excited if you didn’t.

What principles guide you? Do we have any in common? What about in opposition?

Only one way to find out:

1. Name what you’re making, then make it accordingly.1
Art and commerce are not the same thing and knowing which you’re doing at any given moment will not only help you make strategic decisions, it’ll also save you a lot of heartache. Be prepared for people to try and convince you that you are doing one when you are in fact participating in the other. It is up to you to know the difference.

2. A project only exists where RESOURCES and VISION overlap.2
Nowhere else. Vision without resources is delusion. Resources without vision is a shopping spree without a point. Take an inventory of what you are imagining that you’ll make and honestly stack it up against the resources you have — money sure, but also the favors you’ve banked, the supporters you’ve earned, the life you were born into. Only when resources and vision are appropriately scaled to one another, can you ensure that your fantasy isn’t robbing your reality of the limited resources at your disposal.

3. Curiosity is the engine that drives all making but it requires practice.3
Being interested rather than insisting on being interesting requires diligence, especially in the face of exhaustion, uncertainty, or unbridled ambition and certainty. But something is never made worse by asking “why?”, especially in the earliest stages of creation. Doing so is a refusal to assume you already know the answer, which is what allows for the unexpected to emerge. Kismet cannot happen without curiosity.

4. Specificity is the straightest path to reality.4
Vague goals produce vague results. Vague questions (or none at all) lead to vague answers, which lead to middling work and mediocre execution. The devil IS in the details. Logistical ones certainly, but also in what YOU bring to the work as a unique human being. Trade whatever bizarre specificities your personality contains for general vibes and copy/paste platitudes, and you’ve lost the only thing that makes whatever you’re making worth watching.

5. Treat every collaborator like a partner, not a resource.5
Investor, actor, crew, audience. These people can be unparalleled resources for you, but only if you allow them to. Collaboration allows for exponential rather than linear growth, creates environments where happy surprises are possible, makes you aware of your blindspots, and ensures that the whole adventure is a hell of a lot more fun.

6. Judgment lies in the gap between stated intention and execution.6
The success or failure of any project, whether it be art or commerce, sits in the gap between its specifically defined and expressed intentions and the results of its execution. This is the only accurate method of gauging whether what you made was a success. Don’t cheat yourself by refusing to define the intention.

7. Rehearsal is necessary in order to improv.7
Preparation is what makes surrender possible. The more stringently and fully you develop a plan of action, the more nimble you can be when reality inevitably gets in the way. Do not confuse freedom with lack of preparation. And do not confuse a well conceived plan with the ability to pivot when faced with the unexpected.

8. Control environments, not outcomes.8
You cannot, at the outset, determine what the thing you’re making will ultimately BECOME. You can only determine the conditions under which it gets made: who’s in the room, how it’s arranged, and what the experience of making it is. Build an environment that allows good people to do their best work and they will rarely disappoint you.

9. The record proves a BODY OF WORK exists.9
Making things in public creates a shadow of the work that outlasts the moment. A film, painting, a podcast, social post or this essay — whether the final work or not, these are all bits of evidence of something happening, manifested in the moment of creation. Produce enough of this evidence and you’ll discover that you’ve left behind a body of work, which more than any singular project, is proof of existence.

10. Doing is the only proof of thinking.10
Ideas that begin and end as thoughts never become anything else. Planning, talking, and strategizing can feel like progress, but it is only the DOING that makes any of it REAL.

So? Whatdya think? I’m genuinely curious.

-Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 7/21/26

Check out the citations below to read where some of these ideas are more fully articulated, or (/and?) if you aren’t already, consider subscribing below:

“Fantasy melts in the face of DOING. It cannot withstand the reality of something actually happening!”

I’ve always loved this quote.

At least since about 3pm today when I made it up while passionately yelling (in a nice, excited way) at a friend as we stood on a Brooklyn street corner.

We’d met for lunch and had an exciting conversation about a project they’re working on, and which if the circumstances work out, I’d love to eventually be part of. But it’s recently come to that fork in the road that all independent films eventually come to — a sort of logistical “to be or not to be” and I was now frothing at the mouth, publicly pontificating about the fallacies of “playing pretend” when it comes to independent filmmaking… which of course is all about capturing people… playing pretend.

Oh, the irony.

But as ridiculous as it must have seemed to the legions of teenagers and nannies with baby carriages that passed us — assuming any of them even bothered to notice — I am certain that it’s true.

There is a habit I’ve noticed in those of us who have a drive to create but haven’t necessarily developed the muscle to do so with absolute regularity. It seems to be especially prevalent in the murky brackish waters right between art and commerce, when we have a drive to make something artful, but expect (or hope) (or need) for it to achieve some kind of success that can only be quantified externally — whether that’s commercial success, “legitimate” industry access, or public awareness.

In short, if we feel our small independent film needs to get us onto a yacht at Cannes, we all start doing the same thing:

And that thing it to TALK.

To TALK. TALK. TALK.

About the DREAM. DREAM. DREAM

“So and so is reviewing the deck!” “This guy I know swims in money and he loves me — I’m meeting him for lunch tomorrow about our project!” “All we have to do is attach a star! It’ll be so easy, especially with a script like this!”

I’m not suggesting that every time someone says one of these things they’re making it up — they almost certainly aren’t. But I do think that oftentimes when we talk like that, what we’re really doing is dressing up talking about the things we’re making — or to be more accurate, the things we are talking-about-making — while pretending that the TALKING is synonymous with the DOING.

And it’s just not.

Talking is the logical step that precedes doing, the same way that thinking is (hopefully) the logical step before talking. At its best it is a creative process of imagining what a thing we might eventually make, could eventually become. In other words, the thing we’re doing when we talk, is MAKING a DREAM.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Talking is a beautiful, invigorating and necessary thing. One can need imagine how many brilliant ideas have died through the ages because someone was either unwilling or unable to speak about it to other people.

Talking is communicating. And communicating is how we get ourselves and others excited about something that doesn’t yet exixt.

It’s also how we work out the kinks. How we improve our story. How we figure out how to explain it to the necessary gatekeepers. It’s how we change our own understanding of what we want to make and begin to glean how it might impact others. Talking is an absolute necessity for anyone who wants to make something with other people.

Every creative act is a process of willing something into existence from NOTHING:

A tiny, fleeting idea poofs into your head. An invisible seed that occasionally takes root in your grey matter. But little by little, if you nurture it, that speck of nothing becomes a tiny acorn you start carrying around with you. Still small enough that you walk around fearing a light breeze could whisk it back into oblivion if you were to open the hand you’re holding it in. But the longer you hold it and the more attention you give it, the more it takes on a discernible shape. It begins to have weight. And eventually it’s large enough to show it to other people.

That’s usually when the talking begins.

Because even though your mote of an idea has grown enough to show folks, it’s still not quite solid enough to pass around. It’s certainly not formed enough to survive an accidental fall onto the sidewalk, or a toss into the back of a car.

So you talk about it instead, and the idea becomes realer.

At a certain point it becomes real enough that the people you’ve been talking to start seeing it too; start feeling as if they might be able to carry it around. This collective acknowledgement of the idea starts to make it look like something that actually exists — and might possibly even have an impact: change the trajectory of a career, bolster a sense of self, surprise the naysayers.

That tiny little nothing you dreamt up one night is now inspiring other people to imagine what it might become, and so you start letting yourself fantasize about how this thing you’re now going to make is going to change your life.

But dreaming about it is not the same as doing it. We’ve all been guilty of it. I’ve been guilty of it over and over and over:

“Holy shit! It’s really gonna happen this time!”, “OMFG, they’re actually going to finance a slate!”, “I’m finally gonna get my big break!”

But the more we fantasize, the more it is the fantasy that starts taking root rather than the idea.

Our conversations stop being about the thing we are making and start becoming about what we need to make the thing we’retalkingaboutmaking — so that the thing that we’re making will achieve the level of success necessary to make our dream of what the thing we’retalkinggaboutmakingcouldbecome — come true.

Can you track that?

That is precisely what I did for over a YEAR when I was trying to put together DRIVE BY NIGHT — a film that Dane and I have failed to make TWICE — but which both times led to other films: first BRIGHTWOOD and now PRIME MATTER.

DRIVE BY NIGHT is a tight, taut techno thriller. It’s a great fucking script. And it seems “commercial”, whatever that means. When we were super gung-ho on it and actively trying to get it made back in 2024/25 it was also topical in a not-so-cheesy way.

It was also a more expensive movie than we’d ever made — by a lot — which was a manifestation of our own fantasies about how BRIGHTWOOD’s unexpected success should have supercharged our careers, moving us not one or two rungs up, but an entire ladder’s worth in one fell swoop.

And I fanned the flame of my own fantasy.

I had conversations with MAJOR sales companies about casting and took calls with very serious production services providers about our “production plan.” I had decks and budgets and more decks (and more budgets). It’s not that any of it was fake. It was real. But underneath it all there was one simpler, harsher and realer reality: I could TALK all I wanted about the movie, and I could talk well, but I couldn’t actually DO it — not because we didn’t have the technical ability, creative skill, or necessary drive — but because we DIDN’T have the necessary MONEY.

The frustrating thing about money — especially for makers who came up thinking of themselves as artists — is that, at least in the world we live in, it is EXTREMELY REAL. You either have it or you don’t.

Case shut. Door closed. Final. Period. Fin.

And so the TALKING, designed in large part to try and raise the money, also becomes the tell for not having it. Every time someone says they have a star “super interested!” in their high low-budget indie film, what they’re really saying is, “I hope this person can finally get me the cash I need to make this thing.”

You can spend years chasing money, by chasing talent, by chasing money, by chasing clout. It’s a never ending ferris wheel of “what ifs,” and “if onlys”.

And the only way off is: 1. to stop trying (boooo hisss!!!!), 2. get hella lucky, or 3. start MAKING.

And I literally mean making.

Because MAKING a thing depends on accomplishing things in the current moment, whereas dreaming and talking about it are always ways of expressing how you hope the future will be different than it is today.

Which is why “fantasy” (as I derisively called it while wildly gesticulating) cannot sustain itself when faced with actual doing. Because DOING burns away a pretend future, reliant on a never-ending list of “need to haves” and “just have to gets”, and replaces it with a list of things you’ve already accomplished or are actively accomplishing; tasks that can be started and completed.

Sometimes I use this very Substack to TALK rather than DO — just ask me how successful our ghost story collection has actually been and you might assess that my time would be best spent flyering around my neighborhood rather than writing this missive — at least if definitive results are my goal… but more on that some other time.

So go ahead and TALK. Go ahead and DREAM. But don’t forget that you can never THINK your way into ACTION. You can only decide that you’re going to take the first step and DO.

—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 7/13/26

Producing is actually “standing in”.

On the off-chance you don’t know what it means to be a stand-in — it’s what my first job on a film set ever was — being the “stand-in” for Chris Evans in a movie called Orphan King which was sadly never released.

Back then I got paid a whopping $15/day to be the guy who, when they were lighting the scene or figuring out the blocking, would “stand-in” so the camera and G&E teams could do their work while our future Captain America was changing wardrobe, getting hair-and-make-up done, or whatever else needed doing before they actually shot.

It wasn’t a glorious job, but it was also kind of fun, especially as someone who, at that time, had NO on-set experience.

I loved being in such close proximity to the actual MAKERS of that film — even when our 1st AD was on his fourth Red Bull of the day, and almost certainly a few hours closer to a self-induced heart attack.

Since then, I’ve obviously had the opportunity to be on many sets. And despite the fact that as the Producer of PRIME MATTER my hourly pay during pre-pro was likely about the same as it was back in my stand-in days, it’s still kind of fun: pretending to play characters you’re never going to play, giving the director a squinty glimpse of what they might hope to capture (or not!) on the actual day.

One of the biggest reasons we were able to make PRIME MATTER the way we did was because we didn’t have to do it ALL in an extremely condensed period of time, but instead expanded aspects of pre-production over months in ways that allowed us to test ideas out — saving money and headaches, and providing flexibility and time to process that ultimately allowed us to make an extremely efficient production plan.

There is an old theater adage that I love:

“Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two.”

We need the film to be GOOD.

The finance plan required it be CHEAP (by film standards of course).

But luckily for us, we were able to take our TIME.

Now just because it wasn’t always a mad dash, doesn’t mean we had endless, unfettered access to all our locations and gear, but it did mean that we had the freedom to often stop in places more than a few times, take a few pics, do some lens tests, and let those settle in our minds as we continued our march towards production.

And so, without further ado, I present a series of photos of me looking lost and forlorn in a wide variety of locations, as a large smattering of characters, and apparently in a very small selection of sweatshirts as we tested lenses, blocking and framing weeks before we ever shot an actual frame of the film:

PS — just a quick thank you and welcome to everyone who read last week’s post and decided to follow along. This is still an extremely small publication, and your interest is deeply appreciated. I learned today that we are #27 Rising in Film & TV, which may be a somewhat amorphous stat in an of itself, but it’s still pretty cool. So thank you.

But alas, life had other plans. My father, Ruis David Woertendyke died shortly after midnight, early Saturday morning. He was 83 years old.

So while it would have been easier and funnier to share a collection of photos of me being a stand-in for almost every PRIME MATTER character in almost every PRIME MATTER location (spoiler alert for next week I guess), it would seem bizarre to not acknowledge the strange and profound loss of the man who, in both who he was and who he wasn’t, shaped me as a man and father, but more relevantly here, an artist and maker.

I’ll do my best to avoid turning this into a eulogy — I’ll have plenty of opportunities for that in the coming weeks. And as personal and honest as I strive to make this Substack, I also want to make sure I keep it what it’s supposed to be: about art, commerce and making a cinematic ghost story.

But I trust that if I slip into that territory, or if I run at the mouth a little bit, you’ll excuse me just this once, right?

Thanks.

By the time I consciously met my father, he was a teacher of Drama at Pace University, or at least I think that’s true.

Maybe that came later… It’s funny how beginnings get fuzzier the farther away from them you become.

But, as I understand it — and I’m sure my mother will correct me in the comments or off line depending on just how wrong I get it — but as I understand it, my being born opened my father’s eyes to the fact that he was probably going to need a more regular income than off-off Broadway lighting design and directing could ever provide.

Working as a professor afforded him the opportunity to continue doing what he enjoyed without the perpetual uncertainty that comes hand in hand with the practical theater, and over time he came to love the teaching more than he ever loved working professionally, even if there were moments when he may also have resented it.

And when I say love, I mean it. My dad LOVED the theater.

It was in many ways his life blood. And in many ways, I think it’s where he spent much of the best of himself.

He had dementia over the last number of years, and even after he’d forgotten that he was a professor for over 30 years, forgotten that he’d taught the thing he so deeply loved — he could still recite the better part of “To be or not to be,” which was the monologue he worked on with his very first acting teacher in Herkimer, NY.

A teacher that — he revealed during a family dinner in 2021 during a period of time I call the “tape-recorder months” when he’d fixate on certain stories and memories from his past and tell them over and over and over, running through them as if he was trying to wear them out until they could be resigned to oblivion — had abused him.

A teacher that — when his parents confronted my father about whether anything untoward had ever taken place — he protected. Because as he told me and my wife at our dining room table in the house he had once lived in (prior to my parent’s divorce) but couldn’t fully remember as having ever been his own — he feared that if he told the truth, they’d take him out of acting school which was the “only place where he felt like he was really good at something.”

Obviously as a kid myself I had no sense of any of this — not of the insecurity, the disturbing memories of his past, or the ways he’d numb those memories in the backs of bars or in the basement below my bedroom.

Back then he was just cool and kind of mysterious. He wasn’t home much, and when he was he was usually downstairs working on his dissertation, but when he turned his attention on you, it was magnetic. He was fun and funny and creative and sometimes a little bit scary, but very much alive.

As a young boy, I found him fascinating and unpredictable, and I very much wanted him to like me… and for the most part I think he did, when he seemed to remember that I was around.

I didn’t start life as an actor — the first thing I wanted to be was a swimmer.

I was pretty good too, but when I turned twelve and started racing thirteen and fourteen year olds, I also began losing races, which perhaps unsurprisingly made me like the whole thing a lot less.

At the time, my sister, who is four-and-a-half years younger than I am, had been taking acting classes at The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. I went to go see her end-of-semester performance where she did an amazing and funny rendition of a monologue called “Telling the World”, and after, instead of going across the street with my mom and sister and grandparents, I stayed to watch the older kids do a performance of Jonathan Mark Sherman’s “Women and Wallace” — which is a play about how a boy’s relationships are affected over the years by the memory of his mother’s suicide when he was nine.

Now, my mother is very much still around thankfully — in fact, she was the first paying subscriber to this Substack so thanks mom! Love you! — but I was Wallace’s age when my parents split in an acrimonious divorce and I saw parts of myself in Wallace — “Ohhhhh the powwwwwer of the theatre! (please read that line in your best Olivier).

And given that I’d just decided swimming was suddenly lame, I was looking for something to do.

So the following week, with my mom’s encouragement, I went back to Strasberg and asked if they’d enroll me in weekend classes in exchange for coming to the office a few times a week and organizing their rolodexes (they were both behind the times, AND it was that long ago).

They said yes… and so I started acting.

On some level, my pre-teen brain was doing some kind of relational math — if I wasn’t winning at swimming, then that path to my father’s approval was shut, but if I was acting… well, then at least we’d have something to talk about. It would also allow me to silently compete with him — in his arena — but in a fashion that would not feel threatening, and might even allow him to help me eventually surpass him — he was a drama teacher after all.

Or maybe I was just bored and my mom said I had to do something and this seemed as cool as anything else.

Whatever the case, I started taking a Shakespeare performance class with a woman named Melissa Ross (different last name then) who ended up becoming a guiding light for me creatively and professionally. She not only gave me a love for the Bard:

"Shakespeare is Melrose Place!” she’d tell us, which was a show I’d not been allowed to watch which made it ohhh so exciting!

She also introduced me to Center Stage, NY and LAByrinth Theater Company which was housed there. It was because of her that I saw the original showcase code run of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Jesus Hopped the A-Train” a dozen times my senior year of high school. She would also eventually encourage me to apply to Juilliard and wrote my recommendation letter.

(I haven’t spoken to her in a while… perhaps I should send a note.)

But it started with a class, and the idea that I’d now be playing in a world my father already inhabited.

And almost like magic? My dad — remarried by then, living out of the city with a new young son named Dodge — and I began to have something to talk about

And that’s what we did. We talked about acting.

For many years it was the only thing we talked about.

Even during times of relative estrangement, it was a tie that bound us together.

It was a common language we spoke, and as I got better at it, I also felt the pride of a student set on surpassing his teacher, who while not there yet was making strides and bounds.

In undergrad, I invited him to see me in a student production of “Buried Child” in which I played (perhaps ironically) the character of Dodge, the 80 year old patriarch of the family.

I was 20 or 21 at the time — he came and we drank and smoked and I told him what I thought of him: I was very proud to have the balls, after a pitcher or two to ask, “What advice can you give me so my life doesn’t turn out like yours?”

His actual answer was fairly stupid, so I won’t repeat it here, but he also told me that my performance in the play reminded him of his father… his father who had vanished far more permanently than he had ever vanished as mine. If you know the play, you’ll understand the deeper significance of that. If you don’t, well, just take my word for it.

That semi confrontational but also confessional conversation was in many ways the beginning of a concerted effort to become friends with my father.

I was never going to get the Leave-it-to-Beaver dad I may have thought I wanted, but I could have a friendship with a man, adult-to-adult who was fascinating, and who loved something very deeply that I too had come to love:

The Theater.

My father was very often a mediocre father, but he was one hell of a teacher.

I know this because he taught me. He taught me at Pace, after I left McGill a semester early to come home and pursue my career as a professional actor. He also directed me in a one-man show I did at Center Stage, NY (on the same stage I watched John Ortiz and Ron Cephas Jones tear up the boards only a few years earlier in “Jesus…).

And while that first conversation in a Montreal bar had required an inordinate amount of booze to transpire, I discovered that we were able to have similar conversations in a rehearsal room with much greater ease.

Not as father and son, but as director and actor, or teacher and student. During the one man show, Daniel MacIver’s “Wild Abandon”, I asked him if he had felt stifled and suffocated by my appearance as a child. I genuinely don’t remember what he said, but I do remember that I believed him, and that it made me BETTER in the play than I ever could have been otherwise.

As a teacher, he had me do a scene from Genet’s “The Maids” — at the time I joked that I wasn’t sure if he was trying to emasculate me or make me a better actor. Maybe it was both, but it didn’t really matter cause it was a great fucking scene, and I grew as a performer because of it, even if I didn’t fully grasp it at the time.

I wish I could go back and do it again while he directed me now.

I’ve come such a long way, and frankly so has he.

The point of all this — if I have to put a point to it at all — is that ART, the things we MAKE, are always shaped by the lives we live, and the people we live them with, or without.

We are formed, like diamonds, from all the intense environmental pressures and influences that surround us — both in their presence or absence (don’t hold me to the science, the metaphor holds!)

That there is beauty in complexity, wonder in struggle, joy in heartbreak.

One of the things another great teacher, and occasionally fraught grad-acting-school-father-figure Richard Feldman used to tell us was that “Art is life organized.”

If that’s true, perhaps it would be just as true to say that, “Life is Art, in utter chaos”?

Our lead actress in Prime Matter asked me on our final night of shooting why I made art.

“Because life is inherently meaningless — it’s all random chaos — and so it is not only our right, but our responsibility to create our own meaning. Art allows us to do that — to create meaning out of the chaos.”

My father was an artist. He was also a philanderer, and a teacher, and a bully, and a sage, and a lonely little boy, and a director, and on and on and on and on. But above all he was just a guy. Who, at least in my estimation, did the best he knew how.

I will miss him dearly.

I’ve missed him dearly for many years now, which both blunts and exacerbates the current feeling.

My dad did NOT like my first feature film, BRIGHTWOOD.

By the time he saw it his mind had already faded quite a bit and he was prone to occasional paranoia. After watching he got angry.

“This movie is just about killers. It’s about a terrible island of killers!”

Which is both hysterically inaccurate, while somehow being entirely correct.

I said this about my grandmother last week too, but I wonder what my dad would think of this new film. Of PRIME MATTER.

I expect he might find parts of it melodramatic. That was a regular complaint of his, although I think he was just as susceptible to it in his own work.

But then again… HE had ghost stories.

About his mother and father: They came to him in the middle of a poker game. His father standing silently in the recesses of the room’s shadows, while his mother — light, and bright and heavenly — told him not to worry, that she was alright. When he first told me this story I assumed he was on acid, but he was adamant that he wasn’t.

I like to think that when he shook off his mortal coil around midnight very early Saturday morning, it was because his mother’s ghost had come back to him, had offered him her hand and said, “Come, it’s alright, it’s your time now. Join us, you can rest.”

The following is a prayer I read at my maternal grandparent’s and great aunt’s funerals. It’s funny offering a rabbi’s prayer to my Protestant father, but I think it says it best, so I’ll leave it here.

It’s shorter and more articulate than the above, so consider it my thank you to you for making it this far.

Next week I promise there will be funny pictures. But until then:

“Death is not the enemy of life, but its friend, for it is the knowledge that our years are limited which makes them so precious. It is the truth that time is but lent to us which makes us, at our best, look upon our years as a trust handed into our temporary keeping. We are like children privileged to spend a day in a great park, a park filled with many gardens and playgrounds and azure-tinted lakes with white boats sailing upon the tranquil waves. True, the day allotted to each one of us is not the same in length, in light, in beauty. Some children of the earth are privileged to spend a long and a sunlit day in the garden of the earth. For others, the day is shorter, cloudier, and dusk descends more quickly as in a winter’s tale. But whether our life is a long summery day or a shorter wintry afternoon, we know that inevitably there are storms and squalls which overcast even the bluest heaven and there are sunlit rays which pierce the darkest autumn sky. The day that we are privileged to spend in the great park of life is not the same for all human beings but there is enough beauty and joy and gaiety in the hours if we will but treasure them. Then for each one of us the moment comes when the great nurse, Death, takes man, the child, by the hand and quietly says ‘It is time to go home. Night is coming. It is your bedtime, child of the earth. Come, you’re tired. Lie down at last in the quiet nursery of nature and sleep. Sleep well. The day is gone. Stars shine in the canopy of eternity.’”

- Dr. Robert W. Shapiro, Rabbi, Temple Emanuel

— Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 6/29/26

Tell me your ghost story.

No really, do it. Here:

https://primematterfilm.com/ I’ll wait.

…

Did you do it yet?

No?

Why not?

But it’s fun!! (And clever?)

And it’s definitely super helpful.

For me, I mean. But for you too! Cause it’s fun, right?!

I know you have one. Everyone does.

Not always their own. Sometimes it’s a friends, or an aunts, or a grandparents. But everyone has at least ONE.

So go ahead. Share it:

https://primematterfilm.com/

You made a movie! Awesome! And now what!?

Well, as everyone knows, you’ve gotta figure out how to sell it. And a single glance at even one of the avalanche of think pieces coming out on this very subject will tell you that the way to do that; the way to actually make sure your film has an audience is…[drumroll please] … to make sure you have already built an audience!

And as circular as that may sound, I don’t think it’s incorrect.

But it’s one thing to accurately state the challenge, and something entirely different to actually go about solving it.

For those of us that didn’t have the luxury/responsibility of spending the last ten+ years cultivating loyal audiences on YouTube, how can we find and build audiences before our films are finished?

With somewhere between 6-8 months before PRIME MATTER will conceivably become available for public consumption, I have the gift of that time to try and figure it out.

Now I do have some legs up.

As I shared in an earlier post, “Who is Going to Watch my Movie?!”: BRIGHTWOOD, the first film I did with writer/director Dane Elcar, did extremely well for a film so small and we built an outsized audience and fan base over its long release, but we also have almost NO WAY of directly contacting or even knowing who the vast majority of those people are.

Thanks Amazon! Loved doing business with you. (Seriously, and I’d love to do more, so call me! Let’s make PRIME MATTER an Amazon Studios Release.)

But on the off chance that you don’t… the not knowing who my customers are is something I need to remedy.

There are a million ways to skin that particular feline of Schrödinger’s, of course. And I’m going to do my best to try every one of them: from social media to social gatherings, UGC activations to IRL events. I have a list about 16 pages long full of potential marketing campaigns and publicity angles. Some of them are probably very terrible, some of them… hopefully like the “Share Your Ghost Story” campaign I’m sharing here — might be cool and might actually work?

Which reminds me… if you didn’t actually click through above yet, here’s another perfect opportunity: https://primematterfilm.com/

And because you’re already engaged and being so kind… I’d also love to know what you think of it too?

Did you find it easy to navigate? Did you find the UI appealing? Did you understand what you were supposed to do? Do you think it’s fun? Would you share it with friends? Does it make you want to watch the movie when it finally comes out?! Do you understand that the movie hasn’t actually come out yet?!? WIll you even remember you did this when it does at some point… probably in early 2027!?!?!

I really would love to know. I fact, I need to know. Because whether you know it or not, if you’re reading this, you’re already an integral part of this whole process and we’re going to need every evangelist we can get.

As far as the actual strategy so far? It’s pretty local. I’ve printed out 80 copies of 2 different posters, with different text and different QR codes so I can track which ones actually get scanned.

Once the rain stops I’ll walk around my neighborhood — conveniently the very neighborhood we shot 90% of the movie in — and I will post them on every goddamn lamppost and community board I can. I might put a sandwich board in front of my house too.

Will people actually scan them and tell me their stories? I hope so. But I really won’t know until I go ahead and try.

As I’ve said before, you can’t really think your way into making anything.

What I said at the very top of this essay is true. Or at least part of it is.

No matter who — everyone I’ve spoken to has a ghost story of some sort. And usually, I’ve found that they’re willing to tell it if you ask nicely.

Me personally? Of course I have a ghost story of my own:

If I’m being honest, I think she probably would’ve found BRIGHTWOOD sort of ridiculous and annoying and definitely too bloody for her taste.

But PRIME MATTER? I don’t know exactly what the film will be — it’s not finished yet of course. But if I had to take a guess anyways? I think she might like this one.

So, that’s my ghost story. Now will you tell me yours?

-Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 6/22/26

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When I arrive in Sunset Park, I’m not sure what to expect. I’m running a little late, am empty handed and sweatier than I’d like, but it’s time to make the best of it and jump in with two feet. Put on that classic charm, Woertendyke.

I ring the bell of the apartment I’ve been told to go to.

After a moment a voice, “Who’s this?”
”Max Woertendyke?,” I ask as if I’m not sure my name is the right answer.
”Who?”
But before I can answer fully, the door buzzes. ”Come upstairs,” I hear through the intercom.

Which is exactly what I do post haste, barreling through the front door, “Hiiiiii! I’m Max. You must be __________! Thanks so much for having me!!! This is so great!!” I gush as I take in my surroundings.

Two older women, both likely in their sixties, are sitting on a couch behind computers. I’d expected more people, but they seem friendly, if a little preoccupied.

One of them has headphones on, the other doesn’t, but they are seemingly listening to the same thing on the other end of their screens — something about how this was a remarkable gathering and how grateful the speaker was to the organizers, and also how this would be a fun, but also potentially challenging meeting — just as they had always been.

I take out my computer and the turkey sandwich I’d bought at the corner and claim a spot on the couch.

“I hope you brought your own headphones. It’s too loud if you didn’t,” one of them tells me.

I hadn’t.

What I was stepping into was my first Annual Meeting as a newly minted member of the New Day Films distribution coop. Founded in 1971 by four feminist filmmakers frustrated by mainstream distribution channels, the cooperative has grown to over 150 filmmaker-member-owners, and represents hundreds of documentary films on the educational market.

My first and only documentary, the 16-minute short WOMAN IN THE SKY, was accepted to New Day back in February which makes me one of the newer members of the coop and I was excited (and frankly a little bit anxious) to finally be meeting some of my fellow New Dayers.

WOMAN IN THE SKY follows Magda Salvesen, who was working at the Scottish Arts Council in 1970 when she met American abstract expressionist Jon Schueler. A few months later, he wrote a will leaving her the ENTIRE BODY of his work. Now the Executive Director and Lead Curator of The Jon Schueler Foundation, Magda has single handedly preserved his artistic legacy, ensuring the placement of his paintings in over 70 public collections including The Whitney, The Art Institute of Chicago, SFMoMA and many more.

As should be obvious to anyone paying even a fractional amount of attention, it’s a very different film than PRIME MATTER. Although both films do deal with the things (and feelings and memories and ghosts, metaphorical and not) that people leave behind. A few of Schueler’s paintings will actually also appear in PRIME MATTER so there’s that too!!

But WOMAN IN THE SKY is also different in it’s form and function. It’s a film I directed, self-financed (thanks to some money left to me by my great aunt, the remarkable Connie Martinson) — and perhaps most relevantly here — made for entirely different reasons (and with entirely different goals) than PRIME MATTER.

Conceived in the abstract as a pilot project for a doc-series about “Collectors” — I’ve always been fascinated by what it means to LOVE an inanimate object — it became immediately clear once we started filming, that Magda’s story was not that of any run-of-the-mill collector. And so the film became something far more intimate and honest and poetic in its conceptualization. It became something that was less targeted at some specific audience demo and became instead a piece of art. Made for myself, and in honor of my subject.

While PRIME MATTER is of course quite personal for the team of us that have poured the past year into it, it is also, at its heart, a film made for a ghost-loving, ticket buying AUDIENCE.

WOMAN IN THE SKY was ultimately made for me. And for Magda. Because I wanted to and could. General audiences be damned.

Once a film’s made of course though, it’s impossible to not think about how and where, and to whom it might appeal… and perhaps earn back some of what was spent making it. Into that gap, New Day stepped into my awareness.

I had never once consciously thought about the “educational market” — I don’t even think I really knew it existed. But I knew that short docs, especially those not belonging to the true-crime variety, weren’t exactly setting the entertainment market ablaze and as I began to articulate what my movie was actually about:

• An epic love story writ small across hundreds of canvases and thousands of pieces of archive grade paper.

• An investigation into the invisible labor (often left to widows and children) required of preserving an artist’s legacy after their death.

• A case study in the “gold standard” of estate archival.

• A 16-minute doc Executive Produced and shot by Superman.

I began to get excited about the prospect of defining and finding an audience for the film, and New Day Films seemed to offer a window into an audience that might be more amenable to a film like this than a random 20-something scrolling thru Tubi at 2am would be.

In the best case scenario, perhaps here would be a place that my film would make an outsized impact, earn some money and be seen by a niche but highly appreciative audience.

Worst case?

I’d learn something new, which even though focused on a completely different market, might end up proving useful for the release of PRIME MATTER.

And so I submitted. And I was accepted. And became a new member of New Day.

Being part of New Day requires much more than having your film picked up by an average small distributor does.

Being part of New Day means participating in New Day, and so, over the past week, I spent approximately 30 hours reading reports and engaging in conversations with my fellow filmmaker-members on topics ranging from how to better market our films, how to improve the onboarding of new members such as myself, and what it’s going to mean to actually transition the coop into a 501c3.

It’s been an exhilarating and frankly exhausting experience requiring committed attention and curiosity — especially because I have no first-hand experience working within the confines of an organized cooperative (the closest I ever got was attending my now-wife’s Brooklyn Heights coop board meetings slightly stoned), and because until this weekend I didn’t know ANYONE in the coop beyond a short zoom call or friendly email.

As a maker myself I have always relied on working with small tight knit teams of chosen collaborators — WOMAN IN THE SKY was made with friends and schoolmates, and partners of friends and schoolmates from Juilliard. PRIME MATTER was helmed by someone I’ve known for decades and the friends of friends whose VIBES were the most important factor when deciding whether we should bring them on to the project.

Jim Houghton, whose essence has been the guiding light for much of my producing work, told me once that art is not democratic. That all creative endeavours require the buck to stop with some-ONE.

Prime Matter: Art, Commerce, and the Process of Making

Re: "Shadow"

Hi Jim …

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5 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Max Woertendyke

And yet, here I am, participating in a vote with 60 other filmmakers, most of whom I’ve never met in person or at all for that matter, as to whether the coop’s budget for the next year passes muster and whether next year’s Annual Meeting should be taken off zoom and moved IRL. I find myself swimming in the midst of a flexible, amorphous grouping of fascinating, multi-generational, differently formed individual artists.

The tie that binds is not that I chose any of them individually, but that I opted in to a structural framework that binds us all together; the buck stopping with all of us and perhaps none of us at the same time.

So what have I learned so far? The first thing, perhaps unsurprisingly, is how much there is to learn — about the coop and how educational distribution works of course — but mainly about the people around me.

The woman who had asked if I had headphones? It turns out she was a Guggenheim Fellow, with films that have screened at Sundance and Tribeca and at The Whitney. Her family was also fully ensconced in the Communist Party and actively fought to integrate a town in Long Island back when redlining was just a matter of course.

Another member who hosted me on the 2nd and 3rd days of the meeting — she was not only one of the founders of New Day, but also responsible for some of the most iconic rock-and-roll photographs that came out of NYC in the late 60’s and early 70’s. She also, like Magda, cares for a long-gone artist’s estate, and like my mother, spends half her year in Italy.

I arrived at these meetings not only not knowing what to expect, but not knowing who to expect either. But I left them remembering that the most interesting thing is never a bullet point on a google doc or an option on a Doodle poll — it’s the people who make the agendas and polls to begin with.

Which I guess is part of why I started doing all this — an insatiable fascination about the PEOPLE (real and imagined) that surrounded me. What makes them tick? What do they reveal about myself the world we collectively inhabit by the stories they carry with them? How does that feed back into whatever I make next?

Which, of course, is the same question I ask about the imagined audiences of my films — whether they be blood-stained horror fans, or art history teachers.

Because a majority of the people who ultimately watch WOMAN IN THE SKY or PRIME MATTER will be strangers I don’t know and didn’t choose, arriving with a life I know nothing about — a childhood fighting for justice, a darkroom full of rock stars, a long shitty day at work that can only be soothed in the light of the silver screen.

And they won’t know me or my movie either — perhaps only inspired to show up thanks to a 30-second trailer designed to pique a sense of intrigue, or a random recommendation on Letterboxd, or an assigned film on a syllabus.

But the only way to reach through that separation; to close the gap; is to do what we do whenever we are trying to reach someone we don’t yet know: by being curious about who they are, what they’re carrying with them, and articulating what we have to offer in exchange.

I feel I keep accidentally beating a dead horse, but my obsession remains the same:

Don’t be interesting. Be interested. Even in distribution.

Prime Matter: Art, Commerce, and the Process of Making

"Don't Be Interesting. Be Interested."

The first in an occasional series of essays entitled, “Things my teachers said… some of which I listened to,” based on the wise saws I picked up primarily during my time at The Juilliard School of Drama…

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6 months ago · 1 like · Max Woertendyke

Max Woertendyke
- in Brooklyn, 6/14/26

But lots has already been done.

Two-and-a-half weeks after wrapping principal photography on Prime Matter, most of the immediate loose ends have been tied up.

I’ve CLEANED, pushed final paperwork out the door, writer/director Dane has morphed into writer/director/editor Dane and has already shared a rough cut of the film’s first reel.

Despite doing a lot of thinking and plotting and research to further develop a marketing and distribution plan for the film, I’m also back to reading other scripts, taking meetings about other projects, doing drop-off and pick-up at my kid’s school, watching the Knicks.

In short, life has kind of returned to what it was like before we started pre-pro in earnest and you’d think it would be relaxing.

After all, my days have shrunk from 16-17 hours of non-stop action to a much more modest 12 or 13. The biggest decision I will likely have to make today is figuring out what we’re going to have for dinner. I’m no longer navigating 12-20 personalities all crammed into the narrow hallways of my home and instead just handling the personality of one tiny 4-year old who insists on scooting from one end of the house to the other.

And yet…

I do not find myself relaxed.

Instead I find myself agitated, uneasy. Flitting from one thing to the next, chased by the sense that I am somehow forgetting something… or perhaps that something is forgetting me.

I’ve always found it funny that as a child of divorce I chose a career in which I am constantly MAKING, and then BREAKING, families.

I sometimes wonder if it’s a subconscious compulsion, a Freudian re-enactment, a kind of masochistic DIY exposure therapy… or maybe just the random luck of the draw.

I first noticed it doing theater, when I’d hole up with fellow cast for weeks at a time, spending my days rehearsing and my evenings performing then socializing, building intimacies and relationships with people that took the civilian population MONTHS, if not years, to cultivate:

Those weeks spent in the creative trenches together, revealing ourselves in the unnatural but required way that a theatrical process demands, allowing our emotional lives to visibly bubble under the work, and knowing that when it came time for showtime, the director and the producers would be gone and the only people left would be US and an unknown AUDIENCE.

And since I could never fully trust an audience (they do after all sit in the dark, while we play in the light), the only people I could fully rely on were my cast mates. They were who would make sure I was alright up there over the course of a run. And it was they who became my temporary family.

In these cases, saying goodbye at the end of a show was always a simile-stically mixed bittersweet symphony of so longs, farewells, and auf wiederseh'ns — made with intentionally true, but realistically questionable promises that you’d stay in touch and see each other soon.

But ending a play is different than ending a shoot.

Not least because when a play is over, it’s OVER FOREVER. Because once it stops being DONE every night, it essentially ceases to exist at all.

But a film… well it just keeps going at a different tempo.

Done are the 17 hour days with a crew all crammed into a one-bedroom apartment recording while two cast members stalk one another through a viewfinder, desperately attempting to understand the apocalyptic visions their characters are collectively experiencing.

Replacing that are 30 minute meetings about final cost reports, email chains back and forth about that one remaining macro pick-up shot of a compass, joyful but short-lived reunions at other events that are only tangentially related to the thing you’ve just finished capturing.

And yet, unlike a play, the work is nowhere near done. It just no longer takes up every minute of your day, every cell of grey and white matter.

PRIME MATTER in this case stops being the prime matter of every single day, and instead fades to become a part of the day’s fabric… at least until we’re ready to start pushing it out into the world.

This is of course a necessity.

One cannot perpetually be in the active state of MAKING an independent film. That would after all preclude ever completing it, which would mean you were never actually making a film in the first place, but rather an experience that resembles the making of one.

On one of the longer days on set, I had a conversation with our lead — the absolutely remarkable Carmen Berkeley who I am not kidding when I say you will all be so lucky to watch — about what doing the film meant to her.

It’s a paraphrase of course (so forgive me Carmen if you’re reading), but she expressed the joy of being able to throw herself fully into ONE THING. To be afforded the luxury of a SINGULARITY of THOUGHT that of course takes over when you are in almost every scene of a movie… or when you are ensuring that you capture every scene of that movie on time and under budget.

During production, I didn’t think about ANYTHING besides the film (in fact, the only other things I spent considerable energy on were this Substack (film related) and video messages to my wife and son who wisely fled NYC for a family road trip while we were shooting).

That doesn’t mean other things weren’t happening — the thousands of unread emails that awaited me at the end of production prove otherwise — but I’d given myself permission to not think about anything else during that period of time and I found that singularity of thought relaxing.

Tiring. But relaxing.

Or if relaxing isn’t quite the right word, then perhaps SOOTHING would be more accurate.

Because in a way, I’d forsaken the past and the future in preference of the PRESENT.

Or to connect it all back to the very first thing I wrote here, I was spending my time DOING, rather than THINKING.

In this way, wrapping principal photography was not just a goodbye to the daily interactions with my remarkable collaborators — my temporary and chosen family — it was a goodbye to the totality of focus that went with it and the soothing balm that absorption provided.

So what now?

Well, the only thing to do is to continue DOING all those little disparate and distracting things, to try and embrace the multiplicity of thoughts that invade my every waking (and often sleeping) moments knowing that eventually they will narrow again into one PRIME thing… at least for a time.

—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 6/8/26

This week for the first time, I have a guest essayist: Em Canon, founder of Dissoluta Studios, fellow producer on PRIME MATTER, and all around badass whose efforts and talents are inseparable from whatever this film will ultimately become.

When I asked Em to join me on this adventure, we’d only worked together once before (on a very different kind of project) and had only met a few times outside of that context.

But every once in a while you get a gut feeling about a person — a surprising certainty that they’re somehow the missing piece of a puzzle — and there’s very little that’s as satisfying as discovering your instinct was correct. Em proved to not only be the creative powerhouse I suspected, but a necessary and elemental force as we creatively and logistically punched far above our weight again and again.

And so when I asked if she might be interested in penning a guest post, I decided to once again trust my instinct (and hers) and see what would bubble to the surface without any formalized prompt or framework.

The result of that experiment is below, an essay about failure which seems to be in such direct conversation with the “I’m Losing Control” article that it seems as if we’d planned it… but I swear we did not.

Prime Matter: Art, Commerce, and the Process of Making

I'm Losing Control

When you’re an independent producer, you get used to doing a lot of things yourself…

Read more

3 months ago · 4 likes · Max Woertendyke

Just another example of the ways things work out. I’m excited to share her words with you below:

Unless you’ve paid attention to the names detailed in Max’s Substack, you probably won’t know who I am - so let’s do a quick download: I’m Em Canon, producer, production designer, prop master, and wardrobe department for Prime Matter. I’m also a ray of sunshine and a Sagittarius. And I’m also very tired.

About six months ago I got a call from a man who I met a handful of times (Max), asking me to come along for a pretty insane ride (Prime Matter), and ever since then despite a couple sleepless nights and a few failures (all on my account!), it’s been one of the best experiences in my career.

When I first came aboard this endeavor, I had a couple fears and a healthy dose of imposter syndrome. Let’s be very clear, I have experience with these roles, but I don’t have any experience doing them all at the same time without many assists. However, director Dane Elcar and producers Max Woertendyke and Megan Honey have quite a way of making anyone feel super human and ready to take on the world.

During filming I knew I’d have to flex some muscles I didn’t know I had, meditate between each scene, and take help whenever and however I could get it. Even with that in mind, I’ve failed. A lot.

In a mildly masochistic attempt to level with you all on the realities of production, let’s break down every single failure I had on this set:

DAY 1

Forgot a prop at base camp. Made another mistake I won’t realize til later: see DAY 3.

DAY 2

Typed out a background actor confirmation email, got distracted and didn’t press send. Minus one background actor day of.

DAY 3

SFX Blood rig fiasco - blood stain on carpet. AND didn’t get the right blood spurt for the shot.

Also realize a past mistake: totally swapped an entire wardrobe look on day 1 :(

For continuity I had to drop an entire look (my favorite one too) out of the film.

DAY 6

Totally blanked that a ghost character needed a hat. Tried to send the PA/my roommate/wardrobe department to go find one. End up using Dane the director’s beanie (RIP beanie, it was a really good one too.)

DAY 8

Didn’t realize we needed hot tea and tea kettle for a scene. Boiled water between scenes with a borrowed electric kettle.

DAY 9

Forgot to steam a shirt.

DAY 10

Had talent take off sweater when it was supposed to be on. Redo continuity so the newly coined “sweater politics” is seamless.

DAY 11

Fix prop teepee tent to be shorter and dirtier.

DAY 12

Put Max in a short sleeve priest shirt instead of a long sleeve.

DAY 14

Forgot limes for clubgoer’s drinks in club scene.

DAY 15

Forget many items in base camp (that have yet to be collected.)

And I’m sure many many more I’m forgetting or didn’t realize.

In indie filmmaking, especially in the art department, you face a Sisyphean task.

Every day is a hundred tiny details balancing precariously on top of one another, and there’s rarely enough time, money, or sleep to do any of them perfectly.

On this film, my biggest failure wasn’t forgetting a prop, a hat, a lime, or poor steaming. It was believing, over and over again, that any one mistake was big enough to derail the whole thing. Every small oversight felt catastrophic when I saw it reflected back on a monitor. Most people never even noticed these mistakes. A few did, mostly my co-producers Max and Megan, who became experts at spotting the panicked look in my eye from across a room.

But what I learned is that filmmaking isn’t the art of never failing. It’s the art of continuing after you do.

Because despite every forgotten prop, continuity error, wardrobe swap, missing lime, stained carpet, and abandoned beanie, we did make a movie. Not because everything went right, but because dozens of people kept showing up for one goal - to make the damn thing.

It’s incredibly easy to focus on the mini failures, but through that one is often blinded from the tiny moments of hope, joy, laughter, and accomplishment - the mini successes.

When we began this endeavor, Dane cited Tarkovsky’s idea that cinema is “sculpting in time,” that a film reveals itself through the process of making it. Somewhere along the way, that idea became the beating heart of our production family.

Through trust in each other, in the vision, and in our director, we learned to stop trying to control every inch of the process and instead meet the film where it was leading us. The movie, in some strange way, already was. We were simply the people tasked with uncovering it.

That’s the part nobody tells you about filmmaking: the movie isn’t made in spite of the failures.

It’s made through them.

MINI BIO:

Em Marie Canon is a producer, moving image artist, and mystic based in Brooklyn, NY. Often found building community in the corner of a dive bar with tarot cards, she centers her practice around intimacy, ritual, and collective experience. She is Co-Founder of Dissoluta Studios - a collective-minded film studio with a focus on queer femme artists.

Max here again. I was aware of most if not all of these “failures” but with few exceptions, I probably wouldn’t have classified them that way.

Mistakes sure, inconveniences yes, but mainly I would have just thought of them as less-than-optimized-results despite Em’s and our collective best efforts. Certainly, if the above can be considered capital F-Failures, then I have a full filing cabinet of my own.

Ultimately in the creative fields however, I think failure is hard to define in objective terms. It is instead driven by our own subjective standards, expectations, fears and desires, most of which have little to do with any shared external experience.

But that doesn’t make them feel any less real. And so hopefully we are able — as Em so wonderfully articulates — to find ways to turn our failures into Features, giving us the chance to discover a whole new slew of failures the next time we embark on an adventure of Making.

Max Woertendyke & Em Canon
— both in Brooklyn, 5/25/26-6/2/26

Search any platform where filmmakers congregate and you’ll find an endless supply of articles about “What a Producer Actually Does!”, and “What Being a Producer Actually Means!”

People will — rightfully — tell you that producers are story keepers, or that they’re logistics experts, or half-therapist/half-undercover bosses. They’ll tell you that producers develop scripts, support emerging talent, raise money, develop marketing plans and more.

And they’ll all be right. But for my entry into this crowded genre, I’d like to propose something slightly more modest:

Producers clean.

Now if I’m being honest, by the end of this essay I’m sure I’ll have found my way to a clever metaphor, but here at the beginning…? I really just mean exactly that.

Producers clean. Literally.

Like with sponges and brooms and vacuums and stuff.

Because for all the highfalutin and beautiful real talk about building stories and creating narratives, and developing a product that has an audience, and so on and so forth, there is something much more simple at play when you’re making a movie.

And that’s dealing with and managing the physical spaces you’re in.

That’s why I’ve spent the last 3 days since wrapping principal photography on Prime Matter erasing as many traces as possible of our presence in the spaces that aren’t ours, and organizing the ones that are so that the remnants of our shoot take up the smallest footprint possible for the time being.

Because even though the temporal experience of shooting the film has come to an end, the spaces we shot it in persist.

When you eventually (hopefully? Definitely, right?!) see Prime Matter, you’ll see that it takes place over approximately 7 major locations — most of which I was able to obtain thanks to personal relationships I’ve developed over the years.

Fellow New Yorkers were willing to let us into their houses, their homes, their places of work and worship — and I can guarantee that it wasn’t because I made them a financial offer they couldn’t refuse.

For the most part they said yes because they like me and they trust me.

What did they trust me to do you might ask?

They trusted me to be grateful about it and to leave their locations in as good, if not better shape than when I arrived…

In other words, they trusted me to clean up after myself (and ~20 other people).

And since I like keeping friends, and I like making movies and I’d like to make more, I did my best to leave as little mess in our wake as possible.

Now, not leaving garbage behind is not quite the same as not making any.

At some point in the near future, I will write a post (probably called, “Indie Filmmaking is Garbage”) about just how much trash even a small independent film creates — everything from pieces of gaf tape to crumbled sides, crushed Diet Coke cans to crafty wrappers, blood rig tubes to carved out prop candles.

And while we instituted a number of plans and frameworks to help mitigate trash creation we did not succeed in stemming it completely. Making a film leaves behind a residue, a collection of waste byproducts sloughed off during the creative endeavor.

And the only thing to do with all that flotsam and jetsam is to make sure someone cleans it up.

One of my preferred truisms in those “What a Producer Does!” essays is that we do everything we can’t afford to pay or convince someone else to do for us.

And while there are plenty of people who see value in working on their first feature even if it’s at a lower rate than they get for doing commercial work for Dior, or in a department that they want to break into, I’ve yet to find the film worker who feels the deep drive to get involved in an independent film so they can get better at scrubbing tape residue off a floor.

And since a film like ours benefits best from putting our budget ON SCREEN, we aren’t in a position to just hire someone to let us pretend that we aren’t making a mess.

So… it is the producers who clean.

We clean so we can come and shoot again.

We clean because it’s the promise we made to whoever is hooking us up.

We clean so we don’t have to spend every day looking around at the mess of our location and thinking, “ugh” or “blegh” or “gross”.

We clean because it helps create an ENVIRONMENT in which people are more likely to do better work.

And while there may be much that is out of our control when making a film — as I wrote about LAST WEEK — whether the floor is vacuumed or not is something we don’t have to leave up to fate.

Richard Feldman, who taught me to be interested, rather than interesting, also used to tell us that “the work is the way we talk about it;” that our vocalized perception of something has a profound impact on the way we think about it. Saying “I have to do this” vs “I get to do this” can vastly change the way you feel about the “THIS”, what that might be.

I think a similar thing is true about spaces — we work in them the way they feel to us.

If we feel we are sitting in garbage while working on a creative endeavor, we may subconsciously begin to think that the thing we are making is also garbage. Even worse, we may begin to have a sneaking suspicion that our collaborators and even ourselves are also garbage (metaphysically speaking of course). If we’re sitting in a room full of trash after all, why wouldn’t we assume that it’s trash that belongs there.

When I set out to make a project, I want to feel proud of what we make. I want to inherently intuit its VALUE and I want my collaborators to feel the same way. I know for many people it’s just another job, but I do genuinely hope it’s at least a really worthwhile one.

Because just like I want to go back to people who lent me a location, I want to be able to go back to my collaborators again and again and entice them to come spend another adventure with me.

Hopefully one that feels like it’s worth something, one that isn’t entirely disposable, meant for the trash heap. In other words, an adventure that has the exact opposite traits of how we’d define garbage.

And so I guess there’s my metaphor. Producing is cleaning, literally and physically, yes, but also it is about insisting — in the most mundane way possible — that what we make has value, and that the people making it do too.

So here’s to making a mess… and then cleaning it all up.

—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 5/26/26

When you’re an independent producer, you get used to doing a lot of things yourself.

Partially by necessity, partially by habit, the result is the same: you find yourself in some semblance of CONTROL over a vast number of creative, structural and budgetary choices:

Script approvals, cast approvals, hiring, firing, schedule, budget, locations, input on wardrobe and props and set dec… the snacks at crafty and the meals at lunch time; transport, rentals, OT, petty cash.

The list goes on.

It really sometimes feels like you’re in charge of EVERYTHING.

But ultimately that control is only a facade.

And now, at the start of our third week of shooting PRIME MATTER, the facade has noticeably cracked.

The reasons for this are multitudinous:

I’m tired for one. 17 hour days will do that to a person. It’s hard to stay ahead of the literal thousands of choices being made every day on a film set when you’re physically behind.

We’re also far afield from the heady days of planning, and fully in the kinetic days of DOING which means decisions need to be made in the NOW by the immediate decision makers. There is less time for individual or collective plotting which means it’s harder to control both literal and energetic OUTCOMES in the moment. We can’t stop production to have a group conversation about about how our lighting setups are or aren’t totally aligned with a theoretical shooting philosophy; we need to just get the damn thing lit beautifully and start shooting.

The NUMBER ONE reason I’ve lost control however is (tone shift) my collaborators are so damn good at their jobs that I can let myself let go of control because it would be impossible to not only keep up, but try and commandeer them.

Insisting on managing choices in these cases would be a limiting factor as opposed to an expanding one. Besides I have enough on my own plate to worry about.

Now don’t get me wrong, just cause everyone is a badass who has demonstrably gone above and beyond any normal level of effort and delivery, doesn’t mean that mistakes are never made, or intentional decisions that I disagree with are landed upon. Nor does it mean there aren’t times when I regret not having the bandwidth to control more outcomes than I do, if only because like all people my first instinct is to like my idea the best at first glance.

There are times on set I still definitely step in other lanes.

Today for instance, covered in blood, preparing for a pivotal scene for my character, I felt the need to point out that I saw a reflection I didn’t like in the monitor. Or at lunch, (also still covered in blood) I had to strategize with our 1st AD about what to do if we found ourselves pushing up against the limits of our day while trying to capture the final scene of the day (2nd meal, forced call bonuses and a LOT OF public gratitude is what we landed on). It was all I could do to not make a certain suggestion about an alternative coverage suggestion.

But letting go doesn’t mean not caring, because there is an art to letting go. Or perhaps more accurately, to knowing when you don’t have to hang on so tight. And it can offer unexpected rewards when you let go of the reins and let someone else take over.

Watching fellow producer (and production designer and wardrobe and props) Em Canon make her way through the maze of necessary wardrobe changes scene to non-chronological scene boggles my mind. The idea of trying to do anything more than watch in wonder would be absurd (although of course today I also couldn’t help myself from suggesting that perhaps my shirt did require a bit more carnage).

Knowing that Megan Honey, another of our producers, is handling the day-to-day of perhaps the two most important things in any production — payroll and meals — provides me a divine sense of calm… even though I still want to know whether she’s ordering lunch from Glaze or Empanada Mama, and every time she has to send corrections to our payroll company (too many times to enumerate here, and way too many times to ever use the same company again — but I’ll save that for a preferred vendors post).

Then there is always a dreamy period of time in pre-production of every film I’ve ever worked on where I think to myself “I could direct this movie, I know this movie better than ANYONE else,” and the hilarious/kinda true thing is that I always mean it — but watching director (and writer and cinematographer and camera op and editor) Dane Elcar work in real time — choosing when to stick to the plan and insist on those dolly shots or when to improvise and combine three shots into one set-up, when to acquiesce to our fantastic AD’s proddings regarding time (and by association my and Megan’s purview as it relates to budget) and when to push back and insist on taking the time needed to get off one more take — I’m reminded how foolish one can be during pre-pro because the truth is that there is no way I could control the image of the camera the way he does… and frankly I wouldn’t want to.

So what is there left to control when all my collaborators — along with the rest of our team — are doing such a good job controlling the things on their plate?

Well, when I’m on screen, I control my performance, which ironically requires the willingness to give up some control and see where the scene takes me so that I can allow myself to be surprised by our lead Carmen’s astounding performance; letting myself be INTERESTED rather than trying to be INTERESTING.

And when I’m not performing, the place where I can exert the most control is in accepting that fact.

In being willing to sit back and watch other people do great work.

In occasionally letting things happen in a way that are different from how I would do them but TRUSTING that my collaborators are as intentional and interested as I am even if their decisions aren’t ones I would personally make.

Thinking on it, perhaps I’ve never really been in control of what the outcomes on this film would be, so much as I am in control of the film’s environment, and how that allows for a place and space where others can take the control they need and I can trust that they will use it wisely.

And as I finish typing this at 1:13am, with dried blood from the day still lightly staining my face, and a 6:30am wake up time ahead of me, I think the final thing I can control is signing off and taking a shower before we start again tomorrow.

-Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 5/19/26

A plan based on whatever images you have in your head, designed to translate them from the theoretical to the actual.

And yet. No matter how much you imagine something, once you start making it you are forced to deal with all of reality’s preconditions and restrictions.

Those constraints often make it impossible to perfectly replicate the image you’ve spent weeks (or months, or years) dreaming of.

For me, it is that GAP — between the imagined and the real — that offers the clearest glimpse into a working creative process. Because it is where a maker must — in the moment of challenge — assess, adapt, pivot and produce.

What comes out is almost never exactly what you imagined it would be. But often it’s better; its imperfection in comparison to the imagined platonic image the very thing that proves its existence, its REALNESS.

Dane Elcar, the writer and director of PRIME MATTER, often says the film is starting to make itself.

Orson Welles said, “No fine movie was ever made by a director who wants everything to be perfect. Because every bad painting has every leaf in the tree, and every great painting makes you see a tree.”

Below are a few of the leaves, and a few of the trees we’ve captured so far. I hope you find them as intriguing and exciting as I do.

— Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 5/11/26

Friday, May 1st (72 hours before we start shooting)

8:30am — Wake up feeling under the weather. It’s probably just allergies… Right?
8:40 — Pound 2 liters of water with mixed in Vitamin C packets
9:00 — Stop at the liquor store to buy a bottle of gin as a thank you
9:10 — Dane and I load into the car
9:17 — Stop at the bank to pick up cash
9:28 — Meet the person lending us a shit-ton of amazing gear. Hand them cash and gin, say “thanks” effusively and load everything into the car.
10:05 — Land back at basecamp, load all the gear in
10:15 — Grab my non-stick shift car (so I can drive) and begin to head into Manhattan
10:27 — Remember there is a 90lb TV from the early oughts in the trunk
10:30 — Unload that TV to basecamp and carry it up three flights of stairs — maybe it’ll be a cool set dec addition?
10:55 — Get back into the car and actually get on the road
11:00 — Take our final production meeting while crossing the Williamsburg Bridge
11:10 — Producer Em begins driving to New Jersey to get a prop watch engraved
11:30 — Arrive at our rental house
11:38 — Get worried when I think we might not have enough room in the hatchback to fit the final 4x4
12:30 — Finally arrive back in Brooklyn (NYC TRAFFIC!!!!) and load all gear into basecamp
12:50 — Make lunch (thanks A&C Super for the delicious baguette)
1:00 — Dane meets with actress Dana Berger to rehearse, I write emails, SFX supe Dave starts driving up from North Carolina with additional gear
1:30 — Go to the paint store to buy paint that matches the ceiling of our location so we can create a fake ceiling in the basement
1:41 — Return home and wire the remaining portion of payroll to our payroll company. Our bank account is now only 4 digits
2:30 — Dane paints tin ceiling tiles, I work on my lines
4:00 — Em heads out to do our Costco run (prayer hands)
4:30 — Take a break from lines and finish issuing all outstanding COIs and start putting together contract packets for cast to sign on their first days on set.
6:06 — Start writing this as Dane and our gaffer Christian meet up to go through all our gear
6:22 — Realize that we never confirmed our walkie pick-up and now it’s past 5pm on Friday (ooops)
6:26 — Write a bunch of email and make some calls to try and remedy that situation
6:45 — Eat dinner (spicy soup) and pound another few liters of water
7:00 — Make some schedule tweaks based on updated script pages
8:00 — Go back to running lines
10:00 — Go to sleep
10:03 — Get out of bed and draft a preemptive LinkedIn post shouting out Dane, Em and Megan and schedule it go out the morning of the 4th.
10:26 — Get back into bed (and hopefully fall asleep)

Saturday, May 2, 2026 (47 hours before we start shooting)

8:54 — Wake up later than expected, but also feeling better than feared
9:30 — Strategize with Dane and Dave in regards to the day’s plan over both too much and not enough coffee
10:00 — Dave and Dane run through all camera gear ensuring all monitors and wireless devices are functional — they aren’t. One in particular is causing trouble.
10:32 — Go downstairs to avoid letting the monitor situation stress me out and print updated scenes based on Dane’s final re-writes to distribute instead
12:36 — Em arrives and starts labeling ALL wardrobe for run-of-show (She’ll be doing this for the next many hours)
1:05 — Update the strip board with what I hope will be the last major shift in our schedule
2:35 — Head to Home Depot for a final slew of little things we need: carabiners, little locks, water jugs, A-clips, gorilla tape, gravel. Hopefully the last major shopping trip until next weekend.
4:17 — return and unload everything into basecamp, then sit on the stoop with my three-and-a-half year old as we fill up some empty sandbags with the gravel I just bought
5:20 — Dane and Em review wardrobe plan for entire shoot and make final tweaks, including a pair of pants I’ll be wearing. Thankfully, I too prefer the new pair
5:45 — Dave works his magic on our confessional booth, adding window trim and additional aesthetic elements that make it look more worn while I add some additional support beams to the freestanding confessional walls.
6:15 — Em arranges final set dec and prop purchases (Facebook Marketplace) and heads home for the night for a final family dinner before we start
6:30 — I have my own final family dinner before our 16 hour days begin: tortellini
7:36 — Run lines for my Monday scenes
9:00 — Line Producer Megan lands after flying in from California

Sunday, May 3, 2026 (22 hours before we start shooting)

8:10 — wake up from a dream that we were already shooting
8:30 — throw in a load of laundry and pick up the most egregious messes in the house given that for the next 6 days I won’t be picking up much of anything
9:10 — meet up with Dane and Dave at the apartment location as they plan which inserts they can grab outside of principal photography, before we strategize about what gear is going in which cars, and how still we’re going to make our “line on the ceiling” without actually damaging it.
10:33 — Dane sends finalized shot list with instructions to “send it to print!” as he starts organizing his “bible”
10:52 — hear back about the walkies - -I can either pay an extra $85 to pick them up today or figure out who has free hands to get them tomorrow. Neither is a great option.
11:15 — went to Pilates cause you know, strong inside and out… or something
12:30 — back at the house and continuing finalizing contracts.
12:37 — decide to get the walkies today and have one less thing to worry about tomorrow
12:45 — scout our Brooklyn EXT one more time while we can now that Dave is in town
1:20 — Dane and Dave go shopping for washers so they can jerry rig the camera cage to get our focus puller to work more effectively
1:45 — remind myself how to send call sheets through Studio Binder and then remind myself how to create sides on Studio Binder
2:22 — after reviewing for the 5th time and still being certain there’s some small typo somewhere, I hit SEND
2:23 — CONFIRM my own call sheet
2:40 — get an email from the walkie company — turns out picking them up today isn’t an additional $85, it’s an additional $295!
2:42 — Get on the phone and confirm that we WON’T be picking up them up at 4pm today
3:02 — print hard copy sides and call sheets for everyone tomorrow (this will only be the beginning of my printing)
3:34 — Em and Megan arrive with final props and set dec
4:00 — we allow ourselves a collective and pre-emptive pat on the back for all we’ve done so far and then get back down to work: Megan sorting out crafty, Em organizing final set dec, Dane and Dave organizing gear so it’s ready to load tomorrow morning, me, back to filling out paperwork
5:30 — Dane and Dave drive over to our gaffer Christian’s house to pick up some final pieces of gear
6-8:30 - PRINTING. LOTS OF PRINTING. It seems like too long to be PRINTING, but it’s accurate: shot lists, shooting schedules, contracts, time sheets, signage, etc.
8:40 — begin panicking because I can’t find the belt that I’m supposed to wear with my costume tomorrow
9:00 — take a break from panicking while I make sure all our paperwork and production team stuff is ready to go tomorrow
9:15 — eat dinner
9:30 — go back to looking for this damn belt
9:43 — give up for now
9:49 — finish writing this substack (everything here after is an educated guess)
9:59 — look for the belt some more
10:05 — find it under a pile somewhere
10:08 — take a shower and trim my beard
10:30 — go to sleep

Monday, May 4, 2026 (2 hours till shooting)

5:50am — wake up to my alarm and get the day started.

It wasn’t until the middle of my first year at Juilliard that one of my teachers — René Houtrides — articulated the power of YES to me.

And it wasn’t until many years after that, that a different group of people taught me the value of NO while sitting backstage at The Public Theater during the run of Tony Kushner’s Bright Room Called Day.

But the friction between those two simple words: YES/NO underlie almost every part of what I see as a defining tension between art and commerce.

Saying YES allows possibility.

NO creates boundaries.

YES is necessary for the creative act, while NO is a requirement if one hopes to attach universally recognized VALUE to the effort that embracing those YESES requires.

(And hey! You don’t take my word for it — check out Things Agents Want for some real life examples of how yesses and nos are used to negotiate agreed upon terms of employment.)

If I were to point to one principle in my early development as an artist and maker, it would be that I got everything I ever got (professionally) by saying “YES” a lot.

Wanna come do this random play? Yes.
Want to go to this random event? Yes.
Wanna meet these random people? Yes.
Want to take this random class? Yes.

In some ways it was a double edged sword, and I’m sure someone could convincingly accuse younger me of having a hidden but deep-seated FOMO. It certainly meant that I did a lot of (sometimes bad) random plays, met a lot of (weird) random people, and definitely found myself at a wide variety of events and classes (ohhhh…. the classes…. but that’s for another post) that me (and my bank account) could have done without.

But it also meant that I rarely deprived myself of relationships and experiences that I might have otherwise genuinely missed.

This instinct — by nature or nurture — followed me to Juilliard. In some ways it’s what led me there in the first place; and it was a trait that was encouraged by both my fellow classmates and teachers.

It’s worth noting that I never intended to go back to school for acting. I’d majored in History and English Lit at McGill University — with a minor in joint rolling — and when I left I was pretty sure I was done with school of all kinds. If you’d told me I was going to go back to drama school as a graduate student I probably would’ve laughed.

“No. That’s ridiculous,” I would’ve said. “Why would I go back to drama school — I’m gonna be in Marvel movies before you know it.”

In a funny way, attending Juilliard was a result of that fantasy’s failure; the inversion of my original NO re-shaped into a YES by the realities of a few years of being a semi-professional off-off-off Broadway actor who kept getting asked to take on more interesting and fulfilling work at my non-profit job. But who was not quite ready to give up the dream and take the best plan-B a boy could have.

And so, I eventually said YES to auditioning for grad schools, a NO to a promotion at my day job, and found myself on the path that inevitably led to this very essay you’re reading today.

One of the powers of YES is that it saves you from cynicism.

The first year of acting school is frankly fertile ground for cynicism and sarcasm. Because it is to some degree all the clichés you’re imagining: a lot of rolling around on the floor, contact improvs, FEELINGS, and engaging in fantastical imaginative play — what it feels like to take a journey down to the bottom of the ocean, put on an imaginary (but literal) tinfoil hat, or what it might be like to be a tiger stalking through a prehistoric forest.

If you’ve done acting before — and especially if you’d been doing it professionally or even semi-professionally — it can be easy to approach this sort of imaginative play with a kind of too-cool-for-school attitude.

A kind of “been there, done that” point of view that undermines the simple childish wonder that allows a person to be utterly ridiculous without any embarrassment…

…Which to some degree is the entire challenge of acting.

How do I make this game of pretend feel real enough to an audience that they stop thinking I look like a crazy and stupid person and instead let themselves be moved by the story in front of them.

Despite the potential pitfalls of pessimism, there were two very distinct [given] circumstances of my return to drama school that buttressed my ability to say YES to most everything that came my way:

The first was that, I‘d never intended to go. And I certainly had never intended to go into debt to do so.

But, hey! Here I was!

With student loans for the first time in my life, pursuing a career that NO ONE has ever called a financial sure-thing (thanks to a strong American dollar, and Canada’s socialized education I’d been able to avoid this fate in undergrad).

If I was going to risk putting myself in a financial straight jacket, I was also definitely going to take my schooling for EVERY SINGLE PENNY it was worth. There was zero world I was going to throw away one red cent of experience for a fleeting sense of superiority.

The second reason was my classmates.

If you don’t know, Juilliard accepts both graduate and undergraduate students into the same class. This meant that I would be sharing a class with 17- and 18-year-olds right out of high school. And while there were certainly times that I was aware of their age, I found their enthusiasm exhilarating — I mean, these kids were LIVING THEIR DREAMS — like literally living them.

I’ll never forget meeting fellow classmate Brandon Micheal Hall who had come to NYC for the first time to audition for Juilliard, who’d been told by his football coach in Carolina that he was never going to get in, whose embrace of YES in our early morning calisthenics (“calisthenics” makes it sound way less intense than it was, trust me!) set the bar for enthusiasm — to have him in class next to me, saying YES to every single thing that came his way — the only appropriate response, in my mind, was to say YES even louder, till we’d egg ourselves into a frothy and sweaty mutual affirmation.

And so… YES I said.

YES, I did.

With every ounce of my being. And to the best of my ability.

At the end of every semester, we’d have something called a circle meeting in which Jim Houghton would sit us down along with the whole faculty and we’d collectively discuss the events of the semester and what we’d learned.

After, we’d have one-on-one “reviews” with our teachers who would offer their own assessments of our progress — and whether they felt our own perceptions were accurate.

This particular review session must have been the 2nd or 3rd of my first year, and it was going much as expected. The "yesses” I’d been giving were paying off — not only in terms of what I was soaking in as a student, but in terms of ingratiating myself with my teachers as well, all of whom seemed to appreciate my go-get-em attitude about as much as I intended them to.

So it was with a feeling of growing validation that I finally found myself sitting across from René, who taught both Tai Chi and a class called POV (in which we were exposed to different creative “Points of View”).

René had (and still has) a remarkable way of sitting silently, waiting for you to speak. Creating an expectant emptiness that I think most people — myself certainly included — feel a compulsive need to fill.

Sometimes the instinct for YES is really an instinct for NO to uncomfortable silences.

And so I was going on about what I’d discovered, how I’d grown, the challenges I was facing, where I was aiming to improve, what I’d successfully done, so on and so forth when she stopped me.

“One of the things I like about you,” she said…

(I don’t actually remember if she said that, but I like the way it sounds in my memory. As another teacher of mine once said “Don’t get it RIGHT, get it TRUE!”)

“…is that you are inclined to say YES to everything we throw at you.”

“YES!” I enthusiastically agreed before beginning to itemize all the ways she was correct in her assessment of me, going on and on again, until I began to notice that rather than eliciting the little smiles and sighs of affirmation, my laundry list was being met with a cool noncommittal silence.

I began to drift off, letting the roaring hush of silence rise up between us for a moment.

“The value in saying YES so often,” she said…

”…is that it makes people know you mean it when you finally say NO.”

Ultimately, I did not learn to say NO while at school.

And while I would never want to trade the positivity and keenness that were the hallmarks of my experience during that time, I do think my rejection of this powerful two-letter word, NO — perhaps influenced by my own dislike of having others direct it at me — haunted me in my first few years as a post-graduate professional.

Because the YES that had gotten me everything began to become a means of conflict aversion, rather than an expansion of experience.

To be continued in a future installment of Things My Teachers Told Me…Some of Which I listened To about Edward Albee and his advice to us: “There are only two things you need to know how to say in this business: NO. And GO F*CK YOURSELF.”

-Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 4/26/26

A few weeks ago in my essay “My First Major Mistake, I shared that most every project I’ve made prior to PRIME MATTER has been stacked with friends I could just call up and ask to be in my movie.

I’m spoiled to have so many talented friends, and lucky that they usually say “yes” but this film was a little different.

It required actors I didn’t have in my rolodex. So we had to find them the old fashioned way.

We saw lots of good audition, but most excitingly and in almost EVERY case, there was someONE who jumped out at us, made us sit up and say “Oh hellz yes. We need them!”

In the past that feeling would be followed immediately by a text and call to said person, but since I didn’t actually know these people my usual, “hey hey! working on something cool and thinking about you,” text instead had to be an “OFFICIAL OFFER”… to their AGENT.

Now, if you’ve never negotiated deal points with an agent, you’ve probably never really thought about all the things they are going to want (for themselves and their clients).

But just because you haven’t thought about it, doesn’t mean they haven’t!

In fact, thinking and negotiating about these very things is precisely how they earn their 10% of those sweet daily minimums we’re able to offer.

Producing has forced me to become a better negotiator than I ever was as a performer.

As an actor, I was always inclined to people please in an effort to make sure people LIKED me and would invite me back.

But as a producer, you’re the person doing the hiring rather than the person looking to get hired. That changes things.

There is also a level of legal and fiscal responsibility that demands a less sentimental assessment of your circumstances when trying to put all the necessary pieces together to make a film work.

As an actor, you don’t ever think whether lunches cost $16/plate or $18/plate — it makes no difference to you, nor should it!

But when you’re a producer serving 500 lunches over the course of your shoot, the differences start to add up.

You have to become comfortable navigating those spots of friction and negotiating through them in a way that successfully balances the needs of the production and the needs of the people who are going to actually help make it awesome.

Below are some of the things I learned that agents ask for. It isn’t exhaustive, and it’s definitely aimed at INDEPENDENT MAKERS hiring WORKING PERFORMERS at INDEPENDENT BUDGETS.

There are stories of weeks long negotiations and thousands of dollars of lawyer fees when negotiating for an “and” instead of a “with” before a client’s name in a major studio picture. That’s not what this is.

A lot of it’s standard and wildly obvious to anyone who has ever done it, but if you haven’t and you think you might be soon, better to be prepared.

“Yea, of course!”

What are the dates my client is shooting?
You can’t book an actor if you don’t have dates. No agent worth their salt is going to take their client off the market for some unspecified period of time while you figure it out, so… nail down that DOOD, dude.

How many days are you booking them?
Are you booking them for ONE DAY, or FOURTEEN DAYS? It makes a difference, especially to the agent who only gets paid when their client does. More days means a bigger pay check, but it also means more days off the market and in many cases a 3-day Guest Star can pay 3 times more than a 3-week indie shoot.

How much are they getting paid (and is it plus 10%)?
Rod Tidwell said it best... (that’s a Jerry Maguire reference, which is hilarious because I had to look up which character actually yelled, “SHOW ME THE MONEY!” But now I know. The answer: Rod Tidwell). At the end of the day, no one does an indie movie for the paycheck. It’s usually because they love the material or love to work. And yet, it’s still a JOB and not a passion project — especially not for the agent sitting on the other end of the line who was hoping their client was going to become a series regular on the next season of “The Pitt” instead of doing whatever weird movie you’re doing.

Depending on your contract, and whether you’re shooting union or non-union, there may be minimums you have to meet which helps set a floor for these conversations. It’s also industry standard to offer 10% above a client’s daily salary to cover the agent’s commission, which is frankly a reasonable ask when you’re working at truly independent budgets.

What kind of dressing facility will my client get?
Is it a trailer, a honeywagon, a spare bedroom, or a public bathroom? On most NYC indies, Option #1 and #2 are cost prohibitive. Which means you’re probably looking at Option #3 (avoid Option #4 the best you can please!!!) We offered private dressing space for everyone (which was a no brainer) and also Most Favored Nations, which is just a strange phrase that means, “no worse than anyone else.”

Can my client have bio/photo approval?
I don’t really know why anyone wouldn’t agree to this. I want people to look and be described as THEY want to be described. Who wouldn’t?

“Not a Problem…”

What about travel & lodging accommodations for my client during the shoot? Is there a per diem?
Our casting call made clear that we were only looking for NY Local Hires — specifically because we didn’t have budget to fly people in from elsewhere and put them up at hotels.

But providing daily transportation proved to be over-looked and under-rated. We ultimately offered Uber reimbursements for super early or very late calls to pretty much everyone, and truthfully even if it’s not contractual we’re likely to offer to folks anyway if the situation demands it — the last thing we want is for someone to leave set at 1am after a 12-hour day and get stuck underground on their way home, or worse. For actors who are going to be on SET ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, it is also in everyone’s best interest — the film included — to make sure they get the rest they need over the course of the shoot.

The budgetary irony of course is that the farther away a person lives from set, the more expensive this transportation gets… and the more necessary it becomes… so tuck something aside before you even start.

Hair & Make Up / Wardrobe Approval
What we’ve offered whenever it comes up is “meaningful consult”, but not “approval.” The reason for this is purely practical. We wanted these actors in the film because we loved the essence they brought to their auditions and we’d be fools to not want their input, but in a film that is essentially going to try and woo audiences on genre and story-telling moxie, we can’t afford to find ourselves with a character who should look “bloodshot and exhausted” but ends up with a smokey eye Sophia Loren would be proud of simply because that’s what they approve of.

“Sure…ish”

Is there any net profit participation? What about a streaming bonus?
This has come up on almost every indie film I’ve been privy enough to peek behind the curtain on, including ones I’ve made with friends. The answer often has to be “no” simply because the pool is usually already diluted by the time casting *roles* around (especially if your cast isn’t directly driving international pre-sales or financing), or it needs to be retained for writers, directors and producers who have spent the last year or more of their lives putting this thing together with little or no pay. But it would be crazy for agents to not ask, and under the right circumstances, I think it’s something producers (myself included) should consider, if they’re able. High tides rise all boats, right? And it never hurts to give the person or people who are going to be the literal face of your movie a little skin in the game… so if you can swing it, think about it. And if you can’t, then say no and protect what you need so you can keep on keeping on.

Credits
There is a surprising amount of agita around credits. I found most agents asked for Main Titles (meaning those at the top of the film), almost regardless of the size of their client’s role. In our particular case, we are unlikely to have main titles, so the negotiations shift to placement and visibility in the end titles. Many agents asked for “single card” which means that their name would be the only one on the screen for a period of time, which we only guaranteed to our lead. In most cases, we essentially broke characters into groups and assured reps that no one would get “worse” billing than anyone else in the same grouping. (This grouping of people is sort of like trying to figure out who is sitting at which table at your wedding… depending on the size of your cast? Good luck.)

Can my client have invites to every festival, for them and a guest, oh and what about transportation and accommodations?
The first time an agent asked if their client could have an invite to a festival I was like, “Yea of course! We’d love to have them there!” At the time I didn’t realize that when they said “invite” they meant “buy a ticket”. Which I’m happy to do… but I do wish I’d realized that before I set the precedent. Because the truth is for a film like ours, there is NO budget for film festival attendance for ANYONE — not even the Writer/Director or myself.

Which means if we go to a festival, I’ll be going on my own dime and if I agree to invite people, or help them travel, they’ll be going on my own dime too. That’s okay, and we’ll figure it out — we want everyone to be there to watch the film in a dark room with a bunch of strangers! But setting a floor does not preclude a ceiling so even though I’d like to be a bit more conservative on this point in the future I can always still just choose to fly us all out to Cannes if we hit the jackpot… coach of course.

Paid Ads
The first time i saw this phrase I flipped out: “You mean I’m supposed to pay THEM every time I run an ad!?! Are you fucking kidding me?! Fine I get it if you’re running billboards on Sunset and TV spots during the World Series, but I’m planning on running a few thousand dollars of digital ads on goddamnd Facebook in hopes of turning it into a few additional thousand dollars!!! Facebooooook! This is insane!!”

It turns out that was insane, because that wasn’t at all what it meant. What I learned was that when agents are asking for “paid ads” it means they’re asking that their client’s name be included on all paid advertising, which is a much more reasonable ask, if you ask me. Now I’m sure there are a million reasons why this becomes an issue on big studio movies, but as far as I’m concerned if you’re going to be the lead of a movie, then you deserve to have your name on the poster… provided there are any names at all.

The language I’ve settled on here is “Inclusion in paid ads with visible billing, subject to excepted ads and standard exclusions.” It gives us the freedom to create text free cool vibe-y ads without billing while still promising a name’s appearance on more traditional ads.

So that’s most of it — there were a few others. Some outliers, and few things I found bizarre or annoying, or interesting, but which I don’t think are particularly standard.

The old cliché is that it’s show BUSINESS, kid. And all of this is part of the business.

For those of us operating in a truly independent space — we’re trying to balance the very real legal and financial demands of BUSINESS (every film is essentially a new start-up), while remaining bold in our ARTISTIC choices, while also attempting to hold together the artists, employers, makers and collaborators who come together and create something larger than the sum of its parts. It’s a tough challenge, but it’s also pretty fun.

If producing is problem solving, then there’s no better problem to have than figuring out how to get the people you most want to make a movie with in the room to do it with you.

WEEK 15 was full of both ecstasy and aggravation as we moved the ball down the field on Noble Gas Media's upcoming film, hashtag #PRIMEMATTER:

16 DAYS TO GO!!

• We FINALLY closed deals on ALL OUR CAST! 🎉
• Our Director had prelim convos with Principal Cast
• Held preliminary wardrobe and HMU consults with cast
• Began sourcing wardrobe based on those consults
• Re-scouted our park and EXT locations
• Spent 4000 hours trying to get production software to work the way it should
• Settled on a work-around in hour 4001
• Reviewed and Estimated Shoot Times for 470 individual shots over 122 scenes
• Cut about 3 dozen of them
• Cried about it and then immediately felt better about the whole thing
• Officially signed our SAG signatory paperwork and wired our bond
• Signed the contract with our payroll company
• Put together the final appendices for owned and rented gear for insurance coverage
• Started collecting w9s and drafting final contracts for crew
• Hired our awesome new intern Alexander Irwin!
• Secured our first sponsorship from Slice Soda! 😋

--
My goal is to leave a list like this at the end of every week. Both as a record for anyone else who may be interested in shooting their own independent film but isn't sure where to start, and also as public accountability. When we're all said and done, we'll get to see if we spent our time working on what primarily mattered (get it? 😉), or if we spun our wheels.

#IndieFilm
#Filmmaking
#PreProduction
#Paranormal
#SciFi
#Brooklyn
#IndependentMovies

— Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 4/20/26