Penny Lane Hype House, or: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace my inner content creator

Greetings from the month of “Sundance” in the season of “Awards,”

What a massive loss. So few actors could pull off a character as funny, and as lovable, as Moira Rose. I will miss her so much.

It’s always struck me as unfair that Sundance/Awards happens during Winter (horrible) and Holidays (complicated). But my coping strategy during this fraught season of peak social comparison and peak waiting for gatekeeper validation has always been to put my head down, work harder, and work more.

Sundance/Awards is just one of the seasons. It might be the best or the worst season for you this year. Either way, nearly all of this stuff will be forgotten (and sooner than we think). But the work lives on forever. The work is what will matter in the end. You are in service to the work.

Me, Gabriel and Nick are in our final post-production sessions on Wild Inside (@flacodocumentary). Yesterday we spent a glorious day in a dark room with our genius colorist Seth Ricart, who is doing his wizardry (this time in something called “HDR” which I am told is very exciting)! After years of watching offline media, you get used to what I call “the gray.” So, seeing everything in full resolution with the real color… it’s just like magic. I always fall in love with the film all over again! And I start to dream about sharing it with audiences. Real people! Who I know will love it!!

We spent a LOT of time with Seth making sure Flaco’s eyes are always the right shade of orange, as in this subway mosaic by the artist Fred Tomaselli.

The work lives on forever, and I am very focused these days on making sure the work actually reaches the people who will love it. The audience! But how do I find these people?

I have a little bit of a fanbase, which is somewhat unusual for a documentarian. (Ask people on the street to name 10 doc filmmakers and see how far they get. As far as I can tell, most people think “Netflix” or “HBO” is the director, if they ever even consider that a documentary has a director!)

It’s especially unusual because I am not working in one, established genre; my body of work is heterogeneous. I’ve always been aware that some people would be down for a Nixon movie, and others would be down for a Kenny movie… and that a much smaller number of people are down for a Penny Lane movie specifically. But it is this last category of person I am most interested in finding, because the Nixon people and the Kenny people are relatively easy to find with some basic marketing, but the people I want to find most of all are the Penny Lane people. These are my long-haul people!

I find it meaningful that whoever put this copy together for the HBOMax app thought it would be good to list the name of the director in the capsule text. It’s really not that common!

One of my goals this year is to put a lot more effort into finding more Penny Lane people. I want to learn more about marketing. I want to build my fanbase. I want more than anything for my work to reach the people who will love it!!! This post is about how I learned to stop worrying and embrace my inner content creator. Because I believe this is the best thing I can do for my art.

I’m aware that many people find this entire concept cringe, or worse than cringe. It sounds crass! It sounds commercial! But it’s not about that, not at all.

I need to spend time learning about marketing and cultivating an audience for my work not because the work I make is crassly commercial, but because the work I make is not crassly commercial. If my work was crassly commercial, I wouldn’t need to work nearly as hard at developing an audience for it.

---

Releasing a film takes a long time, and in some ways it never ends. Look at the Apple charts for documentary today. What do you notice?

Some observations:

1) The Corey Feldman documentary has been sitting at #1 for many weeks. It is incredible. It’s well-crafted, funny, incisive, heartbreaking. It’s so good; go watch it! As far as I can tell, this film released without any film festivals, and no streamers or industry support of any kind.

2) Some of these films are old, some of them are more than a decade old. Wow! The work lives on. The work is evergreen and can always find new audiences!!

3) In trying to figure out why those particular older films (and some of the newer ones, too) shot to the top of the charts, I determined that it’s probably not a coincidence that all of them were recently recommended by @thatdocumentarygirl, who the Sundance/Awards people have probably never heard of and/or are mad about, but whose impact on sales is comparable to that of Oprah’s book club for novelists.¹

Call me a populist if you wish, but somehow at the end of the day, actual people being willing to part with their dollars and time to see my films might be the success metric I care about the most. Again: this is especially true for me because I am not pandering to a guaranteed audience.

Add to that: I do not come from money; this is not a hobby for me. As much as I long for and jealously covet the validation of Sundance/Awards: ain’t none of that paying my bills.

Plus: even in the best of times (and we are not in those), I can’t necessarily count on The Industry to finance my work either. In the long run, I need audiences for that. This post is about longevity.

---

2026: the year I stopped being embarrassed about being a content creator

The other day I told a friend I wasn’t free next Tuesday night because I’m “taking a night class.” I knew he thought I meant, “I’m finally reading Ulysses” or something like that. I didn’t want to tell him the shameful truth: it’s a course on content creation.

I’m writing this post to banish that last little part of shame I felt.

The “night class” I am taking is Leigh Stein’s HYPE HOUSE. It’s actually a class for writers, but I’ve found all the lessons applicable to my career as well. Leigh gave me permission to share this slide from the first day of class, which I am sharing because it sums up her approach so well:

I have found that last point, #5, to be especially true. I feel incredibly empowered by this work. It’s fun! I’m good at it! I’m learning a lot, and seeing real progress each week. I’ve barely gotten started in this new adventure — I’ve got 4 more weeks of HYPE HOUSE to go! — but I haven’t felt so optimistic in quite some time.

Even before I was in Leigh’s course, I was applying myself to this goal. Starting this Substack in November in the wake of my Sundance rejection was part of it, although I imagine my audience for this newsletter to be more within “the documentary community” and not as much about discovering new audiences for my films. (If your entire audience is inside “the documentary community,” that might be good enough for Sundance/Awards, but not much else.)

For finding new viewers, I’ve been focused on Instagram. I’ve been mostly making content related to Happy and You Know It, since that’s just out on HBO, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see people — not my friends! not the doc community!! actual potential viewers!!! — engaging with it so passionately. I feel pretty confident I’ve driven some people to the film, but I wish I knew more directly that was true. My follower count also went up by about 600 since November. Not bad for someone who literally didn’t know what a “Reel” was 2 months ago.

I’ve also been working on being more intentional with how I present myself on the internet. For example, one of my content creation assignments was to “introduce myself.” I made this collage for my Instagram and I pinned it to the top:

Now, if someone comes to my Instagram, instead of randomly seeing some pictures of my cat (which are still on there… just not at the very top) they at least know who they’re dealing with.

Leigh has helped me to feel not shame about this pursuit, but joy. She says, “making content is how we make friends.”

Hello, friends! I am so happy you are here.

1. She’s a content creator entirely focused on promoting documentaries. Her taste is wide and her viewing habits voracious. I, for one, thank her for her service! She has my vote for possibly the best documentary viewer of all time.